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hey this is attorney Elizabeth potts-weinstein and today we're going to talk about whether or not you can have multiple businesses under just one LLC an LLC or limited liability company is a business entity that you can form to protect yourself personally from liability issues of your business and there's also some other benefits about taxes and things like that now if you form an LLC there are certain costs that go into form of the LLC maintaining it paying franchise fee taxes all this kind of stuff so you may Wonder well if I have a new project a new website I have this YouTube channel I'm doing some Consulting work I'm selling a new product over here do I need to form LLCs for all these different projects the short answer is you can put all your different projects under one LLC but there are times where you don't want to so let's break that down if you put all your various projects under one LLC there are definitely benefits to doing that fewer costs because you're setting up one LLC less hassle because all the forms and all the stuff that you need to file and create you only got to do that one time all the expenses are put together so they can all share the same accounts and services and software and all that kind of stuff and there are some tax benefits to putting everything together if one of the businesses has a loss that gets wrapped into the other business that makes a profit and so it looks like you're not making as much money because the bottom line is you're not taking home any more money so it makes sense that you're paying fewer taxes however there are a couple problems with having everything in the same LLC for first you have to have the same ownership structure for those various projects perhaps this one project over here you're Consulting you're doing completely on your own over here this website business you're in a venture with a friend and so having that all in the same legal entity doesn't make a lot of sense the next aspect is that all these projects are inside the same LLC so they're all liable to each other so let's say you have one project where you're taking on a lot of debt there's a lot of inventory and it loses money it goes under and then your project over here that does awesome is making all kinds of money and is making you a profit for you to take home it's actually liable for this business so you can't just file bankruptcy and have this business go under this business has to pay off the debts of this other business and that may not be what you're looking for in certain situations so when does it make sense to have one LLC with all your projects in it first there's only one owner it's just you the project are relatively low risk so you're not taking on debt you're not likely to get sued so you're not really worried about the liability issue for the projects to each other third is that a lot of these projects are kind of new experimental ideas that you're working on and it doesn't make sense to do the expense of forming a new LLC and last you want the tax benefit of putting everything together you've talked to your tax person and that makes sense in your situation when do you not want to put them all together in one LLC first is the ownership structure is different that's just not going to work it's not going to be practical second is if one of the businesses is high risk it's taking a lot of debt it has a lot of inventory it has a lot of employees there's potential litigation issues because the kind of industry you're in you want to keep that separate from your other projects third if you want to sell off part of the business if there's one of your projects that you're developing to sell to a bigger company you're going to eventually want that to be separate you don't have to start out with it being separate but you're eventually going to want to spit it off so it can be sold as a separate project and lastly there can be tax benefits to having your various projects in different LLCs that's kind of beyond the scope of this video the exact tax benefits and it really depends upon the exact businesses you have sometimes splitting off real estate or the business that has employed a lot of employees or the business that owns all the intellectual property there can be great tax reasons to split off at even parts of a business or entire businesses from each other they can then do transactions with each other and do all kinds of creative tax things but that has to make sense in your particular situation so you want to talk to your Tax Advisor about that again this is Elizabeth Potts Weinstein if you have any questions about whether having just one LLC is a good idea in your situation feel free to ask them below and I will try to point you in the right direction thumbs up if you found this video helpful and subscribe if you'd like any more tips for small business owners thanks a lot for watching bye
Thanks for your comment Leonardo Irigoyen, have a nice day.
- Lyndsey Renton, Staff Member
Thanks for this interesting article
Thanks qkrotncjuU your participation is very much appreciated
- Lyndsey Renton
About the author
I've studied mathematical statistics at University of Rio Grande in Rio Grande and I am an expert in pest control. I usually feel ashamed. My previous job was screen printing machine operators I held this position for 31 years, I love talking about tattooing and camping. Huge fan of John Travolta I practice rollerblading and collect crater critters.
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