Why I’ve been resistant to the idea, I can’t say, but I think it has to do with a perceived difficulty dealing with paperwork, accountants, and government officials. Regardless, it’s becoming more obvious every year that I need to separate a lot of the stuff I do online as a hobby financially because it’s making too much money.
Over the weekend, we dropped off our paperwork do begin our tax preparation process. Our tax preparer says that it’s a good problem to have, but it’s generating this mini-cascade of other problems because I’m not operating the “business” I am being taxed for like a business.
On Saturday, we took Abby to an event at a book store, run by a book author and her college-aged daughter, wherein the group of girls imagined what it would be like to run a business and participated in a workshop with individual and shared group topics. I need to look into this for myself in terms of a casual class for adults. Unlike most people who set out to have businesses, though, the making money from what I’m doing is incidental - practically no effort on my part. I write here, I make money. And I make enough money to be taxed
Apparently it takes the IRS and/or the companies paying you three years to notice this, so I’ve been making money for a while, just not in a way that they were taxing me for it. Anyway, as a result of them now being interested in this income, I have to do a bunch of other stuff to keep from having to pay crazy taxes. The past couple of years, I’ve been more involved in this, just because we’ve been having our taxes done instead of doing them ourselves. It’s kind of a pain to do when you haven’t been thinking to do it that way all year. Altogether, the idea of running what is essentially a business like a business is starting to sound like a better idea than not.
I need to look into some classes. Maybe one of the regional night school programs has a crash course I can try out. All of the books I have on the topic aren’t full of practical advice as much as book knowledge. It’s an oddly subtle distinction. But hopefully a good class can sort me out.
