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Written by : Rocco Gunsolley |
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are you wondering how to start an LLC in Illinois today you will learn about the most common ways to start your business including the correct forms you'll need how to register your LLC critical naming requirements and all other vital tips and tricks then as a bonus later in the video I will reveal a trustworthy registered agent who will help set up your LLC for free so make sure to stick with me until the end the state of Illinois like other states has several specific LLC requirements there are three main ways you can start an LLC in Illinois first is the DIY or do-it-yourself process where you mostly depend on Illinois State's website the second way is hiring a professional service that practically offers more efficiency and Security in the process of creating your LLC while the third one is hiring an attorney we will skip the attorney hiring portion because that's expensive and most business owners won't need that service first let's take a look at the steps required for starting an LLC on your own Step 1 choose a name for your Illinois LLC your llc's name must be recognizably different from the names of other business entities already on file with the Illinois Secretary of State you can check to see if a name is available by searching the Secretary of State Business Services name database you can reserve a name for up to 90 days by filing an application to reserve a name form LLC 1.15 the filing fee is 25 dollars under Illinois Law an LLC name must contain as the last words limited liability company LLC or LLC the abbreviations limited and Company are not allowed in Illinois the name must also not include the words Corporation Corp Incorporated and limited company limited partnership or LP Step 2 Illinois requires LLC to have a registered agent every Illinois LLC must have an agent for service of process in the state this is an individual or business entity that agrees to accept legal papers on the llc's behalf if someone sues the company a registered agent can be an individual who resides in Illinois or a domestic or foreign corporation authorized to do business in Illinois if it's a corporation its articles must authorize it to act as an agent the registered agent must have a physical street address in Illinois step 3 file articles of organization with the Illinois Secretary of State after that you must file the certificate of formation with the Illinois Secretary of State's business entities Division and the office of the judge of probate to officially incorporate a domestic Illinois limited liability company the Illinois State filing cost for LLCs is one hundred and fifty dollars for both domestic llc's and for foreign LLCs basically a domestic LLC means that you are already a resident of Illinois and you want to build a business in Illinois foreign LLC on the other hand is for people living outside Illinois but wanting to start a business or a franchise of their business in Illinois with that said most businesses would be applying for a domestic LLC you can file the certificate of formation online or by mailing it to the Secretary of State expect the LLC certification process to take approximately two weeks this is three to four days for the judge of probate and 10 days for the Secretary of State step 4 prepare an operating agreement now an operating agreement is a good idea to have in place with the other members if your LLC has more than one member although a limited liability company operating agreement is not necessary for Illinois your operating agreement should clarify how your company or business will handle big picture issues such as allocating earnings and losses and dissolving the company your operating agreement should also cover the transfer of membership interest profits or losses and distributions initial Investments decision-making Powers voting rights and management and lastly dissolving the business step 5 of file annual reports with the Illinois Secretary of State all llc's doing business in Illinois must file an annual report with the secretary of state the report is due each year prior to the first day of the llc's anniversary month the month in which it was organized for example if your LLC was created on July 15th then your report would be due by July 1st you can file the report online or by mail with form LLC to 50.1 the filing fee is 75 dollars filing a report late more than 60 days after the due date incurs an additional 100 penalty step 6 obtain an EIN an EIN or employer identification number is a federal tax ID issued by the IRS your EIN is used by them to readily identify your firm and tax filings all Illinois firms pay a business privilege tax and the state requires you to have an EIN to file you may also be required to provide your EIN when opening a bank account or applying for municipal permits or licenses obtaining an EIN is a slightly longer process compared to their previous steps I'm sure you know anything to do with the IRS is confusing first you have to have complete knowledge of your LLC such as your company information managing member information business address business information company details and even critical information regarding vehicular assets and federal excise taxes this is another reason why getting a professional registered agent is way more convenient as they can do this for you as part of their service now let's talk about the second option to form an LLC and that is hiring a professional formation service professional formation services do all the steps you should be doing on your own from filing necessary forms to acting as your registered agent you usually have to allocate a specific budget for this option as I already mentioned earlier Inc file is one of the best companies out there to help you form your LLC you can click on the link in the description to get access to this deal Inc file is one of a kind as it offers a free package with services such as preparing and filing your articles of organization well you still have to pay 237 dollars for the state fees which you would have to do anyway if you chose the DIY option but looking at the bigger picture all other companies will still charge their service fee on top of State filing fees Inc file does not collect this fee this plan already includes a free registered agent for your first year of subscription and 119 annually moving forward if you decide to continue the service after the first year Inc file's next packages are the gold and platinum packages which both have package fees already on top of the 237 dollar State fee each package has its own set of services which are all worthy of the subscription you are paying for the gold package offers you the benefits of filing reports and taxes for your LLC every year USA LLCs are required to file a state annual report this report is essentially an information update of your file so that the state knows who is now in charge and how to contact your company USA LLCs are also required to file state tax returns to make matters even more complicated your annual report and business privilege tax share a document and are due at the same time each year with the ink files
Thanks for your comment Jonas Roshannon, have a nice day.
