It's that time of year. The leaves are changing. Well, not here in Orlando. Here the leaves are doing absolutely nothing. But somewhere in America right now, a business owner is standing on a dealership lot telling himself he's being smart.

"I'm buying it for the write-off."

I hear it every October and November. The truck. The SUV that just happens to weigh over 6,000 pounds. New laptops for everybody. The piece of equipment you'll use twice. All bought in a mad rush before December 31, because somebody told you you'd "save on taxes."

Let me be the jerk at the party. Spending a dollar to save thirty cents isn't a tax strategy. It's shopping with a better excuse.

Quick, important note before we go any further. I'm not a CPA, and this isn't tax advice. Your situation is your situation. Take this to your accountant and have a real conversation. That's actually the whole point of this email.

Plain English version of how a deduction works. A deduction lowers the income you pay tax on. It doesn't hand you the money back.

Say your combined federal and state rate is around 35 percent. That's a round number for the example. Yours will be different. You buy a $70,000 truck you didn't really need, and you deduct the whole thing this year.

Your tax bill drops by about $24,500.

Your bank account drops by $70,000.

You're out $45,500. Congratulations on all that saving.

Now, if you needed the truck anyway, that's a completely different story. Then the deduction is a nice bonus on something you were going to buy regardless. But "I needed it" and "I bought it for the write-off" are two very different sentences, and only one of them is usually true.

There's a reason the write-off talk is louder than usual this year.

The tax law passed in 2025 made 100 percent bonus depreciation permanent for qualifying property acquired and placed in service after January 19, 2025. Section 179, the other big expensing rule, went way up too. For 2026, the Section 179 limit is $2.56 million, and it starts phasing out once you buy more than about $4.09 million of equipment in a year.

Translation: most small businesses can write off the full cost of qualifying equipment in the year they put it into service. Every equipment dealer, truck salesman and Instagram "tax strategist" in the country knows this, and they're going to use it on you between now and New Year's Eve.

What they tend to leave out:

It has to be in service by December 31. Not ordered. Not "it's on the truck from the factory." In service and being used in the business. If it's still sitting at the dealer on January 3, it's a 2027 deduction.

It has to be used for business. Use a vehicle 60 percent for business and you deduct 60 percent. If business use drops to 50 percent or less later on, you can end up paying some of that deduction back. Your weekend trips to the lake don't count, no matter how much you talk about work while you're there.

Heavy SUVs have their own cap. There's a separate Section 179 limit for SUVs over 6,000 pounds, and for 2026 it's in the low $30,000s. Bonus depreciation can cover the rest, but this is exactly where things get messy fast. Ask before you sign anything.

Section 179 can't create a loss. It's limited by your business income. Bonus depreciation works differently. This matters a lot if you're having a down year.

You don't get to deduct it twice. Write off the whole thing now and there's nothing left to depreciate in future years. And when you sell it down the road, part of what you get back can be taxed. That's called recapture, and it shows up at the worst possible time, usually right when you're trading it in for the next "write-off."

You didn't avoid the tax. You moved it. Sometimes moving it is the right call. Just call it what it is.

Now the part that matters most if you run a service business.

Owners have been squeezed this year. Costs are still high, customers are slower to commit, and a lot of people feel less confident than they did back in January. In a year like that, the thing that keeps you alive isn't a deduction. It's cash in the bank.

$70,000 in a savings account can cover payroll in a slow February. It lets you say no to a bad client. It can fund the hire that finally gets you out of the weeds. It buys you time to make a good decision instead of a desperate one.

A $70,000 truck can't do any of that. And it's worth a lot less than $70,000 the second you drive it off the lot.

I'll keep the cash and pay a little more in tax every single time. Wealthy people pay taxes. Broke people with nice trucks complain about taxes. Pick your team.

Before you buy anything for a tax reason between now and December 31, ask yourself one thing.

Would I buy this in March?

If the answer is yes, if it's something the business genuinely needs and you'd buy it no matter what the tax code said, then buying it in December instead of March can be a smart timing move. Talk to your CPA and do it right.

If the answer is no, put the wallet away.

A few quick examples.

The work van with 240,000 miles and a check engine light that's been on since Easter? You'd buy that in March. Good December purchase.

New laptops for a team whose laptops work fine? You wouldn't buy those in March. Skip it.

Twelve months of software you already use every day, with a discount for paying annually? You'd do that in March. Ask your accountant whether prepaying makes sense for you this year.

A boat? No. I don't care what your buddy said.

I'm not anti-equipment. I'm anti-dumb-equipment. So let's look at what a smart version of this looks like.

Say you run a landscaping crew and one of your mowers is held together with zip ties and prayer. You were planning to replace it in spring for about $18,000. Your business is profitable this year, and your accountant says you'd be in roughly that same 35 percent bracket we used earlier.

Buy it and put it to work in December instead of March, and you might pull about $6,300 of tax savings into this year instead of waiting another full year for it. Same mower. Same price. Same need. You just changed the timing.

That's the right way to use the rules. The purchase came first. The tax savings were a bonus.

Now compare that with the guy who buys a second mower he doesn't need because he "has to spend $18,000 before the end of the year." He's out $11,700 he didn't have to spend, and he owns a mower that sits in the shed.

Same rules. Totally different result.

The dealer's favorite line goes like this: "You can finance it and still write off the whole thing this year."

That can be true. If the equipment qualifies and it's in service by December 31, you can often deduct the full cost even if you only put a little money down.

It sounds like free money. It isn't.

You just signed up for five years of payments to get one year of deduction. In years two through five, you're making those payments with no new deduction to soften them. And if business slows down, the payment doesn't care.

Financing can make sense for equipment that pays for itself, like a truck that lets you add a crew or a machine that does a job you're currently subbing out. It makes zero sense for anything you bought because of the calendar.

Before you sign anything with a payment attached, answer two questions. What does this make me money doing? And can I make the payment in my worst month, not my best one?

So what should you be doing? This is the list I'd take to my accountant in the next two weeks. Not December 28. The next two weeks. Accountants get slammed in December, and you want their whole brain, not whatever's left of it.

Notice what's missing from that list? Buying stuff you don't need.

People panic-buy in December because December is when they find out how much they owe. Fix that, and the panic goes away.

Three simple moves.

Open a separate savings account and name it "Taxes." Every time money comes in, move a percentage there. Your accountant can tell you what percentage. Plenty of owners I know land somewhere around 25 to 30 percent, but get your own number. That money isn't yours. Pretend it doesn't exist.

Automate it. A simple Make.com scenario can watch for new payments and either move the money or ping you to do it every time a client pays. It takes an afternoon to set up, and it saves you a heart attack every April.

Review it every quarter. Fifteen minutes with your bookkeeper or CPA, four times a year. Where are we, what's the projection, do we need to adjust. That's it. No more surprises. No more truck shopping on December 29.

Email your accountant today and book a year-end planning meeting before Thanksgiving. Bring your numbers through September and the list above. At the end, ask one question: "If you were me, what's the smartest thing I could do before December 31?"

Then listen. And if the answer is "buy a truck," make sure it's because you needed a truck.

Talk Soon,

Dan

Dan Kaufman

Founder, Dead Simple Growth and Pinnacle Masters

P.S. Reply with TRUCK and tell me the big purchase you've been talking yourself into this year. I'll give you my straight gut take on whether it passes the March test. Gut take, not tax advice. Your CPA still gets the final word.