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violetsystems · 3 years

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personal

I’ve been able to sleep until six the last few days. I’ve been on this miserable eight to four sleep schedule. I ordered a silent vortex coffee grinder specifically to be less annoying in this regard. Even if I could literally just grind the coffee the night before. I also bought a rug cleaner for the first time in my life. It’s amazing the things you don’t realize you need for a home let alone an office. Last night I received an email from LinkedIn asking me to weigh in on a conversation about higher education. The only public facing social networking site I really use actively I pay for. They bought a service called Linda.com years ago. It was probably the most important site to me for instructional videos. These days it is included on the platform so I spend a fair amount of time keeping my job skills plausible. I learned pretty hard the last six months that my professional network had all but evaporated. A hard thing to face when you worked with your friends for over twenty years. But people have to move on. I sometimes make decisions that seem smarter in retrospect. You could even mistake it for premonition but I just call it good judgement. I made the decision to start the process of becoming a LLC. It was pretty easy to do once you paid the four hundred dollars. There’s services out there online that will do the legal part for you. I chose VS consulting as the name which becomes real around mid December if the Secretary of State accepts it. They asked me to cut the ribbon virtually. I congratulated myself in silence but this is pretty much the first place I’ve shared the news with. My mom didn’t quite understand what I had done and my dad is an accountant. I haven’t told him yet either. I got the idea seeing some of the people who still work at my old job starting their own side businesses. Crazy to see people still employed having extra jobs in this economy. But for the most part I don’t really compare my experience to anyone’s anymore. So I just look forward. There are a lot of ways I generate income. Some of them aren’t very lucrative. I released another ep Monday. Three of my friends from across the world I never really talk to bought it immediately. It makes sense because my music is how they know me. So that’s how they keep up with me. From there, Bandcamp revenue share Friday passed with little or no fanfare. It still doesn’t change the fact I owe taxes on the income above a certain amount if I report it. We all know how the rich hate paying those taxes. And the whole world now knows that I work for a LLC on the premier professional social networking site. It’s a win win for me because I can still look for a job but I appear employed. It’s also a nice buffer in these times for your resume. In retrospect, every article I read says the end of December is a perfect time to start your own business. Mostly because January 1st allows you to start with a fresh balance sheet and good accounting. So if anything my New Year’s resolution is to be cleaner and more concise about everything. Even if the rest of society’s ethics and accountability gets muddier as COVID-19 and the election process drags on. The only things I really have to worry about this next year are documenting my spending, opening up a business checking account, and deducting business expenses. Sounds like a job to me.

There are tools you need for a job. I bought a year long subscription to Creative Cloud. I had it for free for years. I worked in a visual communications department for ten years. I saw the most amazing work every morning hung up outside my office. It inspired me to learn about print making and screen printing. I even owned Adobe stock at one point because I realized Microsoft Office wasn’t doing my resume much justice. I shudder to think how many jokes were cracked by the Workday staff over my Chanel submission. Truth is nobody called back for interviews at any of the places I applied. And this doesn’t really stop me from keeping my eyes out for a position anywhere. But if we are talking about generating income, I can do that all by myself. I can also hire people and deduct more business expenses if I felt that was an option. Which starts to get into the meat of why the job market and economy is so fucked up in America. A lot of people didn’t fall in line on a balance sheet when COVID-19 came crashing down last February. And when the fiscal year came time to start fresh, they thinned their liabilities. Companies are now thinking in quarters rather than years at this point. And small businesses like myself also have to think the same because I now owe the IRS money every three months. The accounting side of it doesn’t really bore me. I’ve done every IT role in the business pretty much over twenty years. I guess that’s why LinkedIn calls on me to offer an opinion. I’ve never had to be this hardcore about the finances. Another great reason why I spend so much time in spreadsheets aside from writing on the internet. It’s much easier to approach a professional consultant with twenty years of experience with an invoice than it is to tether them to your payroll with benefits. I’m always having to think six months ahead myself. This has an advantage to it insofar that I don’t often look back. You pay your taxes and you move on. There are many things I could do to generate income. I could make a zine and sell it quarterly on bandcamp along with shirts. I could post flyers around the neighborhood offering after christmas tech support. I could scour the net for opportunities to audit galvanized IT departments. I could do all this with more confidence if I could say I am employed. I could also hire someone to help me. But I could do none of this and deduct expenses without applying for a sole proprietorship. And truth be told I already have to claim this for the New York Stock Exchange. So if you had to put a label on what I do now it isn’t really that much different from any other business. The state’s richest men started as LLCs. They’re also the biggest pricks who pay the least taxes. Trickle down economics is a funny concept. Businesses offer jobs they deduct from their income therefore paying less to the pool. This would be fine for small income generating businesses. But Ken Griffin would say otherwise as he and other rich people benefit from this structure. They say the American Dream is owning your own business. So welcome to my personal nightmare. I hope you don’t mind me taking the itemized deductions after how I’ve been treated.

I don’t actually know how it’s going to work out. I just know I don’t want to appear unemployed while corporate America expects me to wink and make them more money. There are investments that have worked out for me as volatile as they might be. One Chinese company I invested in has made the CEO twelve times richer. I own four hundred and twenty shares of that company in a brokerage. My intent is to hold on to them for the long term possibly making someone richer at my own risk. I could short the entire next year to my heart’s content. My credit scores have gone through the roof. Nobody has had any answers for me on what to do. Nobody has coached me. I read. I think. I come up with solutions to my problems. And I put money in the right places. That doesn’t mean anything is a sure thing. Especially when my government finds it more advantageous to punish other countries while forgetting about it’s own people. I am absolutely in the dark about everything. Everything except running my own business in America. I already have income I have to report over the next three years due the CARES act. So that is income I will deduct. This is how it works here in America. You seize the means of production and you go to work. If it seems backward for me, you wouldn’t know the half. My life is so fucked up in terms of how hazy and confusing other people have made it. People invaded my life on pretenses that I can’t even begin to explain. And part of being a strong, responsible adult is engineering your way out of these problems. And for the most part, I’ve engineered myself into a fort that overlooks the CTA train. And a small portion of that fort can be written off as an office. Which in some ways if you do the math makes rent and utilities cheaper in the long run. I don’t make the rules. This is how America works. A LLC gets a tax id number. It allows you better options for retirement savings with a SEP IRA. You can apply for business accounts and waive taxes on business purchases. Even the family dollar around the corner has a sign in the window reminding me I can apply for tax free status. Maybe they’re mostly to blame for planting the idea in my head. I’m the one who made the call to apply. Nobody held my hand. You could also get audited by the IRS. And I’m sure the IRS would have to figure out how I got into this situation in the first place. Maybe they’d offer me a job. There’s other fantasies in my life I could imagine happening more than that waking nightmare. Like actually having money to retire. I could be travelling around the world cleaning up the mess mark to market accounting has left on big business. The scars on economies the rich have pock marked on the middle class. Or I could just keep generating income and be my own boss here in my kitchen. The one thing I do know is that is sexier to be confident enough to move ahead with your own plan slowly than to short a bunch of stocks disruptively and brag about it on the internet. You could call it my three year plan. Don’t ask me how bonds factor in that equation. I’m not a spy. What I am is a guy that is trying to be the solution and not the victim. And that guy doesn’t ever want to be a burden on the people I love. So that guy is going to keep doing what he does. And I’m not going to lie that you inspire me to do so. As sexy and confident as I’m born to be. <3 Tim

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