Finance Mini-Series: Smart Money Habits for Bloggers with Ansley Beutler

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Hey there Anne from the Food Blogger Pro team here. Thanks for listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Today, Bjork is sitting down with Ansley Butler from Peach Perfect Financials to chat all about bookkeeping strategies for bloggers. This is the fourth and final episode of our finance miniseries. Be sure to check out the previous episodes of the series by visiting foodbloggerpro.com podcast in this episode, Ansley does a deep dive into the nitty gritty of bookkeeping and taxes as well as some of the smart ways you can grow your income. She'll talk about why it's crucial to treat your blog like a real business, how to keep track of all of your expenses, and some common money mistakes bloggers make. She'll also chat through some awesome tax deductions you might not know about, about the pros and cons of different business structures like s Corps and LLCs, and how to invest your hard earned cash. Whether you're just getting started with your bookkeeping process or you're a veteran blogger, we hope this mini series has been helpful to you as we head into tax season. And now, without further ado, I'll let Bjork take it away.

Ansley, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks so much for having me back.

Yeah, we're going to be talking about blogging and publishing, but within the context of best practices for the money side of it, the finances of it, the bookkeeping taxes at the end of the year. We're in the middle of this finance series and so many people who listen to this podcast are interested in the financial benefit of building an online content based business. And you know that well because you run a site, you have a site, you know what it's like to do all of the different things that people are trying to do. But you also have a background as a cpa, and so you understand kind of the mechanics of what it takes to run a business and bookkeeping and running a tight business, all of those things. So tell us how all those came together, both your publishing world, but then also seeing an opportunity here to say, wait a minute, I'm interested in blogging and publishing, but I also have these skills as a cpa. What did that triangulation look like of all those skills?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So I left college and went into public accounting. That was like my first post grad. Big, big girl job was in public accounting. I worked at Ernst and Young in their audit practice. And that's kind of where I thought my life was gonna. Was gonna move. I thought was thinking I was gonna make partner and just kind of stay in this little accounting bubble, but quickly just kind of felt like I was being a little constrained with lack of creativity. I honestly didn't know in school that I really had a lot of that creativity.

You mean?

Yeah, just kind of an urge to be creative, you know. When I got into the workforce, I really realized, wow, I have none of this in this job that I'm. That I'm in. It's so numbers focused and it's very black and white. I like to call it like a little box. I was just kind of put in a box with this accounting. Again with audit, it's just, you follow the rules. It's very numbers oriented. And I really wanted that creative space just to kind of get out of the zone. And that's when I started a food blog. I was kind of always interested in health and wellness and just kind of making recipes and making dinners that were going to kind of make me feel good, breakfasts to bring into the workplace and all that sort of stuff. So I started that while I was in public accounting and like many bloggers, realized that it's quite lucrative and the food blogging space and decided to take the leap full time into food blogging. I was 7 months pregnant at the time. So I like to say it was. It was also kind of a personal shift as well. Just my priorities changed. It was. I wanted the flexibility and all that that came with a food blog. And so I made that shift full time. Food blogging. My blog was making money. It was not replacing my corporate income yet, but I did that in May and then by December of that year, I was replacing my corporate. My corporate income. It was one of those. I felt like I couldn't replace it until I actually did it full time. There was just so much time that was soaked up with my corporate job.

And so that was from your blog at that point, like you had made the transition into that, being a full time replacement?

Yeah.

Can you, can you tell people how you went about doing that? What were the things? Because I know you also have this other business that we're going to talk about where you help bloggers with their finances through bookkeeping and CPA services, but just on the blog itself, what, what did you do to get to that point and what would you tell other people who are maybe trying to get to that point?

