😖 Pain

You know you should start a business, if only for the tax benefits. But incorporation, and turning my passion into a business? I’ll have to write a business plan, and raise a bunch of capital, or have thousands in savings… And now you feel like it will never happen.

💸 Profit

🔑 You Don’t Need To Sell Out, You Just Need to Track your Expenses

You’re allowed to bootstrap your company.

You don’t need to make money day 1.

And you are delivering value, all you have to do is create a brand out of what you’re already doing, track, and showcase your expenses on social media.

Here's a golden nugget of advice: everyone harbors a vested interest in personal finance, and every corporation allocates a portion of their budget to marketing expenses.

When a person spends money on a product, and that product is showcased via social media; that is real value to the business.

This is why influencing exists.

If people are spending money, that’s real value in the economy.

If you’re buying anything at all it’s probably because it’s enriching your life in some way. Continuing existence is a necessary condition for personal finance, and if all we can do is what we want, then every expense is a necessary expense to enriching myself. Pretty much anything that provides positive utility has some correlation to future earning, especially when it comes to the individual.

So if everyone is making value in the transaction where does the perception come from that these are merely personal expenses?

Now, you might be wondering what types of expenses can be classified as business expenses…

Any necessary expenses that aren't assets (i.e., they don't need to be depreciated over time) can be written off your personal taxes, even if you have a regular W-2 job.

Let me clarify further: influencing isn't just about showcasing sponsored content. Even if your content isn't sponsored yet, presenting your expenses can still be a genuine attempt to foster your business's growth.

As you're still in the "growth" phase, these showcased expenses have the potential to become valuable assets in the future.

If these expenses are integral to building your brand, they qualify as business expenses. If people talk about “self-care is praxis”, then even waste can be an important part of flourishing.

Consider this: if you embody your brand, the money you spend on yourself can also be used to influence others. For instance, purchasing a GTX Razer to demonstrate your allegiance to Razer can be a business expense if it's used in your influencing activities. In this scenario, your personal finance becomes a reflection of your personality, and the post itself can generate revenue, either now or in the future.

And again, you have time to turn these into future revenue, it’s not like the posts go away.

Ok so how do you define a brand that will let you turn the things you already spend on into business expenses?

That’s a future newsletter, first we got to talk about what you’re really worried about.

Sure, I believe in my beanie baby collecting hot Cheetos brand but will the IRS believe it’s a real business?

Before we delve deeper, let's examine the IRS rules for initiating a business. According to the IRS, here are nine factors to consider when determining whether an activity is a hobby or a business:

1. Is the activity conducted in a businesslike manner, with complete and accurate books and records maintained?

2. Does the time and effort invested into the activity indicate an intention to make it profitable?

3. Is the income from the activity essential for their livelihood?

4. Are any losses a result of circumstances beyond the taxpayer's control or typical for the startup phase of their type of business?

5. Do they modify their methods of operation to enhance profitability?

6. Do the taxpayer and their advisors possess the necessary knowledge to run the activity as a successful business?

7. Has the taxpayer succeeded in generating a profit from similar activities in the past?

8. Does the activity yield a profit in some years, and if so, how much?

9. Can the taxpayers anticipate future profits from the appreciation of the assets utilized in the activity?

If we can meet all these criteria, we just have to show that our expenses are necessary, with those two components your influencer brand is a real business, and most importantly, it’s a business about what you’re already spending your money on.

Money left on the table.

It might seem overwhelming, but we’ll get through it! Over the next few weeks, we will dissect these points one by one in each newsletter.

I’m excited to take down every single limiting belief you have as to why you can’t be a personal finance influencer.

🏦 But what will my accountant say?

If your accountant asks say you’re doing the following: Dined at [Restaurant] as part of my ongoing influencer activities, showcasing my lifestyle choices. This expense is directly related to content creation for my brand, with the primary evidence being the Instagram post dated [Post Date, e.g., "August 23, 2023"]. The meal and the subsequent post play a pivotal role in portraying my brand's image and irony, as it aligns with my strategy of earnest representation of lifestyle choices and their continual amplifying impact on the brand's popularity.

🗝️ Philosophy

True romanticism is believing that some "instantiation" (to avoid calling it an object, which is a topic for another conversation) of a person is more valuable than the properties that constitute it. So if you love someone because of the combination of their physical (as in atoms) traits you don’t love “them” you love some configuration. It’s to see someone as something special.

But special needs some comparison. Does someone want to be loved for nothing at all? The person is a seperate entity, its own experiences, its own view of their causal chain is what they care about. If you ignore that, then are you loving them? If the person I love thinks they are different than the person I think they are, why love at all?

It seems like a paradox, you love the parts of them that make them them but also something separate than just the parts.

You can make a chain out of anything; find some thread for why you love the things you love. But, really, you love someone for nothing at all, nothing and everything, an everything out of a nothing. To truly love something is to think everything else means nothing.

🤖 Prompt—Break Down a Big Problem

By using the prompt below, you can engage in a systematic dialogue with ChatGPT, where it asks you a series of focused questions one at a time, patiently waiting for your response before moving on to the next

Break down a big problem and have Chat GPT guide and solve it with you at the same time.

🛠️ Productivity

🙈 Need to redact something quickly? Check out this open source model from Microsoft! (Link)

🔗 Links take time–A link shortener that doubles as a link management tool! (Link)

💻 Free Prompt Management for Mac OS (Link)

💸 A password manager will save you hours a week (Link)

🌍 Pommunity

💼 Incorporating in the US? Want the cheapest fastest service? Even without a SSN! Check this out!

💼 🗣️ Incorporating as an Influencer? Want 2 products for the price of 1? Check this out!

Influencer? Wondering what to do next? 🤝 Grab time with me

🚪 Want real-time access to money saving tips? DM me on Twitter for access to our exclusive discord community!