Month: October 2017

I had decided (as my boss) that I was going to only work half the day on Friday so that I could take a trip to see my parents this weekend. When Friday came, I had to tell myself that I could not take a half day off after all because of some unexpected work that came up. That kind of sucked, but was necessary.

Other than tonight, I was able to avoid any work this weekend which felt good, but this week I hope is extra busy. Extra busy means we are making progress, so here’s to a busy week!

I was talking to my dad this weekend about my new company. He was a carpenter that worked for himself for many years, so I asked him how people knew to hire him? To a certain degree his situation is much different than mine, but there were similarities. He had to do subcontracting at first which I’m doing quite a bit of, but on the other hand, all of the clients, people, and prospects he installed carpet for was local and his customer base was local. Mine could be anywhere.

My weakness is marketing and sales. My strengths are in software development as an engineer and I can make ideas and requirements come alive, but I need to communicate that to the world. I need to develop my my brand and while I have a little time to do that, I don’t want to let it get away from me. So I would expect in the upcoming weeks that I’m going to announce my business site (www.ioreadygo.com) and I think it will be good and I’m always looking for advice from anyone that would offer it to me.

Alright then, enough talking, time to start week 3!

As a disclaimer, I’m not an accountant, and I’m merely talking about my understanding of tax law. I’m subjecting this to the entire world to tell me if I’m wrong or right about it. Do your own research or talk to a CPA for your situation.

I’m in the process of projecting my company’s earnings for 2018. Just like bigger corporations do, I am setting a target and going to do my best to hit that target.

Then I get to projecting my personal net income after taxes. Wow taxes are complicated. I spend a significant amount of time on Sunday going through tax law, creating a spreadsheet so I could project what my income looks like. I also crunched the number of what “Trump Tax” would look like. The numbers are quite surprising.

Starting at ~45K it looks as if federal taxes are going to be more for a married couple with 2 kids. So far Trump Tax has boasted double standard deductions but what it doesn’t boast is that it gets rid of personal exemptions.

Consider the following math for a married couple with two kids.
Standard deductions:
2018 projected: $13,000
Trump projected: $24,000

Exemptions:
2018 projected: 16,600 ($4,150 * 4)
Trump projected: 0

Lets do the math:
2018: 13000 + 16600 = 29600
Trump: 24000 + 0    = 24000

Plus in certain states Trump tax makes it so that you can’t deduct local taxes from your federal tax bill. One redeeming factor is that child credit is subject to change, but it would have to go up quite a bit to make up for that difference.

All that said, projecting is kind of fun is a sick way. Planning for how much I’ll owe the government or how long I could survive without work seems to be very necessary.

As I sat with my family tonight, I thought about some of the factors that went into my decision to start my own business. I’ve always heard that only people that are single or folks that have two working parents in a family are the only ones that should risk starting their own business.

I guess I didn’t listen to that. Now granted for my situation, my acceptable risk threshold was much lower than a single person. I had to consider things like the cost of individual insurance vs group policies, or questions like how long could I survive with no work?

Also, I know those kind of thoughts never go away as an entrepreneur. They may evolve based on the degree of success, but we are always trying to play the game many moves ahead. I’ll have to accept there has to be a balance. Why work if I can’t enjoy life and family along the way.

To give some peek into my first week as an entrepreneur: Priorities have changed, distractions are happening, and I’m more excited than ever about it. I’m pretty sure I got COBRA setup for the rest of this year and still working on long term disability and life insurance. Soon, I’m going to be working on rolling over my 401K into a self directed IRA and preparing for open enrollment for health insurance.

Surprisingly I’m pretty calm about it all. I feel like I’m partnering with the right people and I’m handling everything right in motion; that or my new really nice office chair is just extra comfortable and I really should be freaking out.

Anyways, good week, if all the weeks were like this one, I’ll take it!

Today was my first day at work as a business owner. It felt incredible. I was getting even more pumped as the day went on about what I was doing. I felt confidence, more relaxed, and ideas started to enrich my mind. That feeling is very addicting.

I know bad days are inevitable, but I hope that I can remember days like this during those times to get me through them. Perhaps even use days like to day to flip a bad day into a opportunity. Who knows? That’s why I’m blogging I guess.

This is me before leaving on my first day:

When I got home, I also saw that my COBRA papers had came in the mail. While this is the more boring part of leaving the regular world of employment, it’s absolutely a necessary one.

COBRA is basically is a law introduced in 1985 that lets you keep your Heath insurance (dental and eye as well) for a period of time after your graceful termination from an employer. We’ve elected to use COBRA for at least the rest of the year. The process seems streamline with links to elect on the internet, so I’m hopeful I won’t run into any problems here, after all, health insurance is the law now. 🙂

This is it. The night before I start my adventures (full time) as an entrepreneur. So much uncertainty, but so much excitement.

I have my morning even planned out pre-work.

1. Get up at my usual time (7 am)
2. Exercise
3. Cleanup/Get Ready
4. Go into Springfield to meet up with team by 9am

Normally I’m going to be working from home, but we are getting together this week to get all of our ducks in a row (I miss Duck Creek already). It will feel odd, but change always had a good and bad part to it. I’m going to try to embrace the good part.

I hope to blog about my different entrepreneurial experiences. Everything from taxes, insurance, and other business benefits to how I deal with it in my personal life and how I manage my work life balance. All of this is unknown to me at this point so I’ll just blog as a learn.