Last week my PayPal account was "permanently disabled" this also happened to two of my friends at the same time. Is anyone else going through this right now? When I looked it up on Reddit it seemed like a widespread error that started last week. Could it be related to this? Are there any steps I should be taking to try to get my account back? Any help here would be really appreciated.
I filed a dispute with Paypal that a merchant ran off with my money… Paypal nuked my account. No idea if the support agent hit the wrong button but I’m done with Paypal, no explanation or recourse. Filed dispute with bank on the Paypal charge and immediately got my money back.
I really didn't like this line of the article. "This stuff isn’t easy, and before we get to a world with zero traffic deaths, we’ll—briefly, I hope—have to increase the number of traffic deaths just a little. We feel really bad about that."
Reason being, while satire the rest could hold true. Mistakes will happen from cars, but mistakes happen from people anyway. Now this line quoted above is just incorrect. The average automated driver is going to cause many less deaths and the average human driver. That is the thing that is so frustrating about this type of talk putting down automated driving. Automated driving (from my understanding) is already safer than human driving, we just don't accept deaths from automated driving but we do from human driving.
The line seems more correct if it was written: "This stuff isn’t easy, and before we get to a world with zero traffic deaths, we’ll—briefly, decrease the number of traffic deaths, but not to zero and mistakes will be made. We feel really bad about that."
That is certainly a more true statement than the one in the article.
Facebook ads have brought some of the most positive products and positive changes to my life. Sometime I literally go on Facebook just for the ads to see what else is out there for me in terms of personal development and life improvement.
I started my current business originally from a program I bought through Facebook ads. I spent a half a year following Tony Robbins around, which had a huge positive impact on my life thanks to a Facebook ad.
I recently got out of a funk due to a Facebook ad for a support group of people going through what I was going through.
I would be really sad to see Facebook ads go and I don’t think there are other places I would have found these services that I did find.
I can honestly say, I don’t know where my life would be if there were not Facebook ads, but I do not think it would be in such a positive place for sure..
I'm quite stunned by your answer. I think this shows how we all (including myself) just live in our own bubble and just assume it's the same for everybody else.
If we use a reasonable definition of hard, like what percentage of the population can learn a task/skill/subject. We could say the smaller percentage of people that can do a task/skill/subject the harder it is.
And the larger the percentage of the population can learn the task/skill/subject the softer it is.
With this definition we can still use the words hard and soft and I don’t think it changes too much how we use them now.
And then any social consequences that come from the use of the words would just be inherent based on a reasonable definition.
That's the version of "hard" that is opposite "easy", not the version that's opposite "soft". It's perfectly doable to use a hard/soft split without making up a new definition for one of them.
This is not good advice. If you set things up correctly you should set it up as an s-corp to maximize your tax savings.
If you have an s-corp, you won’t have to pay self employment tax, which is 15% on all of your profit and all of your salary if you just stay an LLC without an s-corp election.
With an s-corp you are advised to pay yourself a reasonable salary as a w2. That salary is the only thing you will need to pay that self employment tax on. That salary should be as low as you can justify. Here is info from the IRS about how to go about calculating that.. https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-news/fs-08-25.pdf
I would imagine you could easily justify $50k-$75k as your salary, but you’d have to put the time in to calculate it.
If you were to do this based on $54k a month, you are saving about $90k a year on your taxes. The less you pay yourself a w2 the more you save.
If you set up like this, which is the way you will save the most on your taxes, then the amount you can contribute to your retirement account, ie solo 401k for you in this situation is approximately 50% of your w2 income because how much you can contribute is tied to your salary. For a $75,000 salary that max you can contribute is $38,250. Sure feel free to put that into your Solo 401k.
But that should be an after thought to saving the 15% self employment tax.
By putting money into a 401k it is not tax free only tax deferred, this means you will pay taxes on it eventually. If you think you may make more in retirement than you are now it makes this deal way less sweet. I know I’m planing on making more then.
Also, hiring a spouse is again a terrible idea here, because you are going to then pay 15% self employment tax between the two of you. 7.5% each.
Sure if you are an LLC and didn’t take your s-corp election then this makes sense. But if you did, hiring your spouse will be an extra 15% tax on his/her salary, since all of your profits won’t have that 15% tax on them.
And for what reason.. so you can put it into a tax deferred account you will need to pay taxes on eventually.
The very first thing you do when you start to make real profit is to take an s-corp election. There isn’t even an argument to this.
Telling the poster to do anything beyond taking a s-corp election first is doing him a huge disservice and costing him around $90k a year.
Are you a solo owner? You need to take an s-corp election and you do not need to pay yourself that type of salary. At most you should pay yourself $54,000 a year.
