Comment by stonemetal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stonemetal | Hacker News Reader

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Not a Lawyer, but my understanding is that a single person LLC is a waste of time. When something happened and you were going to be sued they would sue you as a person and you as a business. Protection really starts once you have an employee or cofounder.

As a hypothetical: A domino's pizza driver causes a wreck, the victim sues the driver, and domino's pizza. The only entity protected in that case is the uninvolved individual domino's share holder. As the only actor you would never be the uninvolved share holder, you would always be the delivery driver directly involved in the accident. Therefore you always have direct culpability that can't be hidden by the LLC.

Not a lawyer or accountant either, but my understanding is that a single-person LLC is only useful if you're holding business debt: if your company goes bankrupt, your personal assets are much harder to go after. For liability, you're exactly right: you can't pass off liability to a piece of paper when you're the only person in the company.

I get flak for this whenever this discussion comes up, but personally I have a side project business, and it's a sole proprietorship. I looked into incorporation but could not find a single positive attribute to it, for my situation. My situation is: 1) I'm the only person, and 2) I have zero debt involved with the business. So for me, there just isn't any good reason to incorporate; it would only increase my costs and force me to waste a bunch of time on extra paperwork for nothing.

All these people touting incorporation seem to have several assumptions, one being that you must necessarily go into debt to start a business (not true), and the other being that surely you must have employees or partners (also not true). Just look at some guy who starts a lawn-mowing business: if he buys his own mower out-of-pocket, and does all the work himself, what the heck does he need a corporation or LLC for?

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