Yeah, so I had a big spreadsheet that I put out at the time. It was a lot of sponsored stuff. So I really worked with a lot of either sponsored content on my blog or freelance photography or recipe development and then also some ads on my site at the time. The ads were not substantial. They were something I like to say, they were stable. And so I just kind of forecast it out and said, hey, if I can get my ad network to do this and if I can get two, three more freelance clients a month, again, that's more of like a time thing for me. When I was working a corporate job, I was maxed out. I shoot primarily in natural light. And so there's only so much time on the weekends that you can spend. And again, I was seven months pregnant, so my time was about to be reduced heavily. And so I was just kind of running some numbers in an Excel spreadsheet, literally just forecasting to say, hey, if I can bring in three more freelance clients, my corporate work is gonna, is gonna be removed. I can shoot during the week now too, or batch on Friday, Saturday and Sunday and have, you know, my husband help out with the baby and all of that. And just kind of developed a plan almost of what I needed to land sponsored content or freelance or what I needed my ad network to do in order to reach where we needed it to go. We did have savings saved up. And so that if it was going to be a flop, if I was not going to be able to make it by the end of the year, then I was going to have to go back into accounting, which thankfully is a pretty everyone needs accountant. So it was going to be something.

That I think it was there, but you didn't want to do it.

Yeah, it was there. It was just. It was going to stink to have to go back. And so I feel like that fire under me also is what allowed me to say, I do not want to go back. I've got to make it work.

Yeah. I think what I love about that, and we're going to talk about kind of you as a CEO, but it's really. Even if we are operating within the context of a W2 position or freelance position, we are the CEOs of our businesses. And sometimes our business is we have one client and that's our primary client. And we want to do whatever we can to do a good job within that W2 or freelance role. But what you did is you said, okay, I have this one role. And this role for me as a CEO of my company is one that doesn't feel like it's a good fit anymore. So how do I, as the CEO of my life, change how I'm producing revenue? You had this blog as an option, and then within that, you weren't just the CEO of the blog, you were the CEO kind of of your life within the CEO of kind of the division of your blog. You said, like, okay, what are the different revenue streams here that I can produce? And I think it's really cool to hear you talk about that. And a reminder for anybody listening that we are all CEOs, we are all running the P&LS and the balance sheets of our own personal lives, and we're making decisions around how we want to produce revenue. And what's interesting for me is you made it to this point, but then you also look strategically and said, hey, I have these valuable skills. Like you said, there's always going to be a need for an accountant. But you kind of paired it up then with this new industry that you were part of, which is publishers, creators, even more specifically, publishers and creators in the food world. Talk about how you realized that there was a need for that in this industry and how you got started with that kind of revenue center within your own business.

Yes, yes, no. And it's. I will never get sick of sharing the story either because it's just, it was. It's just kind of so, so interesting to me that within maybe two months of. Of taking the blog full time, and I was, you know, very active in Facebook groups or messaging people on Instagram that were kind of in the same kind of wheelhouse that I was asking them what was working for them or, or reaching out to brands and all that sort of stuff. But very quickly made some friends in the food blogging space. And when they learned that I'm a cpa, I started to get questions about what do I do with my My taxes. My accountant was telling me, I can't expense this. I feel like it's wrong. What do you think? You know, just kind of those sorts of questions. And it kind of opened this, this, this door kind of a light bulb clicked where I'm like, wow, I could actually be pretty beneficial here. And maybe this is the type of accounting that I actually would like to lean into. And so I mentioned previously that I had this Excel file with a forecast that said I need to get three more freelance clients by September or by the fall. You know, those sorts of things that actually didn't happen. Instead what happened is I took on some accounting clients and I started. It started out as kind of more of a consulting practice where I was walking them through estimated tax payments, maybe helping them with bookkeeping, and then ultimately filing taxes at the end of the year. That's kind of what it started out as. And it's just kind of evolved into a little bit. It's really a full scale boutique accounting firm is what I call it, where we kind of do a little bit of everything. And that first year was definitely a trial run with these kind of handful of clients that honestly just kind of came to me just because they, I think, enjoyed what my knowledge that I was also in the food blogging space and that I had this background as a cpa and it's just kind of spread through word of mouth. You know, food bloggers like to talk to each other and so when they say, hey, Ansley, help me answer this or help me solve this problem, she can probably help you solve that too. Is kind of how it, how it evolved. And it's been something that now we're about to go into our sixth year of doing business. It's just an area of accounting that I never thought would be something that I would be interested in, but I'm so passionate about it because I, I love entrepreneurship and I love business owners and I find it very fulfilling to help specifically creative business owners that may not have had the training or the education in like the numbers area of things because they're so creative and just helping them decipher the numbers and helping them just kind of figure out what the numbers are going to do and what's coming up next, like the taxes and hey, you're ready for this. And here's how you do retirement and all that sort of stuff. It's just been very fulfilled, fulfilling to kind of create that. But that started very quickly once I started to have the food blog full time. And it's kind of evolved since then.

