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Written by : Kaci Lastiri |
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welcome back to taxes made simple i'm your host carlton dennis and today we're going to go over how to pay yourself as a single member llc if you're someone who has recently started a business then you probably are thinking about setting up a single member llc or a multi-member llc if you're getting into partnership with someone but in today's video we're going to discuss exactly how you should be paying yourself as a single member llc to not get yourself in trouble and to make sure that you're leveraging the tax law the way that it's meant to be leveraged let's dive in now the first thing we have to understand about the single member llc is the characteristics of the single member llc if you're a single member llc owner that means you have established a disregarded entity a disregarded entity is no different than a sole proprietor business which pretty much means is that you decided to start a business but the only thing now that you've done is that you've separated the liability from yourself which means that you're no longer associated with just your social security number you now have this ein number that you get to utilize the ein number is taken to a bank where you can open up your business banking account you can have a checking account a savings account you can even establish yourself a credit card even if the bank will allow it now in order to understand how to pay yourself as a single member llc i'm gonna break it down very simple for you on a white piece of paper on my ipad let's jump right in so what i have here is how to pay yourself as a single member llc what i'm going to do is i'm going to go ahead and draw a line directly on the center of the page i'm going to put our single member llc on the left hand side i'm going to go ahead and put ourselves us we're going to be over here on the right hand side okay so we completely separated ourselves from our business our business is sitting over here we're sitting on the right-hand side which means the liability is no longer associated with us if something happens and someone wants to sue us inside of our business they can sue us but they're going to sue only to the extent of what we have now that's sitting inside of this single member llc now let's just say that we started in online candle business and let's say our candle business made a hundred thousand dollars in the year of 2021. well if our candle business has accepted this money through our single member llc we need to make sure that we've accepted it the right way first now if you have established yourself as a single member llc the government has given you a very important number it's called an ein number and i view an ein number almost like a social security number for your business because it is it's truly how your business is identified it's the number that you present to your bank when you want to open up a bank account and it's the number that you need when you decide that you want to grow your business credit or apply for a loan so this number is going to be extremely important to you the ein number however needs to be set up which means you need to go take it to a bank and you need to establish your business bank account now once the business bank account is established and we have our candle business we can accept this hundred thousand dollars through our single member llc but now the next question becomes how do we pay ourselves if we were to move money over to ourselves in our personal bank account without doing anything formal or running payroll to any type of company as adp or carla dennison associates then we have taken what's called a distribution what a distribution means is that we've simply just distributed money to ourselves let's say that we decided to distribute twenty thousand dollars to ourselves does this mean that our business receives a twenty thousand dollar deduction over here it does not and part of the reason why our business doesn't receive a deduction when we're a single member llc writing ourselves a check or just moving money over or selling ourselves or even then mowing ourselves the reason why we as business owners do not get a deduction for paying ourselves as a single member llcs is because we aren't processing payroll with a payroll company and we aren't taxed as an s corporation when you're a single member llc you are just what's called a shareholder and as a shareholder you can take income to yourself and you can also pay your employees however when you pay your employees you receive a deduction for this but when you pay yourself you receive no deduction and this is what hurts a lot of my single member llc clients because they'll get into their business and start growing their finances but then they get to a place where they want to start paying themselves but they're not getting a deduction every single time they pay themselves so then they come to their tax guy and say hey is there anything i could have done to reduce my tax bill and then they find out later that they should have switched over to an escort in order to receive this deduction for paying themselves on the tax return so let's talk a little bit more about how an llc can switch over to an s corp to pay ourselves out of our s corporation if we're an llc in order for us to switch over to an s corp we're gonna need to do two things we're gonna need to complete a 25 53 form in an 88 32 form these two forms right here are how the llc transitions over into an s corporation but one of the things that we have to understand about the escort is the s corp has a lot of rules and one of the rules of the s escort is that you have to give yourself reasonable compensation reasonable comp which is a salary not to mention you need to make sure that you're filing your tax returns on time which is march 15th instead of april 15th so when we get over into this s corporation what does it mean to take reasonable compensation what does it mean to have a salary well you think about a job that you've ever had before in your life just think about any type of job you've had whether it was working for 7-11 whether it was being a bellhop whether it was being a lyft driver an uber driver you were given a wage based on what you were doing and it was deemed reasonable based on what you were doing but if you're a business owner and you're making money you may have an extravagant business you may be a youtube star you may be someone who's behind a camera and just selling themselves online your business could be a number of different things so you have to try to determine a reasonable compensation for yourself based on the income you're making but not just the income that you're grossing you want to base reasonable compensation based on net income after all of your expenses so if you're someone who's making really good money but you end up having tons of expenses to offset that really good money you're never really in a position where you're taking a huge reasonable compensation so let's talk about it let's say i made three hundred thousand dollars in my business but then after all expenses and i had two hundred dollars in expenses i was left with
Thanks for your comment Kerry Mcmorran, have a nice day.
