That’s sadly the catch. I’m sorry — I completely forgot to mention that this works for me because I’m consulting, so businesses pay my LLC rather than me.
However, I will say that one business wanted to hire me full time, and I refused and asked for a higher consulting rate, which they agreed to. So it’s not impossible for your next job to end up similarly.
But then you don’t get benefits (my wife’s health insurance covers us both), sick days, and you probably have to log hours (to my surprise). So even if it’s more lucrative for me right now, there are definite reasons this path isn’t suitable for everyone.
Definitely consider it if you can swing it though. And also, you can simply invoice yourself for services rendered from your LLC, which effectively transfers money from your personal account to the LLC. I’ve had to do this to bootstrap funds into the account (since your balance starts with $0, which is useless).
The problem is tax. There are two issues. One is that an LLC is a pass-through entity. That means all profits are expected to pass through immediately to your personal account, or used immediately on business expenses. If you try to maintain a $20k balance for a year, for example, you’ll discover that this balance counts against your deductions for that tax year (effectively a negative $20k deduction). Or at least that’s my understanding so far.
Therefore, as with most things, you should ask an accountant for advice. But that’s an unsatisfying answer. My answer was going to be, therefore, you can create a C Corp instead of an LLC, and transfer some of your personal funds into that (by invoicing yourself).
The problem (argh, they never end) is that the income will be taxed for the Corp, and then taxed again when you pay from the Corp back to yourself. This is precisely the “double taxation” problem that LLCs were designed to solve!
The reason it still might make sense is because of all the incredible benefits of setting up your own company. For example, merely opening a Mercury account at all means you can redeem $5k of aws credits. $5k! I’ve done this! To my surprise, it happened!
And that’s just one of like 80 Mercury perks. There are so many, and it’s been so much fun window shopping through them all. It’s how I wound up using quickbooks for example.
Plus you’ll have an account that people can wire money to. Mercury has a nice little PDF with all your wire transfer details. It feels like driving a Tesla, whereas US Bank was like not having a car at all. (It was truly one of the worst business banking experiences imaginable. They even managed to lose an incoming $10k wire transfer. Nonsense like that simply doesn’t happen with Mercury.)
So there’s a brain dump of pretty much everything I’ve learned over two months of studying this. The takeaway is that if I had a day job, I would set up a C Corp and transfer a few grand to it by invoicing myself. (No, I wouldn’t use stripe atlas. That’s $500. You can do it yourself for $50, and it’s been surprisingly painless. Both Missouri filing and the IRS EIN were entirely online, so you don’t even have to mail anything.)
Just, uh… perhaps consider it a side hobby. This kind of nerdiness is uniquely fun to me. I imagine that it’s incredibly un-fun for most people. Treating it as a hobby helps overcome that pain, and the risk turns out to be minimal. I was surprised by that.