PaperDog wrote:J-HALEY wrote:Mike Nobody wrote:J-HALEY wrote:One of my favorite lyrical lines is in a song by the Eagles off the Hell Freezes Over album. The song is "Get Over It" I played this song for years. The line is "lets kill all the lawyers kill em tonight" Seriously though I know they worked hard to get through school and they deserve to be paid well! I discovered tonight that one has been SCREWIN me for YEARS and I now have proof! Problem is I'll have to hire ANOTHER attorney to fight this one. The moral of this story is, if you are self employed and you are not Inc. do this or at least LLC. asap. I have learned this the hard way. Otherwise your personal assets are at risk.
Gee, I'm not self employed and I know bands usually form a company to protect their personal assets.
I'm not talking a name. It is about paying an attorney and becoming LLc. or Incorporating. This wasn't musical related. It had to do with my REAL craft.
Jeff, if you want to incorporate , you can do this without an attorney. There is a ton of lit outthere that can walk you through it. But why the hell do you want to incorporate?
That just puts you on the radar to get gouged by the gov (You get taxed twice...once for you as the officer, and once for the corporation) .
If you intend to expand to the size of your biz to a giant, then I'd say go for it. But from my own understanding and experience, if you aren't banking at least 500-800K a year, presently , you're just wasting your time . Better to keep it small, and divert your income into some serious investments, retirement plans, etc.
You can still set up a shop, keep it in the family, hire a crew, . You still have to do payroll taxes, but you can maintain solid leverage.
Being incorporated is for the serious big-dogs. All too often, I see little guys trying to hang a big-dog shingle...Next thing you know they are tanking.
You don't need that shingle to be a success.
I realize there are some protections with incorporation... Also gonna draw big dog lawyers who want big-dog payments. You get big dog lawsuits on your ass annualy (Almost a guarantee) and get tanked.
Like I said, if you want to go big, then Incorporation makes sense... (By design, the bylaws are typically geared to enforce profits...at almost any expense)
Do ya need that headache bro?
I would say , do what you do, charge a fair rate and save some of that incomes as deferred (tax-writeoff) via IRAs, etc
It is too late to incorporate. I was sued back in 2004 and I have been making payments to their lawyer. It turns out the attorney wasn't crediting some of my payments. apparently he was pocketing the money. Instead of forwarding the funds to the company that sued me. So after paying for 7 years it is like I haven't hardly paid anything. Hopefully the new attorney will get my account credited. My point is if I don't pay they come to my house and start taking my sh!t! If I had incorporated they couldn't do that and I would just tell them at this point to "piss up a rope".
I was self employed doing remodeling and carpentry work from 2000 to 2005 after the suit my co. went into recievership. I shut the company down after that and started working a regular job. If I had been a LLC or Corporation I could have walked away and washed my hands of it. As it is the lawyers are going to continue to bleed me dry for god knows how long! Oh well live and learn. I just wanted to put this imformation out there so those of you that are self employed won't make the same mistake. One more thing if you are in business protect your personal assets that especially goes for those IRA's, savings.
Just as efficient as the federal gov. 