Sometimes car travels are not accepted as expenses if train is cheaper and a customer of mine in Germany had to justify having employees in Switzerland who have to travel to Germany 2-3 times a year which made them “too expensive”. Tax authorities here are not at all that accommodating.
I find that unbelievable and I bet there is some detail involved. For example I fully believe some company has such internal rules on what travel expenses they will reimburse, etc. I wonder if that company got busted for car mileage fraud so they are sticking to travel means where you get simple tickets which can’t be disputed.
The key to making use of GA for “business travel” (let’s disregard whether it is the “best” way to do that trip – you are a pilot so you naturally want to fly 
) is that there is no test in the taxation system for the cheapest mode of travel. If there was, 1st class / business class airline travel would collapse. Actually most airline travel would collapse because a train tends to cost less. And a bus even less. And hitch-hiking costs even less (to get picked up, you just need to travel about 40 years back in time – 1970s will do – and get a sex change ).
If you are a straight employee, you probably cannot get GA travel reimbursed. I know of only one case where this was available (at a significant-cost level) and the guy was a financier, doing trips visiting very high net worth clients. He was flying his own 421C. Some others have managed to get occassional rental reimbursed… Most companies don’t support GA travel expense reimbursement at all.
If it is your own business, you can do it as much as you want. The trip just needs to meet the tax authority tests e.g. in the UK it must be “wholly and exclusively” for the business, and whether you bring your spouse is (IIRC) a grey area but in reality most do. Then the company can reimburse the total annual costs of the plane, sliced according to the % of the annual airborne time spent on business trips. In practice this can be a tough test to meet; there aren’t many electronics companies to visit on Mali Losinj But, for true anoraks, there is an annual coil winding machine exhibition in Berlin!
Very interesting posts on the wider topic…
For me, learning to fly became possible only post-divorce, for various reasons. However, I was one of the few who didn’t get fleeced in the divorce. Well, actually I did give up almost everything, but kept the (very small) business, and was fortunate that it did very well some 5-10 years later. That might not have happened of course and then things would have been very different…
One doesn’t need a huge amount of time to do a lot of GA flying. For example it is hard for me to take 2 weeks off work, whereas most straight employees can do that easily, if not at short notice, and even 4 weeks is quite common (disruptive as hell to the company). But just enough flexibility to find 2-3 days, especially during weekdays, makes a huge difference to doing trips.
Peter wrote:
I find that unbelievable and I bet there is some detail involved. For example I fully believe some company has such internal rules on what travel expenses they will reimburse, etc.
I am talking from first hand experience, small companies where the CEO (one of which is me) approves the expense. Tax authorities in Switzerland and Germany don’t accept such expenses, they come and sit next to you and go point by point over your financial sheets and check everything. They even do remove kilometers from your company’s car because “you drove it privately, it cannot be that you made 15,000km for business in one year” and require you to keep an exact record of where you went for business, down to 10km. I suppose it’s a different story for huge companies with thousands of employees, high hierarchy and a lot of management involved, but small companies are checked under the microscope. Especially Germany wants its taxes paid.
OK; your post crossed with my edit where I added “I wonder if that company got busted for car mileage fraud so they are sticking to travel means where you get simple tickets which can’t be disputed.”
I say this because I know or have known loads of Germans who use their plane for business travel.
In the UK you have to keep a mileage log where you write down the business trips and how long each one was.
Peter wrote:
“I wonder if that company got busted for car mileage fraud so they are sticking to travel means where you get simple tickets which can’t be disputed.”
Not busted, but had to agree to start keeping a log. Talking about a couple of thousand kilometers, which were really business travels, it just “looked too much”.
Peter wrote:
I say this because I know or have known loads of Germans who use their plane for business travel.
In what companies and positions? A high level manager in UBS can do so; an IT project manager again in UBS cannot spend 20 bucks on lunch without at least three papers, signed by three higher levels of managers, saying it’s OK.
Company owners, from a few employees to a few hundred.
The UBS 20 € case is internal company policy; a different thing entirely.
