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Written by : Lisa Parsells |
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how can you pay yourself from your llc that's the question i'm going to answer in this long format video where i'll answer this question quickly and then go into the details some of the nuances of based on your entity type your structure your income and your projections for the future can affect your strategy about how to pay yourself from your llc or corporation i will discuss that a little bit later because it is possible that you have an llc that you're an owner of an llc but you make the election to be taxed as a corporation so you must understand the default treatment of paying yourself as a single member or multi-member llcs which is a standard llc per se or what if you make the election to be taxed as an s corporation or a c corporation we will discuss that in detail now there are three ways you can pay yourself from your llc one of them and the most typical one is called the owner's draw that's when you write yourself a check you don't make any tax withholdings the llc is paying you the owner or one of the owners a distribution check a draw against the profits of the business the other way you can pay yourself is with payroll pay yourself through a salary you will withhold taxes and you will have an entire system in place to pay yourself withhold taxes send those taxes to the government file forms and so forth and the third way you can pay yourself from your llc is called a dividend which has optional withholding you actually don't need to withhold on a dividend but you can if you want to now the entity type that you choose or how you structure your llc actually affects how these payments are made so let's talk about what the contents of today's videos we're going to discuss a lot of things in detail i gave you the three ways to do it but now i'm gonna explain the nuances that you need to apply to your situation to figure out how you're gonna pay yourself so first we're gonna discuss the difference between owner's draw payroll salary and dividends which we just talked about then we're going to go into the detail of each entity type and i want you to think about an llc as of being potentially one of four entity types it can be all four of them it can be two of them it can only be one so you're gonna make the election based on your situation so the default way an llc is when it has a single owner is called a single member llc pretty easy to remember you're going to file 1040 in your schedule c if you don't you do your own taxes that's something your accountant worries about but you want to know how to pay yourself if you happen to have a single member llc we're going to start discussing that in detail secondly we'll talk about calculating the liability single member llcs don't pay taxes multi-member llcs don't pay taxes it is the owners of the llcs that pay the taxes in representation of the llc so we're going to discuss more or less how the liability is calculated then we're going to move on to multi-member llc that's an llc that is owned by two or more people this this you you will use form 1065 again if you don't file your own tax returns something for your your tax accountant to worry about this is often called a partnership this is the traditional naming convention that we use for association of two or more people doing business together which is basically what an llc potentially is when it has more than one owner so in the tax return it's actually called a partnership even though legally is called an llc now we're going to discuss the the third entity type which is an llc that made the election to be taxed as an s corporation which would file form 1120 s on the tax return and then we're going to discuss the fourth type which is llcs that elect to be taxed as c corporations and c corporations file with form 1120. again if you don't file your own returns something for your accountant to worry about this video is focused around how you're going to pay yourself and the last thing i want to discuss here is multiple entity issues this is for people that have more than one llc or a combination llc s corp c-corp multi-member single member so when there's combinations of things we're going to discuss kind of not so much tax strategies but some of the structure that is allowed when you have multiple entities so let's dive right in now depending on how you pay yourself the tax of pay the the type of payment actually affects the type of form you're required to file to the irs so for example if you have a single member llc and you pay yourself an owner's draw there's actually no reporting requirements when you report the income and expenses of your single member llc that's going to go in your in your personal tax return and the amount you paid yourself or didn't pay yourself is not reportable only thing you report is income and expenses so single member llc easy nothing to worry about if you didn't make any special elections there's no reporting requirements you just have to in your schedule c put your income and expenses and that's it now if you have a multi-member llc this is an llc with more than one owner you are going to have a form called the k1 which goes inside your partnership tax return or the form 1065 that we talked about and in that form you're actually going to see the reported amount of draws or distributions that you took so there will be a beginning balance of the capital you put into the business there will be an increase or decrease in capital based on the profits and then the decrease the final decrease in capital based on how many draws you took out what's interesting about this we'll discuss this a little bit in detail is because there's multiple owners every owner gets the k1 and every owner has its own calculation on those owner drops we'll discuss that a little bit more detail let's talk about payroll salary so typically only when somebody has a corporation an s corporation or a c corporation they start worrying about paying themselves through payroll we'll discuss it in detail this is actually a requirement a minimum requirement on s-corporations and it's sort of quasi-optional on c-corporations we'll discuss what that means and if you have an llc you may have made the election to be taxed as an s corporation or a c corporation so if you made the election you must pay yourself at least a big chunk of that payment through payroll via aw2 that's the form that ultimately gets reported to the irs that represents the amount you pay yourself to payroll with s corporations you can have both you got payroll and owner's draw or distributions with c corporations you can have both payroll and something called a dividend a dividend is only for c corporations and there's a form is a 1099 hyphen div which is the one the corporation or the llc converted to a corporation for tax purposes needs to file at the end of the year to let the irs know that this owner received some dividends so based again as we talked about earlier based on the entity type the way you pay yourself and the way you report what you pay yourself and as we dig deeper the way you pay taxes on how you pay yourself all changes now i want to make a quick no
Thanks for your comment Florentino Turbide, have a nice day.
- Lisa Parsells, Staff Member
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
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- Lisa Parsells
About the author
I've studied optomechanics at Howard University in Washington and I am an expert in finnish history. I usually feel uncomfortable. My previous job was cardiologist (md) I held this position for 21 years, I love talking about wikipedia racing/wikiracing and robotics. Huge fan of La La Anthony I practice broomball and collect scouting memorabilia.
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