Yeah. That's awesome. So let's talk about some of that category of finance, which is the bookkeeping, the accounting. And it's an area that I feel really passionate about and the reason that I love it is because I feel like it gives you information around the game that you are playing and, and it gives you levers that you can look at, adjust, shift. It gives you historical context around how you've been doing potentially. You talked about this as well. Projecting into the future. There's a lot of things that we could tap into here. But the first thing I would be interested in hearing you talk about is when you bring on a new client, what are some of the really common things that you see as areas that need to be cleaned up or tightened up like the low hanging fruit that you get after, right away when you bring on that new client?

Yeah, I mean bookkeeping is going to be the easy answer there. Just even simply doing bookkeeping at whatever frequency makes sense to you, that's something that's at least more than just at tax time. Something that's workable with your work schedule, whether that's quarterly, monthly, twice a year, something. Just doing the bookkeeping is probably the biggest thing that we see coming in. And I will say I have, we have a bunch of people that are neat and tidy as well that come in. They've got everything reconciled, which is amazing. But the biggest kind of pickup we see that both sets us back in the onboarding process as well as to me, I feel like, hey, you're not getting the biggest bang for your buck. You've got this bookkeeping subscription. We need. We need to do it so you can see the numbers. So one, just doing the bookkeeping and setting some sort of cadence. I'm big on calendar reminders, you know, last day of the month, remind yourself, hey, tomorrow when I come in, I'm going to spend 30 minutes doing bookkeeping or quarterly or something like that just to do it. Second is obviously the categorizations. There's a lot of, I kind of, I call it gray area, but it's a little bit just fuzzy with the industry that we're in. Specifically for food bloggers, you know, there's a lot of food that's being purchased, a lot of things that could otherwise be seen as personal that we really want to make sure that we've classified correctly as a business expense, if it really is a business expense, as the other ones. So like the groceries and props and Target runs and all Amazon stuff, all that sort of stuff we want to make sure is properly categorized.

Yeah, it's one of the things that is a great advantage of having a business is that you can be strategic about how you are purchasing things. Strategic, meaning intentional. To. If it's a business expense, purchase it with a business credit card or a business debit card or, you know, within the business account, because that's going to be an expense within the business. And that's where you get into this kind of place of, hey, that's small. Business is advantageous for many reasons, but one of them might be, like, you could expense your phone because you're using it for business purposes. So where's that line in, you know, a computer, a phone? Some of these things that might be in our daily life, food. Can you talk about some of the more common ones and how we know if it could be considered a business expense or if it's actually just a personal expense?

