QuickBooks Self-Employed is no longer a plan you can buy. Type quickbooks.intuit.com/self-employed into a browser and you land on a page for a different product called QuickBooks Solopreneur. The plan grid on Intuit’s main pricing page does not list Self-Employed at all — the sign-in menu still links to selfemployed.intuit.com for existing accounts, but there…
The freelancer losing “almost 7% of all my earnings to PayPal as fees” is neither exaggerating nor being overcharged. PayPal’s published rate is 3.49% plus a fixed fee. Everything between that number and seven per cent is a second, third and fourth charge that no comparison article adds up, because comparison articles stop at the…
Sometimes, and three separate rule sets all have to permit it. Most freelancers only ever hear about one of them. Before state law becomes relevant at all, the contract you accepted when you opened the account may already have decided it — PayPal’s User Agreement says, in a section headed “No surcharges”, that you will…
Almost everything written about Upwork’s freelancer fee describes a sliding scale — 20% on the first chunk of a client relationship, 10% after that, 5% above a threshold. That structure is gone. The current fee is set per contract, it is disclosed before you accept, and it does not move afterwards. Here is what Upwork’s…
There is no form that closes a sole proprietorship. You take the job, you stop invoicing, and the only visible trace is a Schedule C that does not appear the following April. Nobody sends you anything. Which is unsettling, because every article on closing a business describes a procedure — final returns, dissolution filings, asset…
The money you spent getting ready to freelance is deductible. It is just not deductible the way you are expecting. Most of it does not go on your first Schedule C as an ordinary expense at all — it goes through a separate mechanism with a cap, a threshold that removes the cap, and a…
Three things get called “getting a business licence”, and only one of them is a licence. Forming an LLC is not. Registering a trading name is not. The licence itself is a piece of paper from your city, it usually costs less than the LLC people form instead of it, and it is the one…
A lender does not care what you invoiced. It cares what was left after your deductions — the net profit on line 31 of your Schedule C — and it averages that over two years. Which means the year you worked hardest to pay less tax is the year that qualifies you for the smallest…
Yes. A net loss on Schedule C lands on line 3 of Schedule 1, flows into your Form 1040 total income, and reduces the tax on everything else on the return — including your W-2 wages. There is no wall between the two. That is the general rule, and for most freelancers with a day…
If you have a job alongside your freelance work, you can cover the tax on the freelance income by raising the withholding on the job instead of sending quarterly payments. That much is widely known. What is not widely known is that the two methods are not treated the same way in time — and…