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in today's video we're going to be discussing the differences between an llc and an ass corporation and we're going to be talking about how you can save on your taxes set up as an s corporation but also a little thing that a lot of people don't talk about with s corporations and why they may be more advantageous has to do with funding and equity within your business now taking a look at this uh screen right here this is ink file if you're not familiar with that service they can help you set up with an llc or an s corporation uh they also do non-profit c corporation entity structures but they have a really cool s-corporation tax calculator one of the things talking to a lot of different people interested in getting set up with a business they think that there's some sort of tax advantage with getting set up with an llc there is not it's simply about limiting your liability now if we go down this post a little bit and the link to this post will be in the description below it is an affiliate link because if you end up getting set up with an llc or an s corp using my link i will receive a commission but it helps to support me to make more content like this so i appreciate it uh now one of the things though you want to be aware of is the ways that you can set up an x corporation there are two ways to do it one is forming an s corporation which is what i did with my business or you can form a limited liability company but elect to be taxed as an s corporation we're not going to get into that in this video but what you really want to take a look at is these two paragraphs right here basically when you're an employee a w-2 employee and that's what most people are familiar with and used to um there is employment payroll and self-employment tax when you are an employee of a company there is a 15.3 employment tax and that is usually split between you and the business so you might be paying half of that as the employee and the business is paying the other half then on top of that you have your federal income tax now um that's 15.3 percent though if you are a sole proprietor you are now paying all of that now if you're set up as an llc and you make a hundred thousand dollars that means that you're gonna have over fifteen thousand dollars uh in employment taxes because you're paying both sides of the house now now for the federal income tax no way to really get around that unless you want to start talking about moving to puerto rico or something like that but we're not going to talk about that that's a discussion for a different day so this uh this part of the page here really highlights the difference when you pay as an llc uh you're essentially a salaried employee it's a pass-through you're paying 15.3 percent of that employment tax on all proceeds that you earn as a business owner now if you're a sole proprietor but you get set up as an s corp an escort designation what you can do is you can split the way that your income is taxed so some is going to come through as a w-2 salary so even if you're a sole proprietor like i am i am on the books i am an employee of my business even though i'm the only employee currently i am partially paid through salary and then i am partially paid through what's called a distribution so the distribution is taxed differently than what a salary is taxed at okay so this is where the fun part of this video is is playing with this s corp tax calculator so what is your estimated yearly net income for the business so let's say that the business is doing all right we got a hundred thousand dollars in net income and on top of that we're taking about an eighty thousand dollar um salary each year so that's going to leave twenty thousand dollars left over for a distribution so what you can see is as a sole proprietor it would be fourteen thousand five hundred eighty one dollars that you'd pay in taxes as a corporation you're gonna pay twelve thousand two forty which saves you two thousand three hundred forty one dollars uh in taxes and again that is because the distribution that you're taking that 20 000 so now let's lower this a little bit and let's say that we're only going to take a 50 000 salary and then you're going to take the remaining 50 000 of net proceeds as a distribution so this is where you can really start to see things ramp up so now you're going to be saving 6931 a year on taxes so there's where you can really start seeing the advantage of an s corporation over an llc is that you are going to save on taxes by paying yourself partly as a employee of the business as salaried employee and then partly as a distribution and on that distribution is where you're going to see the savings now the other thing that's a little bit less talked about with as corporations compared to an llc it's a lot easier to get funding on an s corporation now the reason for that is if somebody wants to invest in your business maybe it's venture capital or somebody who just wants to be an equity stakeholder in your business it's a lot easier to set that up with an s corporation because you're going to have shares for the business right now my particular business is an s-corporation i have a thousand shares and i own all 1000 shares of the business if i want to bring somebody else on i can actually bring them in and be a part equity owner in the business and then when i do shareholder distributions they actually get a piece of that as well i have no plans of doing that for my business because i like to keep things small and simple but some of the things that you can also do with an s corporation as far as investing in your future and this is the thing that really attracted me to it is as a sole proprietor if that's the case that you're in you can still hire your spouse and bring them on as an employee now on top of that if you have a solo 401k which is something that i set up through vanguard you can bring your spouse on and if you pay them around like 20 25 000 a year in salary just enough to cover the taxes you can max out their 401k at 19 500 as of 2021. so what i'm able to do is i can still keep my solo 401k i'm still the sole owner of the business but i can bring my spouse on so then what you can do is you can decrease the taxable income of the business because my payroll expenses have gone up by bringing my wife on board but then we're also just taking that money and putting it right into our 401k so there's a lot of things that you can do set up as an s corporation that are very advantageous especially for a sole proprietor such as myself so again if you want to take a further look i suggest using the link in the description below to check out this tax calculator and they have a lot of helpful resources here in the learning center as well if you're kind of looking into getting started with a business or diy guides uh or what structure makes sense for you and if you're interested uh in this video right here this is a review of gusto this is how i set up my payroll for my s corporation is a frustration setting up an s corporation but if your business is turning enough of a net profit if you can save money every single year i mean th
Thanks for your comment Janay Lyvers, have a nice day.
