It’s not a misconception, your father was running it as a business, so he was able to take his deductions, just like the big corporations you mentioned. I didn’t say you had to be making a profit, just that you are running it for profit. The IRS considers a for profit business as a legitimate business that gets deductions, but if you are doing it for fun, and would be doing it anyways, that might not be considered for profit and get classified as a hobby business. My warning was don’t assume you can deduct whatever you want if this is just a hobby. You’ll probably get away with it for a while, but one day it might come back to bite you. I’m on my third business, and I do my own taxes, and haven’t been running a profit lately, so I have been studying the tax code for small businesses for several years, but I’m not an accountant, so you don’t have to take what I say as gospel either