Have an LLC

dsschnau

Well if nothing else I feel a bit better having an llc sitting around doing nothing.

kingkongjaffa

whats the uk equiv?

monster_truck

Why does everything need to make money so bad, this is terrible advice

BugsJustFindMe

> "An LLC will help you force a separation of personal and work finances" No it won't. > "it’ll help you accept payments" No it won't. > "or sign up for a bank account" No it won't. An LLC doesn't make those things any easier than they already are (very easy) as a sole proprietor. An LLC only does the liability thing. And that's fine. Just don't make other things up. You don't need to.

charcircuit

>Cost-wise it’s maybe $500 a year, all in (unless you have the pleasure of living in California, in which case you have to add their inane $800 on top). But that’s pretty reasonable considering the optionality it gives you to just… build shit these days. You don't need an LLC to build things and sell things. And you also get the downsides of needing to stay at an office to be able to be served or having to have your active home address be publicly viewable.

OutOfHere

A question is: where do you register one? Should it be Caymans or Panama or South Dakota or Texas or Delaware or your home state? Also, what type of LLC should it be?

_Bruno42

LLCs are great, but you should be aware that single-member LLCs may offer less liability protection than you expect, and in some circumstances it can be easier to pierce the corporate veil.

thatslast

As someone living in Taiwan, can I set up an LLC and get all the benefits of it? I now have a Singapore entity that helps me out for getting a Stripe account mainly.

theptip

For all these things I think just having an EIN is simpler. You don’t even need that to start; you set up Capital One (for example) business accounts using your SSN. The EIN is just to avoid putting your personal SSN on invoices. LLC matters if you think you’ll have liability risks.

cmrx64

hello from an old TotalSpore-head :)

anon291

I agree that if you're engaging in the tech business you should have an umbrella llc. I have been asked multiple times to do projects for people and it's always easier to invoice as an llc with everything already set up. However most software engineers don't engage in the tech business at all outside of regular employment. It's not useful for them

zrail

I feel like a lot of people (not holman) are looking for permission, as if having an LLC is a marker that says "I am a serious business doing serious business things." You don't need permission. You can just do things. A formal business structure is good (but not required!) if you have employees and/or business partners, or if your attorney tells you you need one. IME as a solo entrepreneur an LLC (or two, in my case) just invited more paperwork into my life. You know what actually functionally limits liability as a solo business? Good contracts backed up with business insurance.

skyberrys

There are all sorts of circumstances you will find that having and LLC is a chance to go through the easier/faster door. The whole article starts off with a painful javajoke and the punchline is sometimes you need to go really fast. That's what already having an LLC handy for helps with. Recent personal discovery about an LLC, useful for gaining PDK access to proprietary fabs, so I can finally try touching lower process nodes again that are not open source, despite being out of university and not having a job that gives me the PDK access.