In the place I work for, GA travel cost for a one or two day trip to Europe is still within the cost of last minute business travel tickets in their list of airliners, so it passes the “HR cost test”, but it is judged too risky by the corporate aviation branch, so fails the “safety test”…
I tend to agree on the second point regrading business, if you fly a GA aircraft with less reliable dispatch rate, unless you are a CEO/Pilot with flexible time/clients and you really enjoy flying, otherwise I don’t think GA will be that sustainable and reliable for a full business calendar and its success will also depend on what business you have? to capitals or regional airports?
There was a book reviewed in the St Petersburg Times (Florida, not Russia) a long time ago, I don’t remember the title, something like ‘Why are rich people rich?’ The research was that the differences in income between perceived ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ were much smaller than previously thought, and the conclusion was that ‘poor’ people spent (read wasted?) more money on lots of small things, leaving the rich to spend their cash on large obvious things like holidays, a plane etc.
I’ve noticed that the people featured on the Benefits Britain type programmes tend to have cable/satellite tv packages, phone/ipad contracts etc, which must be in the hundreds per year. A local couple, who sent both sons to Eton, have a self-maintained 1990s small car and wear clothes handed down from their grandparents. Extreme opposites, but it’s a case of how you choose to spend your money. Or maybe how society expects you to spend your money?
The same way you might go through your monthly spending and cut out takeaway coffee or cancel a subscription, you could go through your daily time and remove things e.g. watching tv or reading EuroGA. It seems impossible. I suspect, however, that a lot of my time could easily be classed as wasted.
Time and money.
Sometimes it can be hard to significantly influence either, but you can often do better in your day to day, like optimising the opex of a business.
For example, live in smaller (but not too small) accommodation where you don’t need to continually maintain it (I recall wasting weekends mowing my parents lawns as a child, something I never want to do), or pay for all the costs of it (e.g. maintenance and larger utility bills). Do all of your shopping online (we do, including supermarket groceries) and hardly ever go to the high street other than for quality time (e.g. dining) rather than battling sheep in a supermarket. Live in a place where most things are close, cyclable or walkable, like a village or inner (rather than outer) urban area, so you don’t need to drive everywhere. Don’t buy too many things and keep your possessions minimal and simple. Buy quality not quantity. Learn to repair and do things. Stop buying the newest cars and fashionable things. The planes last 50 or more years, a quality car (a key phrase) can as well.
Most people could probably do better on that right away. Unfortunately a lot of people don’t really have any particular passion or goal for life and they fill up their time with oversized houses, useless status symbols, lots of running around, and using “busy-ness” to provide them with a mission and meaning. I’m okay with that, because of them my apple, amazon and google stock has been soaring !
Wealth is not necessarily about money. It’s about having “a plentiful supply of a particular desirable thing”, which can be time just as much as money. There are wealthy people on low incomes, and poor people on high incomes. I am sure we know people at all parts of the spectrum. Everyone can choose their own adventure, to a large degree.
Having said that, aviation is certainly a recreational activity that has higher costs than many others (you can choose your level of cost though), but you can do the above to minimise the rest and maximise what you truly love.
I’m a bit sad I didn’t discover aviation when I was younger, but then I was poor and wouldn’t have been able to support it. Now I discovered it in middle age, after a career and a family, where I have enough to indulge it.
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to rant :-).
Peter wrote:
If you are a straight employee, you probably cannot get GA travel reimbursed. I know of only one case where this was available (at a significant-cost level) and the guy was a financier, doing trips visiting very high net worth clients. He was flying his own 421C. Some others have managed to get occassional rental reimbursed… Most companies don’t support GA travel expense reimbursement at all.
I enquired about it with my employer (a multinational, $2.5bn turnover, 20k employees) and something could have been worked out. I visit Dublin a handful of times per year.
Of course I only spoke to my boss, didn’t get any kind of corporate view on it, but it could have worked. She said get here however you want and claim the usual expenses. So I could have flown myself and claimed an airline ticket at about £150, probably £60-70 of mileage, the same again for airport parking. It wouldn’t have covered my costs of flying to Dublin and back, but it’d have given a good flying trip at substantially less than my usual hourly cost.
I’ve never actually bothered, because with my IR(R) not valid in Irish airspace and being unable to enter Class A, I don’t really consider it workable or the dispatch rate to be high enough,
While some employers might allow some self flown costs to be reimbursable am not sure it is career enhancing. You may have a job with clients in out of the way places, and then there may be some rationale.
