I am Self Employed with Variable Income. Help me Save and Invest

Welcome back to ADHD Money Talk, the show that helps dynamic but distracted ADHD brains take back control over their money and their future. Welcome to the show. Okay, today we are going to do a listener question because a listener has kindly and generously given me a question to answer, and so I'm going to do that as a reminder. If you remember, way back in the day, when I was doing this podcast like every week and I was trying to just be a boss about it I always asked they almost pleaded for listener questions. I would love to have more of them, because when you give me a question, I get a little dopamine shot and I'm like, ooh, someone's asking me a question, I'm going to answer it on the podcast. What a great idea. I'm going to make this person happy because they're going to get a question answered and their name will be mentioned just their first name, because that's important and they're going to get a thorough answer and, over explanation, a 30 minute long rampage on their question, and that's fun for me and probably for you too. I mean, if I asked a question to be on a podcast, that it would get on the podcast, like literally within like two or three weeks. I would ask questions, and this is your opportunity to do that, because I don't get a lot. I mean, my podcast is small, it's not tiny, it's not huge, it's niche. This is niche, this is ADHD, which is niche in and of itself a big niche. But then we go into a smaller niche, subsection of that niche, into the one area where almost everyone avoids talking about and I'm talking about it. No other ADHD podcast wants to talk about this, because there are episodes that even do talk about it are probably the worst performing episodes, because no one wants to even think about it. No one even want. Everyone is in avoidance. Don't think about it, ignore it. It doesn't exist, my future doesn't exist, nothing exists, money doesn't exist. I'm good, oh my gosh, I'm screwed, just kidding, whatever. So that's why my podcast is small, not huge, so I don't get a lot of questions. I want them and you want them, so ask them, I mean, and we will answer them. I will answer them. One other thing to know is that a few episodes ago I talked about an app called Monarch and in that episode I gave you a discount code to use to get a discount on Monarch for a year. That discount code no longer exists. It got turned off pretty quick because the public sharing of that created some issues with people not being great people. I don't know, maybe we were things with discount codes that people don't like, so Monarch had to turn that one off. But I have a new one that I'm not going to share out loud, but if you were to Instagram message me or email me or ask me for it through the podcast, website, answer or question form, whatever, then I will be glad to share it with you, and that code is going to be good until the end of the year. So if you want to give Monarch a shot, I highly recommend it. It is a game changer for me and for my clients. So let me know. All right. So the question we have today is from a lovely I can only presume a lovely woman, young woman, I presume the most my listeners are young. Her name is Elle. She gave me a question, so I admire her for that. Her question is I am a self-employed bracket therapist, because I'm assuming she's a therapist because the way that this reads. So I am a self-employed therapist and also a 1099 at a group practice. How much and how do I save and invest based on the ongoing fluid income flow. What a great question, and I have decided to answer this within a lens of therapists, just because I have a lot of clients who are therapists and this reads like that. So I hope that this does answer your question. First thing that I would want you to be doing is to make sure that you have your business expenses separated from your personal expenses, and you can do this simply by opening up a business bank account and a business savings account, if you wish as well, because this way you can have a very clean sort of understanding of what is it cost to run your business. And in my mind, your business is your self-employment, but also your 1099 as a contractor to me is all within your business. That is, your business is being a therapist. You have your own clients. You also work with clients that are technically the clients of, I guess, another company, but the whole thing is your business, because all that revenue would come to your business bank account. That is your business. That's important. So the first thing for sure is open a business bank account if you don't already. Make sure you keep your business expenses separate from that, and that will also just help simply with simplifying your tax reporting, simplifying your profitability, simplifying your ability to understand your profitability. It can make you appear more professional. If you're a sole proprietorship, you don't have a ton of personal liability protection, but it still will help you with legal protection. Having it separated It'll just help. Our ADHD brains want clear, clean lines and structure, so that'll definitely help. Using accounting software would help and a system for just tracking receipts and invoices, and all of that will be very useful for you. That is the first thing, and regarding the structure, sole proprietorship is fine. There's also the option of going with an LLC, which you could set that up. That provides some legal protection between you and your personal assets and business sort of assets and debts. So LLC can be a very good way just to have that protection for you. Then, of course, there are some states where you can't have an LLC, where you might have to be a professional corporation or there's some nuance there. But thinking about your business structure is important. And so now that you've got your business account, you've got your personal accounts, you can now track your expenses and you can start setting budgets for your expenses on both the personal side and the business side. You could simply use a Monarch, which I've talked about before, to track both, or you could use accounting software as well. Some of my clients will use Monarch to offer the day-to-day tracking of the business expenses, but then they'll just sort of give that over to their accountant later who will sort of do the bookkeeping or the recordkeeping for their accounting software. So there's lots of different