Early Retirement Extreme Forums

@frita Marketing for live performances is gruelling - but I'm lucky that I've always ended up in bands were experienced bookers are handling this. @Alphaville thinks that live music will come back with a vengeance after the lockdown. I'm not. Everyone in local bands has been struggling with filling venues (no matter how small) before, and this has been on the decline for years. People will get even more used to consume music and shows online, this will be the new normal. I hope I'm too pessimistic and Alphaville is right, but I don't think so.

Tyler9000 wrote: ↑

Sun Mar 29, 2020 10:24 am

I've thought many times about starting an online business...

Have you thought about putting ads on your website? You could go with something generic like google and/or amazon but there are probably some much more lucrative programs for the investing niche. You would just have to find one that sounded good and test it out to see if you make money. It should be very easy to set up and not cause any tax problems beyond having additional income. You might want to set up an LLC for the site to protect yourself from liability in case someone invests using one of your portfolios, loses money, and sues you (unlikely but possible, people are crazy).

As far as selling a digital download, if you mean something like a book I would think you could put it on Amazon or similar and then they would take care of taxes for you. Using something like Amazon also has the advantage that people could buy the book without having found it through your site, potentially resulting in more sales. The downside is that Amazon takes a cut.

@Gilberto -- I've always been reluctant to clutter the site with ads as they generally don't pay well enough to offset the downsides. Maybe it will make sense some day, but I'm in no hurry.

The nice thing about a book is that there are clear channels (Amazon, publishers, etc) to distribute it that take care of everything. Things like online courses, downloadable spreadsheets, and software are a little trickier though, as even some of the bigger site like Teachable usually punt on state taxes. It makes things very hard even for the professionals.

And yes, if I ever do start offering anything beyond public data and personal opinions I'll definitely make sure I'm protected.

@Ego -- Good idea. I'll have to think about what I might be able to offer that works through Ebay. I normally think of them for physical products, but I imagine there are more options than I realize.

Tyler9000 wrote: ↑

Sun Mar 29, 2020 4:08 pm

I normally think of them for physical products, but I imagine there are more options than I realize.

You piqued my interest. I was thinking this would be a big opportunity for a software project as the tax landscape is changing awfully fast as each state adopts these taxes. In the case of Ebay, they hold the funds they collect for sales taxes then (I presume) pay them quarterly. That must be a lotta cash to earn a % on while in holding. I figured it was too much money, too big a problem for sellers and a relatively simple software solution for it to have not been done yet. Turns out, it has...

https://taxcloud.com/

Free for most states. .125% of gross sales in the others.

Ego wrote: ↑

Sun Mar 29, 2020 4:34 pm

https://taxcloud.com/

Free for most states. .125% of gross sales in the others.

Nice find! It looks like they have lots of integrations, too (Ebay, Etsy, WooCommerce, etc). Thanks for the pointer.

Tyler9000 wrote: ↑

Sun Mar 29, 2020 10:24 am

I've thought many times about starting an online business, but the biggest hurdle to me is the insane sales tax system that has developed for digital products where every state gets to individually decide how much of a cut they get to take out of each download. It's an administrative nightmare that discourages small entrepreneurs from even trying.

Any tips for managing that would be a big help.

There you have your business idea

Polp wrote: ↑

Sun Mar 29, 2020 4:51 pm

There you have your business idea

Ha! I guess I walked right into that one.

Rule #1 for me when evaluating business ideas is that it has to be an activity I enjoy. Keeping up with tax law definitely doesn’t make the list.

@Polp

I thought the same thing. Business idea...find a problem and try to solve it.

Yard maintenance. Easy for social distancing.

private security

George the original one wrote: ↑

Tue Mar 31, 2020 7:44 pm

Yard maintenance. Easy for social distancing.

Jean wrote: ↑

Tue Mar 31, 2020 7:51 pm

private security

these are jobs not businesses, right? i mean you trade time for money. or are you thinking of starting companies?

Alphaville wrote: ↑

Tue Mar 31, 2020 8:04 pm

these are jobs not businesses, right? i mean you trade time for money. or are you thinking of starting companies?

Make of it what you will. When I went for groceries yesterday, I saw a yard maintenance firm making their rounds amongst all the closed motels/lodging buildings. A business that can guarantee not to interfere with social distancing will have an edge on any business that can't make the same promise.

George the original one wrote: ↑

Tue Mar 31, 2020 8:11 pm

Make of it what you will. When I went for groceries yesterday, I saw a yard maintenance firm making their rounds amongst all the closed motels/lodging buildings. A business that can guarantee not to interfere with social distancing will have an edge on any business that can't make the same promise.

oh, right, i see what you mean now.

