Deductible from What?

 My sister and I were discussing the other day the largely unhelpful recommendations of most personal finance advisors. We agreed that their suggestions typically fail to account for at least two unpleasant facts of economic life: first, the biggest ticket items pulling money out of one's bank account tend to be the ones that are also the least negotiable—rent, insurance, debt service, etc. One can cut down all one wants on daily coffee purchases or take-out, to be sure, but these trimmings around the margin will forever leave untouched the largest sources of personal expenditure. 

Second, the personal financial advice always seems to merely take it for granted that one has something coming in on the front end. This is what is most baffling about the advice columns from the standpoint of anyone in the creative professions. The self-help gurus tell us: save ten percent of your income! But... we have to ask—ten percent of what? What are these mysterious sources of money that the advice columnists all assume we can turn on at our pleasure, leaving only the task of managing it? The real hard question of personal finances remains forever unaddressed: how is one supposed to make more money in the first place? 

There are presumably people out there who have normal jobs, and who resisted the urge to quit them during the pandemic and start a years-long graduate or professional program instead, as I did (*sigh*), for whom all these minutiae of how to manage one's monthly salary have some relevance. But for those with aspirations in a creative and/or artistic field, most of the advice is frankly incomprehensible. What is this money coming in that people are talking about? How is there enough of it to go around that people can even start to worry about how to save some portion of it? 

I am reminded of a moment in William Gaddis's novel J R, when the poor composer Edward Bast has just been subjected to a head-spinning explanation of a business deal from the person who holds his contract. His fast-talking interlocutor mentions off-hand that, "of course," all of Bast's costs for his training as an assistant should be deductible as a business expense. And Bast, the unworldly artist without any visible means of income, can only splutter in reply—"But deductible from what!"—before his droning business partner cuts him off again. 

The novel's titular protagonist is forever ranting with characteristic capitalist precocity about how various business expenses can be saved, written off, or used to reduce one's taxes—but Bast, like the rest of us, is just left wondering each time: where are these mysterious revenues coming from that we're always supposed to be deducting things against? To have a tax bill that one is worried about lowering, after all, one would first need to have an income worth taxing. 

Gaddis is particularly amusing on this subject, throughout the novel, because he lived both sides of it. As a young novelist, he pursued the Romantic ideal of the vagabond artist to the letter—traveling to Central America and Europe, then making his literary debut with a 900-page tome that even the contemptuous reviewers of the time later admitted they had not actually read all the way through. Gaddis was thus the unworldly Bast, with little earthly income to show for his artistic endeavors, even as he was laying up treasures in heaven (after all, later generations would eventually come to see The Recognitions as a masterwork). 

But after his abortive early career as a novelist, Gaddis entered the world of corporate PR in order to make a living; and so he could speak the vocabulary of the J Rs as well as anyone. Thus, even as we know Gaddis's true sympathies are forever with the Basts of the world, he can also convincingly mimic the phrases of a motor-mouthed junior financier on the make. He can provide every detail of a comprehensive scheme to use "accelerated depreciation" (or "depreciated acceleration" as the novel's preteen protagonist at first calls it) to shave a few dollars off a tax bill; but he also knows the plight of the creative artist who is left wondering—what tax bill? What dollars? 

If one works as an equities analyst or a biomedical engineer somewhere, perhaps all these terms have meaning. But for those of us trying to make a go of it as a writer or actor or musical composer, as the case may be, we always have to remember Basil Bunting's stern warning: "Well sung, singer, but in this trade, we pay no wages." To the personal financial advice gurus we can only reply: first explain how we are supposed to make an income to start with—then we'll talk!