ways to skin the cat. But yeah, it's important to be budgeting and understanding your expenses, because then, once you've got an idea of this is my fixed expenses for my business, these are my fixed expenses for personal you can then at least know that this is what I need to cover me to keep operating. And then you can also throw in budgets for food, all the variable expenses, and then you can draw a line there and say, ok, above that, this is money that could be invested or saved. Also, taxes so as 1099 worker and being self-employed, you will need to be paying self-employment taxes. So you'll want to be setting aside anywhere between 25% 35% of your income for taxes, and of course this percentage will vary depending on your specific situation. But you need to make sure that you are taking care of that, because we do not want a big tax bill come tax time, you should also definitely be considering paying quarterly taxes, so setting it aside but then paying quarterly taxes just to help you avoid any potential penalties. And going back to the expenses again, you know tracking and taking advantage of industry specific tax deductions like office supplies, equipment, professional development expenses. You want to be tracking all of that separate too, so that way you can just know how much you're able to deduct to lower your tax bill. And then again, going back I'm just thinking now about the expenses and income you really want to think through sort of what are the levers? That kind of create your level of income any given month, like what's it based on? It's based on the number of clients. You see, you know your insurance reimbursements, the structure of the group practice, you know what is your compensation percentage, and understanding these variables and potentially mapping it out on a spreadsheet or something just gives you that ability to sort of forecast. So then as the month goes on, you can kind of say, okay, this is how much I'm expecting, and that way you can stay more on top of things. Going back to the business sort of account side of things, having a business savings account could be good, because then you could also you know, before you really just invest into investments you could first have like a business emergency fund in case times get lean, or maybe it's for future investments into your business. That's really important. Maybe you want to just go full solo and not do the 1099 work, and maybe you're going to take a little temporary hit on the income side, but you want to have some emergencies there. So it's really important to have that as well. So then, big picture, just like I recommend with personal savings and stuff, having a way to sort of have income once your income fills up your fixed and variable expense needs, you then should have an understanding of okay, the rest of the money that comes in gets directed into maybe another account, or maybe just straight into an investment account, whatever makes sense for you at the time. You know, given your place, having that money just get directed to the goal, which is it sounds like to you it's investing, saving and investing. So once your fixed and variable expenses are taken care of, you can have the rest of the money flow into a different account or wherever it needs to go. You can set rules for this in accounts, whether it be like mental rules or written rules, or you just have like an understanding of this month. When my account hits this and you know the rest of it I can just send to here. Or you can use a program that's really cool and that's out, called sequenceio, which helps kind of automate smart automate kind of the movement of money. So there's ways to get it, but basically knowing over what threshold is money kind of like free money to put towards goals In terms of investing and how and you know where you should invest. On the personal side, you've got options you can do depending on your level of income. You could either straight up contribute to a Roth IRA or you could do a back to a Roth IRA contribution every single year, or you could potentially do just a regular taxable brokerage account. And then on the business side, you have the option of setting up a SEP IRA, which is self employment pension IRA. So that's basically a self employment IRA where you can contribute a lot more than you could in a traditional IRA on the personal side. So for the SEP IRA you can contribute 25% of your income or 66,000, whichever is lesser. So if you get so, if 25% of your income is 70,000, then you can put in 66,000. If 25% of your income is 10,000, then you can put in 10,000 to SEP IRA and those contributions will reduce your taxable income dollar for dollar, because it's a pre tax savings vehicle. So the money that you put in will not be taxed until you take it out. You may even be able to do, depending on the provider, a Roth set by RA, in which case you will not reduce your taxable income, but you'll be putting money in. After tax, that money will grow tax-free and you'll take it out tax-free. Ultimately, that can make a lot of sense if you're in a lower tax bracket than you expect to be in the future. That can make sense because that way you're paying the tax now but you're in a lower tax rate, so you're paying overall less tax than later on, when you're in a really high tax rate because you're making so much money. You can switch to a regular set and reduce your taxes Today by not paying at the high tax rate and then, when you're in a lower tax rate maybe in a few years, while you start to retire you can take out money and pay from the regular set by RA at a lower tax rate. So, tax planning as an aside, the goal is to minimize your tax rate, your lifetime tax rate. What is your average tax rate over your life? Let's minimize that. Sometimes that means you're deciding to pay taxes today to pay less taxes tomorrow. I would say the easiest way, honestly, the easiest way to get all this going is to work with someone. I'm not trying to pitch my business or anything, but this is a lot you can do as a self-employed person and a 1099 worker, and I would as someone who's a financial planner who has clients, like you. The point is that I want you focused on getting clients and growing your business and saving for your business and reinvesting in your business and helping you grow that, helping you have more money so that I can help you manage it. Because you having to deal with all of this with ADHD especially if you have ADHD, because