Yeah, yeah. So the most common one that I feel like there's a bunch of, you know, different information out there is the groceries. If you're purchasing food specifically to test a recipe for your blog, whether or not it winds up on your blog or not, it should be expensed as a business expense. It's basically job supplies, even if you eat it. And, you know, that's just kind of one of the perks of the job. Even if you serve it to your family, your neighbors, what have you. If you are testing a cookie recipe and you test it five times and you've got all this flour and sugar and everything, and even if it doesn't wind up on the blog, it's basically research and development. It's a job supply. Now, obviously, with. With any expense, I look at the reasonableness. So don't go test 20 different, you know, Christmas cookie recipes just for the sake of testing 20 different cookie recipes and then goes to hold a bake sale, you know, or something like that, you know, look at the reasonableness of it and whatnot. The good thing about blogs that I like is that there's a timestamp on it. And so if you go, you know, I did a beef tenderloin recipe on my site. Beef tenderloin is very expensive, and I had to buy more than one because I had to test it and then retest it and then ultimately, you know, put it up on my blog. And so that you could see in my. In my bookkeeping that I had some higher job supplies for the months of September and October. And the reason is that there was a beef tenderloin Recipe that went up on my site and it stated November of 2023. And so thankfully there is kind of that date number there too that you can kind of tie back to as well. But groceries are going to be a big one. Let's see the other ones you mentioned.

Yeah, phone, computers.

Yeah, yeah, all those equipment and everything. Computers for sure. If you're using the computer for personal work, as bloggers, you cannot do your work without a computer. And so that will be a business expense. Phones have become interesting, especially with the introduction of video because I know a lot of people are having to, myself included, get more storage on the phone because, or I'm taking so many videos and so this is where I default to a 5050 ratio. I know that kind of sounds very arbitrary, but I have people that can, that just take a lot of videos on their phone that are able to say I like documentation, I use my phone 70% of the time for business or something like that. And that way we're able to maybe justify a higher percentage. But unless you have another personal phone, there is going to be some sort of personal element. You know, you're, you're going to call your parents or your siblings or friends or something like that from your phone. So there is always going to be a little bit of a personal element if you don't know. That's why I like to take the 50, 50 like default rule. But nowadays I am seeing some people creep up into that 70% kind of ratio if they use their phone more frequently for business, those sorts of things. Again, it's difficult bookkeeping wise because it's something that you're probably paying for personally that maybe you're using for business. And so what I like to do, there's a slew of them. The, the phone is one, mileage is another one and then something called business use of home, which is basically if you, if you have an office space in your house, there's a bunch of different types of expenses that you can use partially for business. So like Internet water, your rent payment or your mortgage interest, those sorts of kind of home related expenses that you're probably paying for personally, you get to expense some of it through the business because you're basically, you know, you're renting a spot out of your own home for business purposes. And so I call all of those kind of like year end adjustments. With my firm we have a big spreadsheet that we use and we collect all that data from customers and then we'll book a journal entry at the end of the year to kind of account for those expenses. So we wait, we don't. We do not handle cell phone bills monthly and everything. We just book it all at the end of the year. But those are the three big ones that are just kind of, kind of last, last year end adjustments to be able to get a little bit more expense through the business.

Yeah, that's great. And so by journal entry you mean you go in, let's say it's QuickBooks Online. QuickBooks. You'd go in and you'd add an expense. It wouldn't be something that would run through the bank account because let's say if it was a phone, you'd be paying for it personally. But you could look at it and say, hey, we're going to take 50% of this and consider it a business expense. So it's on the books, it shows up as a business expense. There's a bunch of those. So your advice would be if you have something that is considered both personal and business, like maybe your cell phone plan, pay with it with a personal, like pay for it personally and then essentially have it show up as an expense within the business, within the books. Is that kind of how that would work?

Right? Yeah. To me that keeps it cleaner versus you paying for a, you know, your personal cell phone for all throughout the business. And then because you really want to make sure that at the end of the year you remove some of that expense to the personal. So to me it's easier and it's safer to instead go put the expense on at the end of the year instead of vice versa. Because if you forget to do it, that's kind of a big hiccup. But yeah, a journal entry is kind of like the accounting term for it. You can, it's basically reimbursing yourself. And so if you have, if you have a total expenses of $2,000 is basically once you capture cell phone bills and mileage and all the rent payment and all that, it's $2,000 in expenses that you get to deduct on your business. You can go transfer money from your business account into your personal account if you want, like with Venmo or bank transfer or whatever, just to show the money moving. You can do that and then it will pop up in like a, a QuickBooks or a Fresh books or something like that. Journal entry is just a way to kind of skip that step and to just say, I'm going to go push this expense on here and I'm going to call it like a netted against Owner contributions or something like that. It's kind of the accounting term for it.

