Remember when I said I was planning to spend some of my new free time starting a small business?
Well, I’ve finally finished all of the filling-out-forms, creating a product, finding a manufacturer and all the rest and on Friday I shipped the first copy of The Annotated Hasheesh Eater CD-ROM to a paying customer.
The relevance to my Picket Line project is this: Having your own home-based business can be a good way to regulate income and income taxes. In years when I may earn too much money to stay below the tax line, I can invest more in the business and take the investments as a business expense that lowers my taxable income. In years when things are leaner, I can work harder to increase my profits from the business.
In addition, I should be able to take a percentage of my rent off my taxes as a business expense , as I’ll be using my home to store the inventory (which is bulkier than I’d anticipated — 1,000 CD-ROMs in DVD-style cases take up a lot of space).
One of the biggest advantages of this approach is that this is a product that I care about, and so producing it and selling it is something I’m eager to do. Now I’m doing what I love and care about professionally — which for a lot of people seems an unreachable dream goal.
