Quarterly taxes are like a little bomb that blows up a nice stack of money on September 15, January 15, ApriI 15, and June 15. So at work, when one of those guys who likes to talk about how strippers make a ton of money will say “And you get paid in cash! Tax free!” I get a little angry.

I also get pissed at the strippers who don’t pay their taxes, but a lot of times it’s from pure-dee ignorance. I mean, you could have multiple degrees and not know how to do your taxes as a self-employed person, let alone be a young woman with limited work experience. Much of the information I got when I started dancing was anecdotal from the dressing room, and as Jo Weldon says, get your legal counsel from a pro, not your coworkers.

I was one of these semi-ignorant young women for a while. It’s not like my dad taught me about finances, because I’m a girl and was gonna grow up and maintain a household and volunteer like Mom and Grandma. When I first started dancing, we were on payroll, getting paid waitress wage and declaring tips (about as accurately as the waitresses, I guess). At tax time I got a W2 and filed with that. After a few years we became independent contractors, didn’t get paychecks, paid higher house fees, and got absolutely no information on how to file. I’ll admit that I went three years without filing until I needed to produce legit records for student loans and, you know, proof of income. It’s pretty damn hard to do a lot of things without proof of income, and if you’re a stripper who’s in the business full time, you’re going to have to produce a 1040 as proof more often than not.

As an interesting aside, in my city car dealers and landlords were known to take a letter from a club manager approximating a dancer’s monthly take-home as proof of income. Some savvy customers have also figured out how to write some strippers off as consultants (no lie. I have known a couple of girls who actually did some paid office work for a guy; they got benefits and he wrote off champagne rooms. I doubt that would pass an audit, but cute try) and how to give them money as a gift so the dancer in question didn’t have to pay taxes on it. All of this enters the world of dressing room tax advice, along with a bunch of misguided pointers I may rant on at some time.

Settling up with the IRS sucked. I wound up with a five-figure debt that I spent quite some time paying off. Now it feels like I pay a lot of fucking taxes, and I don’t even make that much money in the grand scheme of things. 20-30% is going to federal and state taxes, straight up. Being self-employed means paying those Medicare and Social Security taxes that employers pay for employees, plus the other SE taxes. It is not fun and it’s expensive and makes me crabby, but I do it, because being audited or having the IRS decide what I owe would be terrible. You can get away with a lot of illegal shit, but if you’re busted by the IRS (or your state, depending) you are fucked.

This is why I tell dancers to file, because I know some who have been audited, and it’s far worse for a dancer to let the IRS decide what you made and tax you based on that. A lot of clubs 1099 us on credit card tabs, for instance, and of course it’s when credit cards are being used that you make the most money, so say you’ve got only nights that you made a bundle in the champagne room on record thanks to the club. They can look at that and say “Well, these nights average out at $800, so we’re taxing you based on this.”

So. I don’t have much nice to say to those guys who think we stuff that cash in our panty drawer and don’t report our income. I probably pay more in taxes than they do.

But they don’t get to deduct fishnet stockings and corset purchases.