Yeah, that makes sense. And so then at the end of the year, the business essentially looks less profitable, which is a good thing if you're wanting to pay less in taxes, because then there's more expenses for things that you otherwise would have been paying for out of pocket personally. But now that you're also using them for business, you get to reduce some of the profit within the business. So you reduce some of the taxes. One of the things that I think people sometimes forget about, especially people in the early stages. So this is kind of like a 101 piece of advice, and we can talk about some more 201 considerations. But even if you're in the early stages, a year, one year, two, year, three, maybe you're not making a lot of money. Maybe it's tens or hundreds of dollars a year, but. But maybe you have thousands of dollars of expenses as you're starting up. You're buying equipment, maybe you buy a computer, you're starting to charge some of your phone as an expense. It's still important to be doing bookkeeping because, correct me if I'm wrong, but the. Let's say you have a loss within your business as long as you have $1 of income and you can explain why that is, you're able to take the losses, the expenses, against other income that you're producing. Is that right?

Right. Yes. Yeah. No. I tell people when they are generating at a loss, it is almost even more important to do your bookkeeping because it can help save you a lot of money. Usually when I see people that are running at a loss, unless they have a bunch of savings saved up, they have another job that they have on the side as well. They say you have a W2 job that that brings in $80,000. It's a W2 job. And you're also running this food blog and getting it set up. There are a lot of expenses involved with setting, setting everything up, the camera, the computer, the hosting, all that sort of stuff. And maybe you're running at a loss of $5,000 to your point, the IRS wants you to have a viable business in order to net the business loss against any other sort of income. And so you basically have to just be trying to make money. So if you earn a dollar and you definitely go sign up for the Amazon Associates or something, that can maybe give you a little bit of passive income, you know, while you're striving towards the ad network, or if you can land a Freelance gig or something like that. It just gets you a little bit of money. It's viewed in the IRS's eyes as a viable business. So, you know, if you have. If you make $50 from Amazon and then you have all these expenses and you're at a loss of $5,000, the $5,000 is going to net against your W2 income with 80. And so you're only going to pay tax then on $75,000. And so depending on your tax bracket, you've saved a good chunk of money there while, you know, getting your business off the ground, because soon, hopefully, that business is going to turn profitable and you're actually going to be paying tax on the $80,000 W2 and on the profit of the business. So those kind of early years are, to me, important to capitalize on that ability to do that.

Yeah, you think about, like, if you had a hobby and your hobby was you loved skiing and you spent $5,000 a year, you wouldn't be able to take that against your $80,000 income. You would just get $80,000 taxed at whatever that 80,000 is, and then you'd be spending 5,000. But when you're working on a business, you might enjoy it the same amount that you would skiing, but because it's a business, and like you said, you're showing that you're kind of creating income from it, suddenly that becomes something that is an expense and kind of reduces that taxable income. How long can you go on doing that? Right. So, like, can you operate at a loss for 10 years and continue to just take losses and say, I just haven't figured it out yet. I'm not there with my business.

Yeah, yeah. The. SO one, it is very, very normal to be at a loss in the early stages of a business, and the IRS knows that. And so they're kind of expect you to be at a loss for maybe one, two to three years. Once you kind of creep into that four or five years where you're in business, they do expect you to be generating a profit. So those first three years are when, like I said, capitalize on that ability to be at a loss. By year four, they do expect you to be at a profit. I see that as a common question. I get to just maybe with people that maybe drug their feet with the, you know, the early stages of the blogging, they're like, hey, I'm on year five, and I have yet to turn a profit. What do I do? You know, one, don't freak out. It's at the end of the world, there's actually a little like area that you can, you know, tell the IRS basically about why you're at year five and you're at a negative again. It's very normal for businesses to be running at a, at a, at a negative. But one to three years is typically the guidance that most people will say, hey, you're good. One to three years, you can operate at a loss and you won't get any questions. Year four, five, six and beyond, they're wanting you to be in the green. There is that option to explain basically why maybe you're still at a loss.

