The big advantage of this route is you have much wider discretion to define your salary, business expenses, what you can claim on taxes, etc. It was really eye opening to me what the accounting possibilities are.
The downside is you need an accountant (or be very good at it yourself), and of course you need steady clients.
Indeed. Scubabear the employee is still limited to the same 401(k) contribution limits as everyone else, but Scubabear the employer LLC can have some very generous employer contributions for all of their employees (which happens to be just the one).
It’s so annoying that that sort of thing isn’t available to everyone. Similar for mega back door Roth IRA. Which my partners work supports but mine doesn’t. Iirc being able to back door or not was something like 175k dollars over 30 years.
Hey, can you share any resources for learning this stuff? I've started to play around in these waters, meeting with an accountant next week, but I'd like to get semi-ok at it myself. Any books or resources would be appreciated.
I learned it all online from various sources, and confirmed with an accountant. Start by Googling “single proprietor llc tax advantages”, and go down the rabbit hole of sole proprietorship vs single person LLC vs S-Corp.
From memory S-corps are a little involved to setup, but have some unique advantages. Single person LLC’s are dead simple to setup. In my State, NJ, it was simply getting an EIN from the IRS website, doing a name search for a unique enough name, and then registering the LLC with the State for a small fee.
Unlike a salary, when you do “Corp to Corp” and someone pays your LLC, it is up to you what to do with that money and how to account for it. That is where the tax advantages can be big. But be sure to talk to that accountant and get your tax payments in order.
Same here. When I finally did incorporate, I did use a local lawyer who does everything for $300 and walked out with my documents and EIN. Took about an hour. Said lawyer also allows use of their office address as the official contact and weeds out spam/scam official-looking letters.
I do my own accounting, it's not exceedingly difficult if you use e.g. TurboTax, but it does take time that you won't be billing for. If you don't use an actual accountant, you probably want to be pretty conservative with writeoffs, deductions, etc. I have a lot of physical inventory and hard purchases, so that makes it more straightforward.
Do be aware that all the stuff about having a corporate veil to protect you is basically nonsense when you're one person with a corporate entity. I know folks who thought that was protecting them, didn't have professional insurance "because if they sue the company it won't come down on me," and found out that yeah, that's a super easy veil to pierce.
The big advantage of this route is you have much wider discretion to define your salary, business expenses, what you can claim on taxes, etc. It was really eye opening to me what the accounting possibilities are.
The downside is you need an accountant (or be very good at it yourself), and of course you need steady clients.