How to claim Gluten-Free products on your tax return
This is what TurboTax had to say:
Having celiac disease is never easy, but with a bit of planning, you can help make tax time easier by claiming a medical expense deduction to help with the costs of gluten free products. If you have been diagnosed by a medical practitioner with celiac disease, you can claim the incremental costs of gluten free products on your income tax return as a medical expense.
Eligible expenses are limited to food items, such as gluten free bread products, muffins & cereals.
What is an incremental cost?
The eligible claim is for any incremental costs you incur - not the full price of gluten-free products.
Defined as the difference of purchasing a non-GF product and the cost of GF-product, the incremental cost is determined by subtracting the non-GF product from the cost of the GF product.
But there are other considerations when determining the eligible claim. For example, only the amount consumed by the person diagnosed with celiac disease is eligible to be claimed as a medical expense. If your spouse eats half the loaf of gluten-free bread, than only half of the incremental cost can be
claimed.
What documents do I need to support this claim?
The following documents are required in order to claim gluten-free products as a medical expense:
- A letter from a medical practitioner confirming that you have celiac disease and requires gluten free products
- A summary of each item purchased during the 12-month period for the expenses are claimed (a helpful tool, provided by TurboTax, to help you track your expenses is below!)
- Receipts to support the costs
Click here to download the expense tracker spreadsheet.
What if I have a gluten-intolerance, but haven’t been diagnosed by a medical
practitioner?
You must be diagnosed by a medical practitioner in order to claim gluten-free products as a medical expense on your income tax return.
For more information on what is an eligible expense, and to determine if you are eligible to claim gluten- free products as a medical expense, please visit the Canada Revenue Agency’s website.
11 comments:
Thanks for sharing! This is really helpful. I was just diagnosed last year and gluten free living can be hard on a budget.
Truly well informed and very intelligent. You wrote something that people could understand and made the subject intriguing for everyone.
There should be a program like this for every disease out there. Having something like a PPLIC plan is a great help in itself, but having freebies like this makes things that much better.
We once used turbo tax due to its native graphics and feel to ms office excel. The good part is that it is still potent in this day and age due to VB coding functionality to handle pivot charts for reporting. It is one of the best online bookkeeping for SME's.
It is very important to claim something that is rightfully yours but we must put to mind that we are very well aware of the conditions and the terms so as not to abuse it. In this light, this article is very helpful. I for one, make sure I research all the available info about research and development tax credits so that I'll be able to know if there are perks lying in there somewhere.
If there's one thing that I'm thankful for as a forex trading broker and a lover of gluten-free products is that I am very particular with tax refunds. Everyone has to. It's their right as consumers.
That TurboTax will be really helpful to our business. We can track down the financial status of our business especially on expenses. I hope that it will help us also whenever we are filing an irs form 2290.
This is one way of getting your tax's worth as you put it. It's good that people with this disorder gets something out of their tax. And so I ask one of the top accountants in perth upon showing him this blog, "Do people have to get sick in order to get something out of their tax?"
Does anybody know if there is a minimum dollar value that has to be claimed? For example in order for me to claim any medical expenses it has to be a certain percentage of my income. I can't remember the exact amount but I know that one year I had a couple hundred dollars worth of medical expenses and I couldn't claim it because it wasn't enough. Does this apply to claiming gluten-free items? I'd hate to do all the work of saving receipts and figuring out the amount only to find out that it's not enough to qualify.
Your gluten free items are considered medical expenses and fall under the same category. So you still need to exceed the amount required on income tax for it to be beneficial.
I leave these cases on my claims consultant perth friend. It's good to know that you have a professional advice for some perks lying in there.
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