You don't have to pay VAT on things you fix for yourself, because you don't pay yourself at all. This is in fact a kind of (legal) tax avoidance, but not (illegal) tax evasion. Given the cost of housing, being able to build your own house or even just doing small fixes here and there, leads to a big increase in perceived income. The tradies I know can afford whatever kind of car they want, whatever kind of holiday experience, and they live in a nice home. Mind you, they typically work 50h+ a week so there's that.
Of course, the parent may also have been referring to getting clients to pay in cash and not putting anything on the books, at the expense of getting barely any pension in the end, but that's not how I read it. This is getting somewhat less common because people are more likely than 20 years ago to get a loan from a bank to pay for renovation work, and the bank will want to see invoices.
> You don't have to pay VAT on things you fix for yourself, because you don't pay yourself at all.
Just to be clear, if you're a VAT-registered tradie doing a job for yourself, you are obligated to pay VAT for the materials. Diverting vat-reclaimed materials for self-supply is tax evasion (which can be identified by auditing invoices). So legally speaking, the only money saved is the VAT on your own work hours.
Slightly ironically, self-supply is much easier and almost impossible to identify when devs use work-paid subscription services (e.g. Claude Max) on personal side hustles.
Sorry, not VAT - but the value of the benefit you gain from working on your own property (presumably also if you're, say, a car mechanic and work on your own car, etc.) is subject to taxation. Mea culpa.
The obligation to pay tax only kicks in (as far as I can tell, IANAL) if the work is substantial and of a nature which requires professional skills.
Here's a recent link, though in Norwegian, I'm afraid:
Jesus! Spinning this forward, this means: If I'm a professional wealth manager and I manage my own wealth during working hours (because office not busy right now), then I would have to pay taxes because I'm a finance pro applying my own skills on my own stock portfolio?
IANAL, and I have only heard about a couple of cases where people have been taxed under this statute - typically carpenters having built or renovated their own homes or cottages.
(Their obvious disadvantage being, of course, that the result of their labour is very tangible - and that whenever you do any significant building work, you'll need permits and documentation afterwards, making it difficult to discreetly renovate something off the books...)
I have seen very wierd tax laws in other EU countries, but this is really "fresh": In that case I would somehow try to do it without someone noticing (so treat your neighbours well :-D) - this is similar to collect taxes on food that Ive grown on my balcony
I read the Norwegian article that was linked, and it isn't actually similar: you would only have to pay taxes on food you've grown on your balcony (and mean to consume yourself) if you are a farmer, are growing it during regular working hours, and have an insanely huge balcony.
Another thing that makes home construction a bit different in this regard is that you could claim to build a house for yourself, live in it for a bit, and then sell it on a couple of years later. That'd be an easy way to avoid or evade taxes. Not so easy with lettuce -- once you've eaten it, you've eaten it.
Context was getting income. You don't get income, by avoiding paying more. So it is about black market jobs. Works until something happens. Disputes, accidents, .. you cannot go to the police or courts to demand money from an inoffical job.
In EU, you can declare a business and go to wholesale sellers and buy stuff with your business-ID without VAT and use this stuff for your own usage in your house.
There's a certain sort of "snarkiness" that's very easy to spot. There's a convicted scammer named Craig Wright (long story) who uses ChatGPT to write long, smug essays on X which have the exact same sort of tone, complete with the weird florid analogies.
> Hard to say if it was a mistake, a flex, or just their way of making sure we didn’t miss who was milking the trials.
> It’s tested. It updates with a single click. It saves time and reduces risk. That’s what we sell. And that’s what they keep pirouetting around with their email dance.
> We’re not going to waste days chasing them. But at some point, this goes beyond saving a few bucks: it becomes performance art.
ChatGPT loves to do that artificial, inauthentic snark thing with me. Its style and tone are reflective of its reinforcement training.
I’d assert that unless it was specifically trained on my writing style, it is almost impossible to “prompt away” the tone it uses.
And that is the thing about authentic snark, it is crisp and edgy and unique. But LLM’s are trained in a way that would average out millions of different “snarks” so all of the attributes that make snark work go away.
I know a few people on the spectrum using ANR headphones or earbuds in social or loud settings (party/bar/restaurant/subway) to lower the ambient noise, just as you would wear a pear of sunglasses in the sun or on a brightly-lit stage.
To them, it is a welcome fix to the alternative they had before: be exhausted by the stimulation, or stay home. The tendency of "the young" to do it too is a bonus: now they don't stand out so much.
Interesting. Would you care to enlighten us on a legal way to do this ?