Beating Broke

Personal Finance from the Broke Perspective

Separate Your Business Accounts

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I don’t think it’s any secret, in this online world, that just about everyone is trying to make a little bit of money with a website.  After all, it’s not terribly difficult.  It’s not necessarily easy, but it is far from hard.  Throw up a website, put some work into it, and start bringing in money.  I do it with this site and others.  There’s work involved, but you can make money.

If you’re going to do it, you’ve got to treat it like a business from the start.  I don’t mean that you have to create a company, license it with your state and the IRS, and create a board of directors.  What I do mean, is that you need to have the business assets and accounting separate from your personal assets and accounting.  Using your own personal checking account, savings account, and trying to keep them separate come tax time (and you’ll want to) can be very difficult.  So difficult that you almost have to be a CPA in order to keep it all straight.

Keep your business accounts separateWhen I first began making money with blogs and websites, I didn’t separate anything.  The money to buy the domains came directly from my personal checking account.  The money to pay for the hosting of the websites came directly from my personal checking account.  And then tax season came around.  While I hadn’t made much money from the sites, I did make some.  I wanted to be able to use the expenses of the sites to reduce the income from the sites, so I needed to figure all of that out and get totals for my taxes.  Instead of just going into my accounting software, pulling up the business accounts, and running a profit loss statement, I had to go through each months’ statement of my checking account, and single out the transactions that were related to the sites.  After I’d pulled them all out, I had to compile them into a spreadsheet and create a profit loss statement from them.  It easily took twice as long as it should have.  And that was when things were simple and I only had a couple of sites with a couple of transactions every other month or so.  It would be much more difficult now.

How should you separate your business accounts?

I’m still a fan of keeping things as simple as you can.  I don’t think you need to go through the whole filing process to create a company.   That’s something that can wait until you’re making a decent amount of money.  Ask your CPA if you want a more accurate number.  You can keep it simple.  What you really need is separate accounts and separate bookkeeping.

Start with setting up separate accounts for the business funds to flow into.  You’ll need your own business savings account. Add a checking too if you think you’ll have need of a debit card or actual checks to write out.  I’ve got a checking account and several savings accounts set up that are used solely for the business funds.  If you’re not going to use the business account debit card for online purchases (it’s probably safer not to), you’ll also want a credit card that is used only for business transactions.  Again, it doesn’t have to be in the business’ name, it just has to only be used for business use.  I use one that has a 1-5% cash back feature to save a little extra on expenses.

When it comes to keeping your books, you probably don’t need anything too fancy for your personal accounts.  Just enough to create your budget, and keep track of accounts.  For business, you really need something a little bit more.  I prefer a full on business accounting software.  There’s a couple out there, and you can probably pick one up cheap off of eBay.  They’re a little more complex than the software created for personal accounts, but I like the detail the complexity gives me.  Maybe you can get by with a robust spreadsheet.  But, something that you can use to give your CPA (even if that’s you) a full detail of the profit/loss of the company including all sources of income and expenses.

It may sound a little difficult, but it’s not any more difficult that it would be if you didn’t separate them first and then tried to separate them after you need to.  You’ll thank yourself later.

Starting a Business: Can You Afford the Risk?

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Freedom! Be your own boss! There are plenty of people out there that will tell you that starting your own business is the only way to go. You can set your own hours, and do what you are passionate about. And, sometimes those things happen.

Eventually, you might be able to set your own hours.  Eventually, you’ll be able to make gobs of money doing what you are passionate about.  Eventually.  Until then, you’ll work long hours and probably not make much money doing it.

As with anything, starting a business can be a very risky proposition.  If you decide to do it full time, you’ll have to leave your job.  Doing it part time is a valid response to that, but then you’ll be working even longer hours than you already do.  And, sometimes, your passion just isn’t profitable.

But, I’m not here to discourage you from trying.  In fact, I’d like to do the opposite.  But, if you’re going to start your own business, do it responsibly.  Know ahead of time that you will likely be working long hours and making less money than you have planned for.  And know ahead of time that a very large portion of new businesses (about 60%) fail within the first 5 years.  I’d be willing to bet, however, that a very large portion of those failed businesses failed because the business owner didn’t do their research and didn’t know what they were getting themselves into.

But you will.

Can you afford the risk of starting a business? Let’s ask ourselves what we will need financially to devote ourselves to our new business. We’ll need to have a way to pay ourselves. You cannot count on the business to make enough revenue to pay yourself with. You’ll have to have a way to pay for start-up costs. It’s actually pretty expensive to start a business. To better understand where you stand financially, it’s wise to start by analyzing key financial performance indicators that will show you whether you’re on track and how sustainable your business model is. These indicators can provide valuable insights into your cash flow and profitability potential, helping you plan your next steps.

If you’re still in the planning phases, visit your local branch of the SBA, or find a local business incubator, and sit down with someone to discuss your business plan and the costs that will be associated with it.  Those experts do this all the time, so they’ll have a much better understanding of what it will cost you to get running.

Once you have a firm idea of what it’s going to cost you, you’ve got to start saving up.  Plan on saving at least a few months of salary and personal expenses, but I would shoot for at least 6-12 months.  And if you can, start saving any extra so that you can put that towards business costs as they come up.  Again, the business isn’t likely to pay for itself right away.

A solid savings plan will not only help you get your business started properly, it can also do a great deal towards keeping your business operating if necessary.  And having an extra cushion to pay your own expenses will save your sanity while you expend all your energy into your business.

My Wife Quit Her Job: One Year Later

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If you’d like to catch up on this on-going series, start here, then go here, and here.  Then come back here and read on.

There, now that you’re caught up, you know that my wife quit her job about a year ago.  Sometime around last August, she and two of her friends (and ex-coworkers) decided to start a business together.  And as of the last update, you knew that the business was going well.

Now, the business is still doing well.  Better than most of us expected, I think.  On May 1st, they began working with the clients that the certification that they picked up allowed them to.  Because of that, all three of them should be seeing full time hours fairly soon.  My wife has been working full time and then some for several months, but everyone else has been relegated to doing most of the office work (that is unpaid).  That’s good for us, but wasn’t all that great for everyone else, or for business partner morale.  Unfortunately, much of what my wife does is limited to people with certain qualifications.  Qualifications that only my wife has.  And, until the business is able to help pay for the others to get those qualifications, she’s got to do it.  With the new program that they just started, that should become more of a possibility towards the end of the year.  Of course, if the new program continues to do well, it might not be something that needs doing anyways.

As I expected, due to the added insurance costs, and some increases in withholding for ChildCare, my checks are much smaller than they were in 2009.  We had planned on that, and since a lot of the extra is pre-tax, it will help us in the long run.  It is a bit sad to see your net income be less than 50% of your gross income though.  To try and compensate, I’ve re-doubled my efforts here and at my other websites to try and make up some of the difference.  Income is increasing there, but it’s a very slow process, and it has yet to be enough to make any significant difference anywhere.

Due to my wife’s increased work load, we’ve been able to keep up with our bills and haven’t had any major issues.  It hasn’t been good enough for us to return to aggressive debt payments, but we haven’t added much new debt either.  That’s a win if you ask me.

The rest of the year looks pretty good.  My wife’s business looks like it will continue to grow and, with any luck, so will my side endeavors.  I’m hoping that we might even be able to start our debt snowball rolling again.