[Amanda]

My husband and I would like to open a business bank account for our new LLC and start tracking with quickbooks.

We would also like to add our children as employees eventually and set up payroll for them as well as other employees that we plan to hire.

With our children’s income, we are planning to contribute to a Roth IRA for each of them.

We are new to all of this and plan on hiring a cpa.
But, I wanted to come on here to ask advice about setting this up.

We would like to set our children up so that they will have financial freedom when they are older.

We would also like to set up a trust that would hold all of our assets and LLC for our children as well.

Can anyone recommend the best place to open a business bank account, a trust fund, IRA, set up payroll, hire a cpa, etc.

We are new to all of this and finallly have some money put aside to do this and I want to be smart about it.

Any advice is greatly appreciated!

[Ian]

You open a business bank account at any bank. Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Local Credit Union…take your pick.

For a trust you don’t open one. You have an estate lawyer draft one for you, and you file it with the county clerk.

You can hire your kids at any age as long as they are actually providing market rate services.

Including them in pictures on your website and paying them as models is the easiest way to hire them at a very young age and give them income for IRA purposes.

Your kids don’t need to be W-2 employees to have income.

They can be paid as 1099 contractors from your business so “payroll” can be a lot more simple than what you are imagining.

Your kids would just have to file their own tax returns for the income they earned as contractors, and that is what qualifies them to contribute to an IRA.

[Shawn]

Don’t spend too much money setting it up yet. All that stuff costs money and it sounds like you haven’t made any profit yet.

[S.A.]

You are going to spend more in fees, legal and accounting costs than actually benefit from it. I do not think you can make your under 10 year old children employees.

Why? Labour laws to start.

All the questions you ask will also vary on where you live.

Start with investing in hiring a good lawyer and accountant for advice.

[Lauren]

I recommend you contact your local office of the SBA/SBDC. They have a wide variety of courses for opening a business, many of them free or low cost.

They also can connect you with a SCORE (retired executives) mentor who may help.

I’m not sure your children can be officers of an LLC unless they are over the age of 18 but if you are going to have multiple LLCs, I would recommend getting a good local attorney and an insurance broker to find out what kind of insurance(s) you will need in running this business.

They can be employees as long as you have legitimate work for them to do and pay them a market rate.

[Karen]

You will need to register a LLC. I am in Connecticut and the process was relatively simple. I used NOLO to open it, I believe. After the registration goes through, you need to file a report for the business to stay open every year.

I get notified at my email from the state and just need to verify the business info and pay an $80 fee. Be careful because a ton of agencies will start mailing you scaring into filing with them and the fees are high.

You do not to do the annual filing with any external agency, you can do it on your own. The other very important thing is that you’ll have to pay estimated quarterly taxes.

Check out the dates so you do not miss any because there are penalties.

Once you start making money, whoever does your taxes should be able to advise you what would be an appropriate % of your income to pay as the estimated amount.

For the bank account, I would recommend opening one with a local bank not one if the big ones like Wells Fargo.

Local banks are much more helpful and at least mine had much better resources in their website for small business owners (ability to create invoices etc.).

I also found that they don’t charge so many fees unlike the big ones. Just be aware that they may not have the ability to do Zelle transfers.

Best of luck!

[Perez]

We use wellsfargo and I like it a lot because I found there interface to be very user friendly. Also, very easy to download quickbooks transactions into quickbooks and you have access to bank statements for few years back, witch is very valuable.

All of these futures are not true with a local small bank we use as well.

For quickbooks, the license renewal was $999 this year for the desktop version.

The online version would cost us more but we will be force to eventually switch to it.

I highly recommend you to research other bookkeeping software if possible.

I also highly recommend you to take small business classes and accounting 101 to help you understand the language of professionals and avoid costly mistakes running your business.

Good luck.

[Author]

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