- Kaci Lastiri, Staff Member
are you and your business partner wondering how you should be paying yourself and your multi-member LLC today I'm going to explain to you exactly what you need to do the five steps you need to take to make sure that both you and your business partner can sleep better at night knowing that your LLC is properly taken care of and that you're each being paid adequately based on your work in the business that sound good let's do it are you looking for legal guidance and practical business tips without spending thousands of dollars on high-priced lawyers and law firms hi my name is Jim Hart and the founding attorney here at Hawthorn law we help online businesses and small business owners to protect their business without spending a small fortune in both time and money so that you can focus on what matters most and that's building something that truly matters in the world if you're interested in legally protecting your business and building it the right way then go ahead and click the subscribe button down below and don't forget to hit the little bell thing so that you can notify when we publish new videos each and every week and also especially for this video if you are in business with somebody else which I'm sure you are you wouldn't be watching this video make sure you share this video and my channel with your business partner so that both of you can be on the same page about how it is that you need to run your business legally to make sure things are in order so today I want to talk to those of you that are in business or somebody else about what you need to do to protect yourself and your business when it comes time to pay yourself this is a really hot emotional topic for a lot of businesses when there are multi members of that LLC now if you're not in business with somebody else if you have a single member LLC which means that you're in business by yourself and you want to check out my other video on how to pay yourself in your single member LLC I just updated it for 2019 so link up there now if you are in business for somebody else you know how hard it can be it's basically like marriage without sex unless that is that you're in business with your spouse in which case you're a single member LLC in the eyes of law you may not have known that but you are so espoused to spouses together that's still a single member LLC that's not a partnership I bet you didn't know that did you so for the rest of you who've decided to go into business with somebody that is not your spouse this could be a boyfriend or girl this could be a colleague professionally or personally this could be a friend this could be a family member this could be somebody you met in college or university this video is for you whomever it is that you're in business with you need to make sure that the two of you are on the same page about how you're going to pay yourself with your multi-member LLC this is an incredibly important decision that you need to make you need to be an agreement about how and when each of you are going to get paid and how much you're going to get paid if you can't agree on this it's going to lead to a lot of infighting between you with the business it's going to lead to problems regarding how you're going to be spending the money in the business it's going to lead to a lot of animosity between the two of you and and ultimately it could tear down both your friendship if you were friends before you got into business and it could turn her down the business itself which is a problem and that's something that you want to avoid I'm sure so obviously there's a lot at stake here by the end of today's video I'm going to talk to you about the five things that you need to include in your operating agreement to make sure that all these things don't happen for you and your business but before we get to that quick water break today again I don't have my coffee into water from my mega tub by the way I love these things I don't know if you know but this is like a Yeti knockoff and these things keep your water cold for hours even if it's in a hot car amazing so in many of my videos I talked about the importance of having a solid operating agreement and that is never more important than when we're talking about a situation where you have a multi-member LLC now I say multi-member LLC but this could also be a corporation with multiple shareholders it doesn't necessarily have to be an LLC or it could just be a general partnership where you have any reformed a corporate entity but you have multiple partners in the business basically the idea of the operating agreement here is that you need to agree to all these things before you start operating business it's kind of like again I'm gonna go back to the the analogy of a marriage having a prenuptial agreement before you get into the marriage to make sure the marriage goes south that you know how you're gonna handle things now if you are a single member LLC you don't need to spend a whole lot of time on this because if you ever need to make a change the operating agreement you just make the change it's it's a it's a living breathing document that can change as as times change but if you are a multi-member LLC and you want to make a change to your operating agreement you need to think long and hard about how you're going to do that because there's somebody else on the other side that might have a say in whether or not you want to make a change to that agreement and that's your business partner in the course of a multi-member LLC you can't just change the agreement anytime you want all of you need to agree and that's why it's important to get these things down at the outset so here are some of the main issues that you're going to need to face when negotiating an operating agreement for a multi-member LLC and this is specifically in regards to what you need to do in terms of getting paid there are a bunch of other issues that you're going to need to negotiate but these are the most important issues you're going to need to deal with when you're talking about how you and your business partners are going to get paid ideally you would agree to all these issues before you number one invest money into the business or to start actually operating the business sometimes that's not possible some of you are probably watching this video and you've been operating for years and now you're wondering what you need to do well you need to get operating agreement in place as soon as possible before there are any problems with your business so let's go through these five issues that you need to deal with real quick number one how are you going to get paid are you going to have a set salary or you're gonna get paid based on a percentage of revenue or are you going to get paid when the business is profitable are you gonna get paid based on commissions how are each of you going to get paid that is the number one decision you need to make the second option is pay split how are you going to divide up the pay are you gonna be paid each 50/50 or you each equal gonna be taking equal draws from the business or are you gonna be doing something else third opt
Thanks Augustine your participation is very much appreciated
- Kaci Lastiri
About the author
I've studied climate change policy at Southern Illinois University Carbondale in Carbondale and I am an expert in computer graphics. I usually feel hot. My previous job was technical publications writer I held this position for 8 years, I love talking about movie memorabilia collecting and snow boarding. Huge fan of Richard Rawlings I practice parasailing and collect numismatics.
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