- Milagro Laher, Staff Member
welcome back in this video i'm going over how and when the s-corp election saves you taxes to answer this question we're going to be looking at how s-corps are taxed how all of the tax calculation works in the s-corp and we'll be going through my s-corp tax calculator which is part of my business tax comparisons spreadsheet template and we'll look at some examples so that you can see how this affects your personal taxes and how you really know when it's going to be the right fit for you and your business to save taxes there's a lot of myths out there we can clear all that up in this video with my spreadsheet templates so let's get started if you're new here my name's amanda you're watching the business finance coach where i simplify all the technicalities of business because i believe that the world needs your business and that these things shouldn't be complicated they're the tools of a civilized society that are here to support you check out the description box below this video for links to all sorts of freebies and spreadsheets and courses that i offer now let's jump in to my s corp tax calculator and exactly how and when the s corporation election can save you taxes okay we're gonna use my spreadsheet template for a solo owner business so that we can compare self-employed taxes to s-corp taxes for the s-corp we have a business column and an individual column because we've got to account for any and all of what's going on in the business side and the personal side to have a really accurate comparison to the self-employed and same goes for the c corp but i'm covering c corp in a separate video so i'll be leaving that out of this comparison so in this example we've got a hundred and eighty thousand dollars in business income 50 000 in business expenses and you can see that gives us net business income when we're self-employed of a hundred and thirty thousand however in an s corporation we have to pay the owner as a w-2 employee and that is also a business expense that decreases our net business income you can see owner salary here so in this example i put in 80 000 for the owner salary which may or may not be applicable we'll come back to how we determine the amount of this owner's salary in a moment on that owner's salary we're going to calculate payroll taxes now payroll taxes are the same thing as self-employment taxes they're medicare and social security the calculations are just done differently when we're self-employed versus when we're an employee when we're an employee we split those taxes social security and medicare with the business so you can see that's what's calculating here under payroll taxes this is half of the payroll taxes the owner pays the other payroll taxes out of their w-2 and so we'll have that further down in the calculation but here for the business the business gets deduct their half of owner employee payroll taxes now that's not a benefit to self-employed because as we'll see further down in the calculation the self-employed gets to deduct for income taxes half of their self-employment taxes but you can see we have very different net income here our net income in the self-employed is 130 000 but in the s corp we got to add in our owner's salary and our payroll taxes so in the escort now we're down to 43 000 in net business income after we add in our owner's salary and our payroll taxes so we're already addressing two taxes that affect the escort as we can see on my business types cheat sheet the s-corp is a flow-through entity and that means that the business doesn't pay any taxes now we're going to come back to this topic of distributions right here we'll leave that alone for a second the first thing is what happens to this net business income if we come down here to our business taxes section which is after distributions we can see this is where that 130 net income from the self-employed business is paying its self-employment taxes but right here in our business for the s corp we have no business taxes being calculated but that doesn't mean that the owner isn't taxed on the net income from the business as a flow through that net income amount is taxed we've got to go down to our personal income tax returns section down here this is where the owner is being taxed on the net income from the business it flows through to the owner to be taxed for their personal income tax however the benefit of the s-corporation is that you don't pay self-employment taxes on this amount of course the owner is going to pay self-employment or payroll taxes on the amount of their wages so because of this benefit that there's no self-employment taxes on this amount that flows through because of that the irs cares about how much you pay yourself as a salary very much and it's therefore called this concept of reasonable compensation you must pay yourself reasonable compensation a lot of you know people on youtube or writing blogs will say that oh you know you get to pay yourself just 10 or 20 thousand dollars and take the rest out as distributions and avoid taxes that's not true either you must pay yourself reasonable compensation if you pay yourself a really low wage and then you have are taking up huge distributions that's definitely a red flag however it's certainly a valid strategy to make reasonable compensation as low as you can now i go into more depth and talk about court cases in another video on reasonable compensation but let's talk a little bit about how do you get reasonable compensation to be the lowest amount possible because that's where the tax savings are here i'll explain the concept of how you can number one choose the right amount of what is reasonable compensation for you as well as get that amount as low as possible so it depends kind of what your role is in your business but let's say you like many small business owners are doing lots of tasks in your business you're doing bookkeeping you're answering emails right you're doing all of these smaller administrative tasks which you might pay someone a lower wage to do so what you can do is literally calculate out all the tasks and time that you spend on those tasks and then look up what you could hire someone for to do those different tasks and document it so if you use average there's average pay companies i have a bunch of them listed in my course but you can find all sorts online that give you average pay rates or you could even look up job positions and what they say they're paying anytime you find a number and a description you want to save that as documentation for your reasonable compensation and then let's say you decide okay i spend five hours a week doing email i spend one hour a week doing my bookkeeping and so you're going to come up with a rate for all of the time that you spend in your business and then you can calculate that together for a total salary and that's one way to get your reasonable compensation as low as possible and as you can see i'm really emphasizing documenting it because that is really important when it comes to court cases and challenging the irs and if you're audited and especially if you have a low amount and regardless be
Thanks Nathanael your participation is very much appreciated
- Milagro Laher
About the author
I've studied sustainability studies at Stevenson University in Stevenson and I am an expert in developmental systems theory. I usually feel shocked. My previous job was aircraft body and bonded structure repairer I held this position for 19 years, I love talking about footbag and possession. Huge fan of Vanessa Bryant I practice equestrian and collect insects.
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