The reason is money that goes through an s-corp you don’t pay self employment taxes on. Salary you do. That is 15%.
You wouldn’t need to pay yourself more than $54,000 without the government getting upset.
Right now, based on $54,000 a month you are losing about $90,000 a year not being structured like this.
The rest of the money, you can just transfer to your personal account and do whatever you want with. It is all your money as a solo owner, so if you want it just send it to yourself.
I’ve been through this exact situation before and I’m currently a tax strategist and help people with this type of stuff everyday.
When we had all that extra money, I moved to Asepn Colorado and had a bunch of fun skiing and living it up.
You can do whatever you want with the money, but please get your s-corp election set and stop paying yourself $14k a month.
If you want help reach out. I think my email is still in my profile.
Between an S-Corp structure and having an i401k... definitely awesome for taxes. Nothing really competes for contractors.
I'd take the advice here of what dictates a "reasonable salary" with grain of salt however. $54k is not some magic cut off. Income only a factor in calculating it.
I have a (maybe dumb) question about salary: wouldn't "officially" paying myself $54k / year result in my not being able to rent or buy real estate where there are income requirements?
Could be. My experience (in multiple cases) was that they accepted bank deposit slips and Quickbooks invoice records, though.
It also has implications for unemployment insurance and SS calculations.
Your social security payout will be lower if you spent 20 years earning $50,000 than if you spent 20 years earning $100,000. Unemployment checks (which you can receive even if you're a self-owned s-corp) will be smaller too.
The long-term benefit assumes you weren't an idiot with the extra income. Even if it's post-tax, tucking the extra $$ away in your favorite safe investment vehicle will probably leave you better off over 20 years than whatever extra Social Security you would've made when you hit 65.
Yes that can definitely happen so you'll need to be careful about that. For some areas or houses, you can show your bank statements rather than income, but not all places accept those.
There are businesses dedicated to assisting S-corp owners in determining reasonable compensation. While $54,000 is not a ridiculously low number, there is no "magic number" that makes the IRS happy. Remember, you are working for the corporation. The requirement is for a reasonable salary, based on the work performed and local market conditions. What would it cost to hire someone else to do the same work?
So still an LLC, but it is taxed like an S-Corp when this election is made. This allows an owner working in the business to be an employee and take a reasonable salary. W2 income is subject to FICA taxes, but all the other profits in the business pass through to the owner as usual for an LLC, but aren't subject self employment tax or FICA. You still pay regular income tax though. This is all at a federal level.
It's not tax free, as you're still paying the income tax on it, but if you (as the owner) get it as distribution instead of salary, then you're not paying payroll taxes on it, which is what was suggested in the parent comment. You'll have to make sure you're paid "reasonable compensation" (https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-news/fs-08-25.pdf).
Other replies said it, but to put it more clearly:
Is "any money the company makes past $54,000 annually is tax free?" Not even close!
You have to pay income tax (federal, possibly state) on _all_ the money you make. That's very important. Like, "at best a fine, at worst jail time" important.
I was a solo S-Corp for three years and had to learn all this stuff. Here's a breakdown:
Payroll taxes (federal) are taken only out of your salary. If you work for a business as a W2 employee--hourly or exempt--you pay half your payroll taxes, and the business pays half your payroll taxes. The 15% total in payroll taxes (SS, Medicare, FICA) is 7.5% paid by you, and 7.5% paid by the business on top of the salary they are paying you.
So, for example, if your salary is $50,000 per year, you will have $3,750 deducted from your paycheck for payroll taxes and your employer is responsible for an additional $3,750 on top of that. Disregarding income tax, taking a $50,000 salary means getting paid $46,250. But to pay you that $46,250, it costs the business $53,750.
All well and good if you and the business are different people. It wasn't your money to begin with. But if you are the employer and the employee, which is the case for solo S-Corp structures like this, then the whole 15% is coming out of your pocket.
Let's say your business earns $120,000 a year and you decide to pay yourself a $100,000 salary. That costs $107,500 (gross) and you keep $92,500 (net). If you decided to pay yourself a $54,000 salary instead, that costs $58,050 and you keep $49,950. Your profit is ($120,000 - the cost of your salary) and your total earnings are net salary + profit.
In the first case, (120,000 - 107,500) + 92,500 = $105,000. Congrats, you made $105,000! That's a lot of money. Now you pay income taxes on it.
In the second case, (120,000 - 58,050) + 49,950 = $111,900. Congrats, you made $111,900!
Thus, you took home $6,900 more this year because you paid yourself a lower salary, all due to payroll taxes.