@Alphaville

Some businesses start off as trading time for money. One eventually just needs to figure out a way to have someone else do the work in exchange for taking in lower revenue....and then expanding human resources to recapture lost revenue.

Management consultant is a good example. Imagine selling services to the government. Lets say IT services. You send proposal...win a subcontract. You charge government $100 an hour for your human resource ($100 per hour * 2080 = $208,000). So very rough estimate you divide this number in half to cover employee health insurance, taxes, PTO, trainings, etc leaving you with $104,000. So you just need to hire someone willing to perform that work for around $70,000k salary or so. You profit $34,000. Use that money to cover expenses while you go find more services to sell or expand your business.

these are jobs not businesses, right?

Every job has a supporting business structure.

If you are trying to find a business, that somehow doesn't take any of your time, and attention, or anyone else's, um... Good luck.

Though once you find it, I do wonder how long you think you can keep it. See all those mythical ebusinesses.

Lemur wrote: ↑

Wed Apr 01, 2020 7:18 am

@Alphaville

Some businesses start off as trading time for money. One eventually just needs to figure out a way to have someone else do the work in exchange for taking in lower revenue....and then expanding human resources to recapture lost revenue.

Yeah I've had a self-employment situation going for a long time. I've experienced varying levels of alternating enthusiasm and burnout, and have switched from full-time to part-time over the decades with some intervening homesteading experiences.

The problem was always the "expanding human resources part," which I did by subcontracting freelancers, but with me being at the center of everything I never figured how to write my role out of the equation without handing the whole business in itself to someone else.

It was a classic E-Myth nightmare.

I could continue forever in this line by either a) revamping the model, or b) finding occasional gigs as a cog in someone else's machine, but I'd like to explore other options.

FRx's online courses are a nice model: make once, market, and then a machine that takes a cut provides the revenue.

Riggerjack wrote: ↑

Wed Apr 01, 2020 10:00 am

Every job has a supporting business structure.

If you are trying to find a business, that somehow doesn't take any of your time, and attention, or anyone else's, um... Good luck.

Though once you find it, I do wonder how long you think you can keep it. See all those mythical ebusinesses.

I don't know that ebusinesses are mythical, if anything we have more of them than ever these days.

Time and attention are fine, but the thing needs to be scalable without time and attention increasing equally. It's the difference between self-employment and entrepreneurship.

https://patch.com/massachusetts/malden/ ... d_0bb9c4b9

Given that I don't need to make a ton of money ($500/mo would be great) what I'm looking for is a micro-enterprise idea, not a gig.

I'm asking here because I assume that ERE and semi-ERE people don't really need to go out and start a massive business that's going to keep them working 18 hours a day, and then awake with worries in the middle of the night. A little money goes a long way now... so why suffer?

This is an interesting question I have thought about it in the past. I don't think there is anything that completely disassociates time spent with money earned, but you can probably minimize it. Opening a businss and regulating yourself to managing the employees/contractors is one way. Things like Uber, Instacart, Lawn Service and so on. I feel like there will be opportunities that come out of this crisis where you can earn money connecting people who require a service and people who are willing to perform it.

The grocery situation is still crazy for exmaple, maybe a local delivery service? Most websites seem sold out or have long waiting times. Demand seems to outstrip supply.

Without employees I feel like something with the subscription model seems like the best way to do things. Popular webfiction writers who use Patreon and offer future chapters as Patreon perks can do well.

den18 wrote: ↑

Wed Apr 01, 2020 1:43 pm

This is an interesting question I have thought about it in the past. I don't think there is anything that completely disassociates time spent with money earned, but you can probably minimize it.

no, of course, but there are differences.

take a busker. there are only so many hours in the day a busker can perform.

on the other hand, a record label does not need to increase the same amount of work and expense for each band they add to their roster. they become more efficient with scale.

an artist on a record label would be somewhere in the middle. they tour and have to perform, etc, exhausting, but also a hit record could yield profits only limited by mechanical/digital reproduction, and royalties, etc, in perpetuity.

the music business is crazy. but it's a business in the entrepreneurial sense:
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/musi ... 18-706745/

same thing with inventions, patents, film, publishing, etc. yes they require effort, but the goal is to decouple income from time spent.

This seems timely. Although I'm not sure how you become credentialized.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-51643306

@Jason - I believe Switzerland has such clinics, although I don't think they are for profit.