Great. And so even if you're in the early stages, really important to be keeping track of those expenses. Build that in as a part of the process that you're going through. You talked about that cadence once a month, once a quarter, whatever it might be. You're tracking your expenses, you're tracking your revenue and your getting an idea of how profitable or not profitable in the early stages you are. As you start to become profitable, things change a little bit. Well, and even before we get to that point, like from the get go, should you have two separate accounts? Should you have a business account and then should you have a personal account? And how do those play together? So you have this business account and a personal account. Are you sending money back and forth? You know, if you are operating at a loss, do you just keep feeding money into the business account to make sure that it doesn't go negative? How do you, how do you do that?

Yes. So yes, that is actually, you asked previously what like one of the big mistakes I see with clients that I'm onboarding, that that's actually probably number one is not diversifying the personal bank account and the business bank account. That should be like step number one when you're wanting to take the blog and turn it into a business. Maybe it's more of a been more of a hobby. Step number one when you're wanting to take it into more of a business realm is to get a bank account, which unfortunately is like going to the dmv. It will take a little bit of time to paperwork and all of that, but it is crucial and honestly it's going to make the bookkeeping that much easier due to again those kind of personal nature expenses, the groceries, the target, the Amazon. It's very difficult to go sift through your personal credit card if you're only doing your bookkeeping once a quarter and go pick out which ones were business runs and which ones runs or personal runs. Number one, it's hard. And number two, the IRS does not like it. It's called commingling of funds is what they call it. And so separating it out, having a business bank account is going to be crucial in separating the two, and it's going to make the bookkeeping that much easier. Use your business debit card, or if you want to play the points game, get a business credit card. Do that, and you can spend the grocery runs on that business card and Amazon and all that sort of stuff on the business card you asked about. Like when we. When someone's maybe operating at a loss, how do you basically beef up the business account so that it can pay for the subscriptions and whatnot? Yes, that is called an owner contribution. And you do need to pay personal dollars. If the. If the business bank account cannot afford to, you know, the monthly subscriptions and whatnot, you're operating at a loss. Transferring something from the personal account into the business account is very common and something you'll need to do until you kind of become a little bit more profitable.

Yeah, it's one of the ways. So we probably have. In any. Well, I should probably know exactly what this number is, but it's probably like seven or eight sets of books that we have running at any time, like, different QuickBooks accounts. And part of it is. So we have our operating businesses, right. Food Blogger Pro is one of them. Pinch of Yum, we have Curbly, which is a small home DIY site. Clarity, which is another site. We also have real estate, which we run as, like, a separate set of books. And I think for anybody who hasn't kind of slowly walked through the process of building those up, you'd think, like, oh, my gosh, like, there's just like, all of this information. How do you keep track of it? But the review process is actually really easy because we have separate accounts for every business. Money flows in and money flows out. And then we work with a bookkeeper. And they know generally, hey, if there's revenue from this place, here's how it's categorized. If there's an expense from this place, here's how it's categorized. And our review process each month is simply going through and making sure that everything is categorized correctly. And usually 98% of it is. And then occasionally there'll be something where it's like, oh, actually, this was like, you know, a hotel in New York. It's not like a office expense. We need to categorize that a little bit differently. But we're only able to do that because we have separate books or we have separate bank accounts for every business. Every business has its own either debit card or credit card. And the money is flowing in and out with really hard lines. And what that allows us to do is have multiple sets of books that we're looking at and to feel confident on the profitability of those businesses or if the business is operating at a loss, the loss that that is operating at. And it's been super helpful for us to have the clarity around that. But what it requires is some diligence on the front end, getting those set up and optimized and making sure that anytime that we're doing an expense, you know, in Amazon, we're using the right credit card. I just bought some, like, door stops. And so it's like, I gotta make sure that's the right credit card when I had those shipped. So let's say somebody does have that set up. You have those bank accounts separate. It's really tight. You have your books, you're starting to do those on a cadence. You have a good idea of the profitability or the loss that's happening within it. How do you keep track of and what is the system you'd recommend for receipts? Because I think that's another thing is making sure that you have this information at any point, if you are ever audited. Right. Like, that's really what we're trying to do with all this is to be as intentional and methodical and not aggressive, but just playing within the rules and keeping a tight system to make sure that we have as much as appropriate running through as expenses within the businesses. But we also need to validate that with receipts to show, hey, this is actually a business expense and we need to have those for what, seven years? So what would your advice be for people who want to create an equally tight system for keeping track of that information, like receipts?