- Rocco Gunsolley, Staff Member
so today we are talking about how to start an llc in illinois my name is eric and i'm going to give you three methods for starting up your llc the first would be going through your state website which we're going to discuss in detail the second is using online tools to set up your llc and the third is going through an attorney but at the end of this video i'll show you how you can go through an attorney with a free consultation involved so perhaps before you dive off the deep end spending a ton of money with an attorney you can figure out if that's the right fit for your needs also what i'm going to be talking about in this video are important facts on how to make sure that your llc is legit a lot of people overlook these things and if you're not familiar with the terms such as piercing the corporate veil or understanding exactly what a registered agent is and what they do for you then you want to make sure that you watch this entire video to make sure that you're setting up your llc in the proper way so why don't we get started with the state website so here we are on the state website and i've got some good news and bad news for you so some of the good news here is if you look at the state filing fees and we scroll down you'll see that the old filing fee just for your articles of organization was 500 and now it's 150 so the cost of setting up an llc in the state of illinois is actually reduced quite a bit recently so that's great to hear the bad news is i don't think that this website is laid out too great um it's a lot of information and what i have found is other services will walk you through kind of more step-by-step where a state website is just somebody working for the state for the government and they just kind of throw every bit of information at you and then say good luck so what i should mention too is the link here above any link or resource mentioned in this video will be in the description below so if you go to the description anything you could possibly need that was mentioned in this video is going to be mentioned there so what you do is you kind of go through and click file and we're just going to set up a standard llc and then uh this particular junction here i'm just saying yes i kind of meet all these provisions for the llc and then this is where it gets a little bit important here is that if you put in an llc name you want to make sure that it is not taken already so you can see i already have an example here of abc llc what they'll do is they'll search their database here and they'll let you know you know what we've already got these types of llc's with these names here so if the specific one that you're looking for is here then you may want to consider a different name but if it's not you can click i confirm and you can continue through so i just got some dummy information just to get through to the next page and this is where i start to have kind of issues with state websites so in this particular case it's talking about a registered agent registered office it's saying that a limited liability company cannot act as its own registered agent the address of the registered office must be located within the boundaries of illinois and then you know a po box is not acceptable who is your registered agent so i think most people going through this at this point are just going to say you know what it's my friend johnny down the street i'm going to have him be my registered agent he lives in illinois he'll take care of me so the reason why this is an issue is in the case of you being sued by an attorney now the whole reason you set up an llc is to limit your liability and if you're not doing things like this seriously you're not taking this seriously as far as your registered agent you might be opening up yourself to a lot of liability this might be a good point in the video to explain exactly what an llc is and what it is not some people think that an llc is going to create some sort of tax savings for your tax advantage it does not it's simply for limiting your liability what an llc does is you have your business assets and then you have your personal assets your personal assets might be your personal home personal bank account your personal car and the llc creates a division between these two things so what happens is if you are sued an attorney who's suing you is going to try to do something called pierce the corporate veil now that is legal jargon for basically trying to find cracks in your llc to say that your llc is not legit now one of the ways that this kind of happens is if you have issues with your registered agent now if we go to this tool called ink file they explain what a registered agent is so what they do is official letters and correspondence from your secretary of state services of process notices so if you're sued they're going to make sure that you're appearing in court official federal government correspondence information notifications tax forms and requests for payment and request to complete permits company filings or reports so again if you're going through your buddy down the street and he's not sending you these documents not making sure that you're renewing with the state and making sure that you're doing your annual reports you might have a crack in your llc so when you're sued by an attorney they're going to find that crack they're going to be able to pierce the corporate fail and they're going to be able to erase that division between your business and personal assets so what this means is they could potentially come after your personal home your car your personal bank account so that's why it's really important when you're going through these steps is to not just kind of breeze through these types of things and say hey my friend down the street is my registered agent so this particular point in juncture what i'd like to do is talk about why i think that some of the online tools outside of your state website are pretty advantageous probably one of the most popular one is legalzoom the only issue i have with legalzoom is they're kind of the original gangster in this space and that being the case what they can do is they can actually charge you a 79 fee on top of your filing fee so in your particular case the state filing fee is probably going to be around 150 154 but then it's going to be 79 on top of that now the service that i was just showing you is called the ink file i like this service for a couple reasons one of them is their learning center here is super helpful so if you're looking for state filing prices or what we were looking at just a moment ago is about registered agents start a business checklist is great if you're very early on in your business but one of the other things too is they've incorporated over 250 000 businesses since 2004 and your eyeball might have been attracted to this big zero number here so if you launch your business with this service by clicking this button or this button up here what's going to happen is is you'd say i want an llc which you know what 80 of all entities created are llc's so it's a very popular choice and then we go down to illinois it's
Thanks Loriann your participation is very much appreciated
- Rocco Gunsolley
About the author
I've studied standard english at Hartwick College in Oneonta and I am an expert in natural language processing. I usually feel anxious. My previous job was stained glass artist I held this position for 27 years, I love talking about knife collecting and xbox. Huge fan of Sandra Cisneros I practice mountaineering and collect toys.
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