Cash Grab

by Benchmark Ledger Solutions

Entrepreneurship Non-Profit

Season 2

How Starting a Business Affects Your Personal Credit Score

In this episode, we talk about the real impact of business credit inquiries, guarantees, and debt on your personal credit profile.

Separating Personal and Business Finances: Why It Protects You Personally

In this episode, we talk about why separating your personal and business expenses is important, and how the legal protections work. The personal, financial, and legal reasons to keep these completely separate go beyond just good bookkeeping.

Tool Spotlight: Betterment — Automated Personal Investing for Busy Owners

In this episode, we talk about how this robo-advisor helps business owners invest consistently without having to think about it daily.

Retirement Accounts for the Self-Employed: SEP-IRA vs. Solo 401(k)

If you had a 401k at your last job, you probably just... had it. HR set it up, you picked a contribution percentage, and the money went in automatically. As a business owner, nobody sets it up for you. Which means a lot of business owners just don't have one. And they're missing out on some of the most powerful tax advantages available to them. Today we're fixing that.

Self-Employment Tax — The Bill Nobody Warned You About

There's a tax that a lot of new business owners don't find out about until they owe it. It's called self-employment tax, and when you first see the number, it feels like a punch in the stomach. Here's what it is, why it exists, and more importantly, how to plan for it so it never surprises you.

Tool Spotlight: Keeper Tax — Finding Deductions You're Missing

Here's a real number: the average self-employed person misses over $1,000 in tax deductions every year. Not because they're doing anything wrong, just because tracking every deductible expense throughout the year is genuinely hard. There's an app that tries to fix that. Let's talk about Keeper Tax.

The Home Office Deduction: What Counts and What Doesn't

If you work from home (even part of the time) there's a good chance there's a tax deduction available to you that you're not taking. The home office deduction makes a lot of people nervous. There's this myth that it's a red flag for audits, or that the rules are too complicated to bother with. Neither of those things is really true. So let's clear it up.

Quarterly Estimated Taxes — What They Are and How to Not Get Blindsided

Let me paint you a picture. It's April 14th. You've had a decent year. You sit down with your accountant, and she tells you that you owe $8,400 in taxes. You don't have $8,400 sitting around. Because nobody told you that as a self-employed person, you're supposed to be paying taxes four times a year. You were just... waiting until April like you always did. That scenario plays out more than you'd think. Today we're making sure it doesn't happen to you.

Tool Spotlight: Covered California / Healthcare.gov Walkthrough

Healthcare.gov is one of those websites that's gotten a lot better over the years, but can still feel like a maze the first time you're in there without an HR department guiding you. Today I'm going to walk you through it step by step, so when open enrollment comes (or if you're newly self-employed right now) you know exactly what you're doing.

Disability Insurance: The Coverage New Business Owners Almost Always Skip

Quick question. If you couldn't work for three months because of an injury or illness, what would happen to your personal finances? For most business owners, the honest answer is: it would be bad. Really bad. And yet disability insurance is probably the most skipped coverage among self-employed people. Today we're going to talk about why that's a problem and what to do about it.

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