Would parking at a parking lot near or in my residence prevent me from paying for it with my transit FSA?
"No, it doesn't look like you can use the employee benefit to pay for parking near your home. The definition for ""qualified parking"" is in the Internal Revenue Code Section 132 (""Certain Fringe Benefits"") (f) (5) (c): (C) Qualified parking The term “qualified parking” means parking provided to an employee on or near the business premises of the employer or on or near a location from which the employee commutes to work by transportation described in subparagraph (A), in a commuter highway vehicle, or by carpool. Such term shall not include any parking on or near property used by the employee for residential purposes.  Parking near your home is explicitly excluded. Your employer's human resources department can probably provide information on the details of where you can park and get reimbursement."
The reason this sort of question gets asked over and over again is because it's initially difficult to comprehend how you can possibly be scammed if you have no money in your bank account. Perhaps this would make it easier to understand: Someone approaches you in the parking lot of a mall and says, Excuse me, complete stranger, please take this $100 bill and go buy me a pair of $50 shoes at the shoe store. Then go buy whatever you'd like with the rest of the money. Sounds like a good deal, right? The $100 bill is counterfeit. If it were not, the person would buy the shoes themselves. It doesn't get any simpler than that. Back when I was 25 and living near Kansas City, I would put 500-700 miles on my car almost every weekend traveling to other places like Omaha, St. Louis, Iowa City, occasionally Minneapolis, once to Fargo, and one longer trip all the way to Virginia... There's a whole lot of nothing out there so road trips are quite naturally long. They're also quite attractive and I still wouldn't miss an opportunity to get up and drive somewhere for the weekend. But, I have spent less money on cars in my entire lifetime than you have on this single car. I preferred then, and still do, to buy older cars for a few thousand dollars (or even less) and drive them until they die or can no longer pass inspection. Changing the oil is usually the most maintenance I'll do. Since I've spent so little on each car, I don't really care if it suffers some minor damage, or even gets totaled in an accident (which fortunately has never happened), so I would only carry the mandatory liability insurance. This is going to be much cheaper than the full coverage you will have on your car. If something did happen I would just go buy another junker. One such car I bought cost me a grand total of $150 excluding gas and gave me almost 10,000 miles until its transmission fell out. Another that I paid $100 for had difficulty getting over 60 miles an hour, but it did those 500-mile trips almost every weekend for two years before the engine threw a rod. This might not be something you want to do. Perhaps you don't want to be seen driving what one of my exes called a ****mobile because people will misjudge you. But consider that billionaire Sam Walton (of Wal-Mart) could afford any vehicle he wanted, but drove an old pickup truck. I present it as an option because it works for me, and might work for you. And my ex liked my old cars, especially the 1983 Mercury Zephyr station wagon with enough space in the back for a full size bed... Thus you have one possible way to cut your expenses significantly. The only thing left to deal with is parking and its attendant security issues. My ****mobiles have never been stolen, broken into or even looked at funny, though I have never left anything visible in them but the occasional bit of trash. Thieves don't seem to expect an old beater to contain valuables or even be drivable, and a chop shop certainly wouldn't want one. And as I noted in a comment earlier, it's possible to find cheaper monthly parking in NYC if you search carefully; the $130/month example in the Bronx being just the first one I found after 25 seconds on Google. I am pretty sure that if you do some more extensive research you can find cheaper parking that is reasonably secure and at least relatively convenient to your most common travel plans. "&gt; You're the one arguing for a change away from the status quo here, to something that not only is entirely untested but requires everyone to do it at once AND everyone to think just like you do for it to 'work properly'. It's nothing but hypotheticals, yet you're saying the burden of proof is on me to 'prove' that your hypothetical scenarios won't work?  I don't have to prove anything when I'm advocating for not being a part of your system. I am in no way advocating that you be forced into mine. I'm not advocating any positive action towards you, nor anyone else. Simply arguing against the status quo doesn't place a burden of proof upon me.  &gt; That's not a thing you can do, you can't prove a negative.  Then don't make that claim. Easy as that. I laid out how the market could deal with a court system, and you devolved into making unsupported claims. When we get back to what does make sense, we can have productive conversation. It's not productive to use baseless conjecture and unsupported claims.  &gt; All i can do is say look around at all the free markets and stateless populations we have now living in perfect harmony with each other and the environment. Oh wait. They don't exist. Because they don't work in the real world.  Wrong. It does not follow that because something does not exist that it does not work.  &gt; Any advantage is going to be used to bludgeon the competition with until you have a monopoly/quasi-state  You have no evidence to support this. Why are you reverting to this nonsense?  &gt;  it relies on the population being informed in and believing in the system enough to make a conscious effort to not buy the cheaper goods at the store with the bad business practices, or potentially drive further to a different store if it's the store doing the bad practice!  No, it does not. This is a straw man. A voluntary society doesn't preclude the possibility of people buying bad food or something like that. It doesn't even preclude the possibility of third-party assurances to prevent bad food. It just doesn't have a built-in monopoly on assurance services that you have to use in order to buy/sell.  &gt; So you're saying there can never be a truly free market then?  No. People buy and sell freely all of the time. Ever bought something from Craigslist? Ebay? Silk Road? I'd say those are pretty much free markets.  &gt; You had little kids getting their arms ripped off by textile looms for fucks sake, people working 14 hour days. But it made more money than working in the fields, so #worth, right?  You're conveniently leaving out how kids worked, people toiled all day and still starved to death as the alternative up until industrialization allowed a better quality of life. It's not like they could have just passed a fucking law and mandated a 40 hour week and instantly had prosperity. It was because they did grind their way through the Industrial Revolution that we're able to live lives of leisure and prosperity. If you think that government action can get people out of poverty by decree then tell it to the third world countries that are still developing. I'm sure they'd be all ears.  &gt; Because the pooling of vast resources for disaster relief is something that states do?  That they do it doesn't mean that it couldn't happen without the state on a voluntary basis. The funding for all of these programs combined is easily less than, what, a quarter of the government's budget? If the people who made this same objection put their money where their mouth is, there would be no shortage of funding. People from the left and the right alike claim that they want these things, so which is it? Are you telling me that there are just millions and millions of people who virtue signal about humanitarian efforts?  &gt; This is my point, neither you nor I have any evidence to base this off rather than a tendency for people to be utter bastards to each other, looking at history. You're postulating that if all governments dissipated in a puff of smoke, there wouldn't be huge conflict in the resulting power vacuum?  Actually I don't think that immediately destroying governments will create the best outcomes, as that usually happens violently and results in someone wanting to fill the roles performed by government. Instead, I think that based upon history individuals are less likely to be violent when they aren't acting on behalf of governments, and they can and will find alternatives to the state that will replace it over time *if they are not violently stopped.* Here are some examples:  1. I would rather be entirely left alone by the state police agents and allowed to use my own private security. I would not be taxed for state agents and would instead pay out of pocket. This would likely lower the cost since they would be interested in preventing losses rather than busting people for parking tickets, speeding tickets, drug offenses, civil asset forfeiture, etc. Would you not agree that this is a superior model? 2. I would rather have private large-scale defense since it would not be involved in international wars of aggression. I would not be taxed and would instead pay out of pocket. All else equal, this would be less expensive and less dangerous since resources would only be used for defense. Would you not agree that this is a superior model? 3. I would rather have a private system of healthcare rather than a government one, being free to not pay into Medicare/Medicaid. This, along with eliminating certificates of need, monopolization by the AMA, eliminating IP protections, and the like would lower the cost more than nationalization would and would also allow providers to better align with my preferences. Would you not agree that this is a superior system?  &gt; Yeah, good one. There weren't any Anarchists in a position to do any of that. Great straw man.  Actually the purported left-wing ""anarchists"" in Spain did carry out what is called the Red Terror. I put that in quotes because I do not agree with their methods or their ideology. Change must be done through the market, not through violence.  &gt; WHY is the burden of proof on the 'statists'? It's the Anarchists who are arguing for the change in the status Quo.  Because appeals to tradition are not rational arguments and anarchists are not advocating for positive action against you. Statists are arguing that others be subject to their government. If a person is trying to argue against his own enslavement, he wouldn't have the burden of proof simply because he had been enslaved for some time.  &gt; You're the one making the claim that it would be a better system here with nothing to back it up  On the contrary, I do have something to back it up: the market responds better to consumer preferences on an individual level than governments do. If you disagree with me on healthcare and want a collective system, the market can put you with other like-minded individuals and me with those who share my views. A state cannot.  &gt; why do we have states right now?  You're conflating violence and efficiency. That's like saying ""if kids have such great ideas, why are they still living under their parent's rule?"" It's not because the ideas are bad, it's because the parents are keeping them there. States don't compete, they rule with violence. The notion of creating a market for violence to stop rule by violence is contradictory." I've seen this in my town. I don't know if they are charging for Teslas specifically, or things like the Volt (I don't own an electric car so haven't looked into it too much), but there are over a dozen places in my city that have parking spots equipped with charging stations. They are outside various retail locations/malls as well as parking garages at the local university.   Keep in mind, this is not a major city. The total population is about 150,000 and that includes about 50,000 transient students who aren't here during the summer. "This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://qz.com/1029925/if-youre-renting-a-city-apartment-without-a-car-16-of-your-rent-pays-for-parking-you-dont-need/) reduced by 76%. (I'm a bot) ***** &gt; Since the 1940s, many US cities introduced minimum parking rules: for every new unit of housing, developers must also build a certain number of parking spaces.  &gt; Parking should be thought of as an equity issue, argues researchers Gregory Pierce and C.J. Gabbe in the journal Housing Policy Debate, Why? The average price of building a garage parking space is passed on to people whether they own a car or not, and distort the true demand for urban parking.  &gt; &amp;quot;The lack of rental housing without bundled parking imposes a steep cost on carless renters-commonly the lowest income households-who may be paying for parking that they do not need or want,&amp;quot; write the authors.   ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/6o5ro3/if_youre_renting_a_city_apartment_without_a_car/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ ""Version 1.65, ~170156 tl;drs so far."") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr ""PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome."") | *Top* *keywords*: **Parking**^#1 **housing**^#2 **price**^#3 **car**^#4 **new**^#5" If you itemize your deductions then the interest that you pay on your primary residence is tax deductible. Also realestate tax is also deductible. Both go on Schedule A. The car payment is not tax deductible.  You will want to be careful about claiming business deduction for home  or car. The IRS has very strict rules and if you have any personal use you can disqualify the deduction. For the car you often need to use the mileage reimbursement rates. If you use the car exclusively for work, then a lease may make more sense as you can expense the lease payment whereas with the car you need to follow the depreciation schedule.  If you are looking to claim business expense of car or home, it would be a very good idea to get professional tax advice to ensure that you do not run afoul of the IRS. If I do not have anyone in my car I am not getting paid. If I am not getting paid I am not working. It really is that simple. When you deliver packages you are getting paid to drive in between all points involved. FedEx drivers aren't insured on their way to work. That interesting. It seems like an apt building could use that for its residents. I think I saw the amount quoted at $470/month, but since there isn't a market it's probably speculative to say anything about what it would cost a consumer or group of consumers.