this is my show it gets to be a lot and overwhelming and, as we all know, information overload will just stop, we'll just procrastinate, we just will never do it and when we do do it, it'll be out of a position of complete weakness, meaning we've waited so long that now it's urgent because we're screwed if we don't. So the earlier that you work with someone, the better, or just get on it and just figure out a way to do it and then just open these accounts and start all of this stuff. It's a lot, it's a lot of lot. But to recap, basically, what I'm trying to tell you is you have to be tracking your expenses. You need to know your fixed expenses, you need to understand your variable expenses, you need to know how much you're making over that which can go towards various goals, whether it's whether you set up a set by array, whether you you know, and ideally, what I would want you to probably do and this is not like advice, like this is this is just general information, because I know basically nothing about your situation besides what you've told me, which is a sentence question, which is great and I love it. But I just just want you know this is just ideas for you to think about, but before you do anything, I would really want you to be consulting with a professional and making sure you do all of your due diligence and make sure you really understand this stuff. So, to recap, you want to you know, understand your expenses, your fixed, your variable, what's beyond that you can send to goals every single month. You could, and I would consider potentially setting up like a automatic amount. That, like you know, is gravy. Like you know, you're making at least this much over. So it's set up an automatic transfer to your goal accounts, whatever you choose to be your goals. Then you know also what's left over at the end of that. Any money that you weren't expecting or any extra income just because you had a good month can go towards that as well. Make sure you have your business expenses and income coming into separate accounts from your personal. That's really important so you can understand exactly your fixed business expenses, exactly your fixed personal expenses. You can look at your personal sort of profitability. You can look at your business profitability. It's all related. Obviously you could have a business savings account, keep money in the business so that way you're not having to draw it out from your business and have to pay taxes on it. You can keep it in the business so you can reinvest in the business. And then I would definitely be considering saving, making sure you have a business emergency fund and making sure as well that you invest in your business, invest in yourself. I mean, I think someone in your position constantly be thinking about how can I improve, how can I get more skills? How can? What can I do to raise my fees? You know what can give me an edge? Because ultimately, more income is going to help you in a very dramatic way to make all of this possible and to offer all of this to work flawlessly. There's nothing quite like having income that goes well beyond your fixed and variable needs, because that way you could set stuff up and it runs automatically. If you're in a poverty mindset, if you're always spending what you have, then any rules and automation you set up just breaks, because you break it, because you're not, you're constantly leaving everything short. Oh, also, beyond the step IRA is also a solo 401k. Now, I think a set IRA is probably sufficient, but the solo 401k, once you get bigger, might be a good way to switch, or to start with a solo 401k, because as a solo 401k, which is for self-employed people as well, the only thing with solo 401k is you can only have a solo 401k if you have no employee. So if you ever get so big and you have your own practice and you're hiring a full-time employee, you can't, you can't all or contribute to your solo 401k. You can still have it and it can still grow, but you just can't contribute to it if you have employee. But I know this is so much information and I'm going into the weeds now and so it's fine. But just quickly, as a solo 401k, you can contribute both as the employer and as the employee, just like with a regular 401k at work. You contribute your employee contribution and then your employer can match as the employer contribution. You can do both, since you are both employee and employer with solo. Also, that 66,000 I mentioned earlier for the set is a 2023 number, so that's going to change in 2024. It's changing every year, so keep that in mind if you're listening to this. Well, into the future. So one last time, because I know reputation is good and I know saying it in different ways is good. If I were to give you a checklist, I would say open up business accounts, move all business expenses to business accounts, start accepting income into business accounts, and then I would start tracking expenses. And number two would be tracking expenses and understanding exactly how much you're fixed and variable expenses are for. Variable just understand what your patterns are and get an average, understand the line of what your fixed expenses are, the line of what your fixed plus variable typically are, and then that helps you understand what's extra From there. Number three would be to evaluate if you have enough emergency fund savings for your business. If you do not, I would have that be your first goal. If you do have enough, then I would be looking to opening up the solo or the SEP IRA and contributing to that. Number four would be dope so number so that would be I don't even know a number, I was on three, four, whatever. So the next step, five, I think, maybe, or four. This is this is why being ADHD and talking to people ADHD can get a little bit complicated sometimes, because it's a little bit of chaos. But anyways, the next step would be to determine what is the gravy amount that you can set and forget as a dollar amount each month to set account, whether it is the emergency fund or the investment fund, and then I think that would be a great start. Thank you so much for the question, elle, and for everybody else. I hope you got some value out of this. If you're an entrepreneur, if you're a business owner, if you're thinking about it. I hope this gave you some ideas, some inspiration, hopefully, and with that said, I am going to just end this podcast right now. See you later. I'm out of here. Until next time, take care.