Income Tax Help. First time.?

I am 16 I have babysitted for a family friends baby for last year, I have made $8600.

As this is a job I got paid for and not taxed I figured i wouldnt claim it.

But the family just let me know they need to claim it as its an expense and they're over. but they told me they would only claim $8000 as thats my limit before they tax me.

What do I need to get from them? A paper saying I babysitted the child and received $8000 in the year of 2007?

When filing this I do have a metropass for the month of december only should I include this?

As well sometimes I would feed the child food from fast food places, I became aware I could claim this as expenses but me unknowingly threw them away. I can't claim them anymore?

Any other help would be appreciated.

If you want to file your taxes you can just go to any post office and pick up the forms for free and fill them out. Also since you made less than $20k you can use any of the online tax programs for free.

In Canada you only need to file income tax if you owe money or if CRA specifically requests it. In your case since you earned less than the personal basic deduction you do not owe any tax so are not required to file.

Normally I would advise someone to file even if they did not have to because they might be eligible for GST rebates or tax credits of some kind. Also it starts building RRSP room but given you are 16 that is hardly an issue yet.

If you choose to file you don't need anything from the people you worked for. CRA trusts you. Still if they are willing to give you a receipt then take it and keep it for your records.

Throwing away the expenses you incurred while caring for the children is not relevant to you situation. If you had earned say $14k and had spent $2k on stuff for the children then you could use that to reduce your taxable income to $12k. Since you are below the amount where you will have to pay any income tax anyway reducing it further will not help you. CRA does not reimburse or compensate you for the money spent they only allow you to offset some of your income. Claiming $8000 or claiming $8000-500 (assuming you spent $500 on stuff for the kids) =$7500 leads to the same thing which is $0 owed.

In the future though you should save them since had you made more money babysitting you could have used them. CRA doesn't require that you submit the expenses when you file but if they audit you ro find them suspicious they can ask for them and if you can't produce them they may disallow the claiming of those expenses. So keep that in mind for future years

Contrary to the claim below you do NOT need to file income tax if you do not owe money.

http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/tax/individuals...

I don't have time to go into detail here, but you absolutely DO ned to file for income tax. The answer above is wrong. If you earn taxable income, you file, period.

You have earned less than your personal limit, so won't pay anything personally, but this impacts your parents claim of you as a dependent, so they need to look at it as well.

You have no claim for the food, and never will, unless the family requires you to feed their child as part of your babysitting.

You don't actually need anything from them, if you know the amount, but it can't hurt.

Tough question...they can only claim the babysitting if they used you to earn income. If they just used you for babysitting to go to the movies or a day out or something, then they can't claim it as a childcare expense. They are limited on the amount that they can claim. You are below the personal exemption of $9600, which means you dont pay taxes on the first $9600 you make. If its a legitimate claim, they will include your name and SIN number...you just need to know how much they are claiming, and enter the same amount.

edit - as above, you are a dependant I assume, so the numbers may change a bit to optimize your parents taxes. I suggest that you get your parents to run the scenarios through an online tax program like Ufile and see what the effects are. Your parents can optimize their taxes, and with coordination with the people you babysat for (since they can only claim a portion of what they paid you...), you all may be able to optimize the taxes. If you aren't comfortable discussing this for your clients, do make sure that you work with your parents to minimize the tax they pay...they are in a higher tax bracket than you!!