One person corporations

[Shadow]

It's sometimes strange when you are the only owner and employee of a corporation.

For example, every year I must have a shareholder meeting and a director meeting. So each year I legally have to have 2 meetings by myself, where I vote for the directors, chairman, president, and secretary of the company, and do various other stuff. Can you guess who gets elected each year? I bet you can.

Another strange thing: Soldak has to pay unemployment taxes to the US and Texas. I'm currently the only person that gets a salary. So I guess I'm paying unemployment just in case I fire myself. What's even worst is that Texas has a range of rates that companies can pay depending on their past history of former employees that have received unemployment payments. As a new company you start out in the lower/middle of this range by default until you have built up enough history to push it lower or higher. So not only do I have to pay unemployment in the first place, I have to pay a relatively high rate, just in case I fire myself.

I'm sure there are a bunch of other weird things, but those are the two that come to mind today.

[jureidinm]

Originally Posted by Shadow

It's sometimes strange when you are the only owner and employee of a corporation.

For example, every year I must have a shareholder meeting and a director meeting. So each year I legally have to have 2 meetings by myself, where I vote for the directors, chairman, president, and secretary of the company, and do various other stuff. Can you guess who gets elected each year? I bet you can.

You must have fun time roleplaying the different positions during your meetings.

[sss4r]

time to get social security numbers for your cats.....

[Gragt]

I guess they did not think of this situation when they made those laws.

[Delve]

It's exciting working as a freelance contractor as well. I find it entertaining that, according to the local state health department, self-employed contractor is not sufficient to qualify as a job title. At least I don't have to pay unemployment taxes on myself though, as I'm not an official business. My wife keeps threatening to incorporate me or something though. :/

[Shadow]

Originally Posted by jureidinm

You must have fun time roleplaying the different positions during your meetings.

Yeah, the discussion of who was going to fill the positions was quite long and the vote was really close. I only won by 1 vote.

Originally Posted by Delve

It's exciting working as a freelance contractor as well. I find it entertaining that, according to the local state health department, self-employed contractor is not sufficient to qualify as a job title. At least I don't have to pay unemployment taxes on myself though, as I'm not an official business. My wife keeps threatening to incorporate me or something though. :/

I get that one a lot also. There are so many forms that I have to state what the company does. The ones that just have a blank line are easy, but most of them give me a huge table to choose from and for some reason Create Video Games is never a choice.

Each time I pick whatever I feel is closest. I bet if different organizations compared notes or even compared my answer this year from last year, my answer probably changes each time.

I also sometimes get the question, what's your title or role in the company? Well let's see, I'm the owner, the only director on the board, the chairman, the president, the secretary, the only programmer, and the lead designer. So the problem is always what are they really asking.

[Delilah Rehm]

I always want to go to the meetings, but noooooo! I guess it's too crowded, what with all of that staff and all!

[Pseudonym]

Complete tangent: IIRC, back at its founding, TX was so concerned with the power, wealth concentration and aristocratic tendencies of corporations that they originally required individuals to petition its Congress before you could operate one in the state. That didn't last long. But hey, the upside is incorporation for a less-than-phenomenally-wealthy individual is probably much easier now. (The downside is obvious.)

I would suspect that the tax advantages of incorporation in TX overwhelm the unemployment contribution. (I mean, both compared to being a little-ol' private citizen.) Merely a suspicion, though, and probably too broad a generalization.

[Shadow]

Oh, don't get me wrong, it's still better in my case to be incorporated even with the strange rules. The unemployment payments for one person really don't amount to much, they are just kind of silly.

[scragar]

If you fire yourself do you need to pay a severence pay? And if you were to quit would you need to give 2 weeks notice? :P

1 last question(and the only one I really want an answer to), how do you deal with all that in terms of a job? I find it hard working as a web developer when it's assumed by job description if broader than it is(I am not a designer of any kind, and it's not my job to fix anybodies computer), I can't imagine having so many different tasks as you must have.