In Bidness!

Well, Stuff Enterprises, LLC, is off and running, and earning a buck. It's not any time soon on the Forbes 100 list, but I'm paying the rent...so far. I don't know that there is a businessperson anywhere who can truly say he's done it all himself, because when it comes to all the crap involved in setting up a business legally, a businessperson would just give up and hold a cup on a street corner for a daily meal.

My savior has been Chris, the accountant-cum-HR-cum-taxes whiz at my former employer. She has helped me cross the I's and dot the T's and had me sign the forms that the state and Fed need in order to properly get their claws on my earnings.

It was on her advice that I shifted my personal status from independent contractor to employee. Of Stuff Enterprises, LLC. The company I own. So, yes, I am the owner and president of the company. And I am the sole employee of the company! The reason behind this setup is to protect myself from any potential lawsuits that may arise as a result of my operation of the taxi. Should that happen, the company is the legal target, and any damages or seizure of assets is exacted upon the company, and not me, personally. As an independent contractor leasing the taxi from my company, I would still be individually liable in the event of any legal action. So I exercised my Employer Identification Number and became a job creator! Though, admittedly, the hiring process involved an unfair amount of favoritism....

As a tax deadline loomed in October, Chris called me in to finalize and sign some paperwork. And she said to bring my checkbook...which sounded ominous.

I arrived, and she explained a few things, and gave me some forms to sign, among them an IRS form authorizing the service to withdraw a fixed amount monthly as payroll tax, based on a salary that I'm paying myself.

I'M PAYING MYSELF A SALARY!

I asked her if this IRS fixed amount was the amount for which I needed to write the check, and she said that it was not, and that it was going to be withdrawn electronically from my business checking account.

She also advised me to consider changing my company from a Limited Liability Company to an S Corporation — which I did not know I was eligible to do — in an effort to save a little on taxes annually. We're going to wait on that decision until the new year.

Then she presented me with another form, and pointed to the amount on that sheet as the amount I needed to write on the check — an amount which, for this month, anyway, was anything but ominous.

"This form is the Unemployment Insurance form. As an employer, you have to provide this for your employees. As an employer, should you close the doors on Stuff Enterprises and go out of business, as an employee you can collect unemployment."

The spoon in her coffee cup rattled when my chin hit the desk. In the freaky world of entrepreneurial endeavor, I am no longer unemployed. And while I am self-employed, I am no longer self-employed.

My next question for Chris is to wonder if Stuff Enterprises, LLC, can have a summer work slowdown and subsequent layoff for, say, a month or two....

I also want to remove the name "Stuff Enterprises" from the taxi business, as I also operate — in principle, anyway — a video production company. I want Stuff Enterprises to be the parent company of the others, so I need a new name for the taxi operation. My favorite, because it actually sounds like my family name — Gasbarro — is "Casbah Row Transport Company," though I fear it may mislead one to think I'm Algerian.

Of course, I could call it "Casbah Row Airport Passengery," and go by "CRAP" for short.

OR, I could take suggestions. From you. Serious ideas accepted, too!

November's Urge ~ November Surge?

This author has been very extremely remiss with this blog, and with reading others' blogs. However, judging by the number of blogs in my "Better Blogs Than Mine" that have gone dark, I am not alone in this.

I can blame any number of factors in my life right now for the word blight, but they all come back to me, eventually. The taxi job, of course, takes up a lot of my time. Where I had originally thought that I could use all of the down time in the car for writing, I soon realized that working nights — and the down time that came with it — translated to slow financial death: I wasn't making any money. So I switched to days and began to enjoy the busyness that shift brings... and my writing suffered.

I also leapt back into theatre — with a vengeance, to my exhaustion — and every last moment of potentially free time was taken up.

This past summer I purchased my own taxi with the hopes that lightening my burden of the steep weekly lease payment would also free up some of my time. Of course, I have been in hiatus from theatre work since the spring due to the impending move in the fall, so that free time was fleeting at best. But ownership of my taxi, in conjunction with my move into a lower monthly rent, has made it possible for me to function entirely without leaning on my retirement IRA for supplemental cash, as I had been doing since shortly after I lost my job in 2009...IF I work the hours of an indentured servant.

I always lament at how far behind the curve I am with movies, so I have renewed my slog through my Netflix queue, another activity that sucks my time away from writing.

And I will do no more than mention "Words With Friends."

My photo blog even died a lonely death. I would link to it, but what's the point? It hasn't seen a contribution since July, and nothing short of a monumental effort (for which I have no time, surprise, surprise!) can resuscitate it.

So I can do nothing more than promise to try (how's that for evasive?) to write more in future. Perhaps there will be a real, serious New Year's resolution involved. The shame of it is that I call myself a writer, yet every opportunity I have to write I have filled with other activities. And sorry, Tony, the discovery during "Words With Friends" that "BICE" is actually a word does not count as writing.