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What's the catch? Why not pay yourself $1 a year and increase your stacks?
The IRS has a rule for S-Corporation employees that says they must be paid a "reasonable salary" (https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-news/fs-08-25.pdf). Ultimately they get to decide if you are taking as a payroll-taxable salary is "reasonable".
The way I had it explained to me is that I would need to be able to testify before a judge that whatever salary I picked is "reasonable" (not necessarily market rate) for a person with my skills in my location. $1 a year isn't even minimum wage, so that's out. Minimum wage is out because I can't argue with a straight face that the local minimum wage is a "reasonable salary" for a software developer. So it's up to each individual S-Corp owner to pick a number that they could argue is a "reasonable salary". In this case, $54,000 is probably safe because the IRS has bigger fish to fry.
As in all matters of legal and financial decision making: talk to your lawyer, talk to your accountant, don't talk to cops.
I’m trying to find a job right now and it isn’t going well. I have my PhD in computer science and I’ve run my own bootstraped company before and took it to over a million in profit for a couple years. I want to find a job as a engineering manager or something similar, but the feedback I’m getting is I don’t have enough corporate experience for that type of job, because I’ve just been doing my own thing for so long. I could find a job as a programmer, but I really don’t want to. After running my own company, I just like management better. And I know I wouldn’t enjoy programming for someone else for 8 hours a day.
So, I’m currently starting a tech business, but it is just going to take a bit to get started and it may not work. So in the mean time, I’m going to work on starting a plumbing company. I live in an affluent community and I think I can get the plumbing business to $400k-$500 a year, with just myself and a van. I’m going to just hire a plumber to take calls with me until I get comfortable going on calls on my own. I apprenticed this fall with a plumber; I like the work way more than programming and got an idea of how much I could expect to make. Which is way more than I could make programming for someone.
Thinking back on it, as my PhD was finishing up, I was having trouble finding a job, which was one of the things that pushed me to start my own thing anyway.
So I guess not being able to find a job and starting my own thing is something I have done a few times now. It is way more motivating to start something when you have no other good choice.
What a curious career! Trades in general, and plumbing in particular, seem pretty lucrative, particularly where I am (Sydney - we've had a crazy property and construction boom). And the path to small business ownership is fairly well trodden.
I'd say most 'entrepreneurs' are probably in trades, we just don't just that word for some reason.
The existent low competition is mind boggling but the career change is not that easy for people coming from intelectual challenging careers. It feels like a 'downgrade'. For the typical HNer selling is the only challenge there.
It's funny it feels like a 'downgrade' as it is more lucrative. It is also really fun. You feel like a superhero when you show up at peoples house and rescue them from their problem (which if you are a plumber is often serious). I also noticed that we did a fair bit of almost counseling when we showed up at peoples houses, which also felt great. It got me out of the house and meeting people. To me it seems like a good noble career.
And let's not forget what Einstein said.. "If I would be a young man again and had to decide how to make my living, I would not try to become a scientist or scholar or teacher. I would rather choose to be a plumber or a peddler in the hope to find that modest degree of independence still available under present circumstances."
BTW, Ryan Conway @ Digital Tradesman might be able to help out with a website for your new Plumbing Venture. Good guy, worth talking to > https://digitaltradesman.net/
I've been incredibly tempted to do an electricians apprenticeship, so it's cool to hear someone from an academic background that's actually done something similar and gone into a trade. My study was Electrical and Electronic Engineering so I imagine the career swap would be trivial, but it's a large time investment.
How did you find the time to do it? To become a licensed electrician in the UK apparently takes about 4 years, and I'd earn pittance until qualifying so that's the only thing stopping me currently. I assume plumber would be as similarly stringent.
I had a roommate who had both and EE degree and was a licensed electrician. He could get a high paying job with just a phone interview. All the more amazing because he was a felon who served five years for drug smuggling and would reveal that in the interview right off the bat.
In the US you can do "plumbing service" without a license. So that is any repair basically. You just can't do installation, so no new construction. However, there is plenty of business in service and I like the work better than installations.
Hey! It sounds like both your consulting and budding start-up are very interesting. I'm looking to get into consulting. Python and SQL and my specialties.
If you want to cut back on your consulting perhaps I can try to take some of the work off of you. I could work under you at half your price $140/h, so you could spend more time on your start-up and still be making money from your consulting and keep your clients. It makes sense for me as it would be a quick way for me to get into consulting and it seems like you already have the workflow, etc down.
Or perhaps you would want to work with someone on your startup. I have had a few successful start-ups over the years.
You can check my LinkedIn and my email is in my HN profile. Get in touch if you are interested!