Yeah, that's a big question that I get asked as well, is how many of the receipts do we need to be keeping? And so few things. One, the receipt does not need to be kept unless it is over $75 or unless it's a meal and entertainment. So if it's from a restaurant or something like that. So, you know, that may rule out a lot of these expenses. The $5Amazon purchase or you run to the down the street. I have a gas station that I have down the street and I run down there most all shoot days to go pick up something. You know, it's $3 for $5 here. Yeah. Something like that I don't have to keep that receipt because it's below that threshold. If I'm doing a really big grocery run and it's $150, I will, I will have to keep that receipt. And so what I do, I'm very simplistic with this. I do not have another app. Have another, you know, I don't have any other technology that I'm using. I will take a photo with my phone with just my phone app, and I will email it to myself while I'm unloading the groceries. I do not throw the receipt out until I've taken a photo of it with my phone. And I will email it to my, my blog email address and then I throw the receipt away. And next time I'm at my computer, I will drag that email into a receipts folder that I have in my Gmail. I have it broken out by quarters. And so I have like a Q Q4 20, 24 open right now. And so whatever receipts I'm getting, I'll go drag it into that folder and then I forget about it. That's, that's kind of my, my, my, my system that I do. That's what works for me. Again, any of those restaurants, if I go out to dinner, you know, occasionally I'll go out with my husband and we'll have like a little business meeting and I'll chat about what maybe I need his help with and how the business is going to those. It's probably going to be over $75. I will write on there like, you know, dinner with husband or whatnot. Again, take a receipt, take a photo of it, and then email it to myself. And then whenever I'm at my, my desk, I'll drag it into that box. The good, the good news with a lot of those, you know, e receipts now is that if you are audited, you can pretty much pull up your Amazon and probably look and say, okay, I spent $50 on something. What was it? And you can pretty much go figure that out. It's really just those bigger dollar ones and from those areas that may look like personal. Again, if you go spend $200 at Target, who's to say you didn't go buy a bunch of exercise equipment for personal use, but really you bought a KitchenAid mixer or something from Target. That's why they're asking for that. And it's with food bloggers in particular. Just that much more important to remember that, hey, I spent $200 at Target. I got to take a photo of this and go Send it to my email. And I'll do that too, with anything, even if it's not over 75, if it's 60 bucks or 50 bucks, and I'm like, hey, this is kind of a weird one. I don't usually buy something from here. I'll just take a photo of it. Literally email it to myself just to kind of have some CIA in my. In my email.

Yeah, it's really what it is, is you can pick how tight you want your system to be and it's just a matter of how much work do you want to do in the unlikely scenario you are audited.

Yeah.

If you have no system, let's say you just throw everything, every physical receipt into a big box and you know, it collects over 10 years, it still maybe will work if the receipts don't fade. Like you could still, but you'd have to do a lot of work. Or you could do a lot of work on the front end, have a really organized system. And then when you are audited, you could be like, ah, this isn't going to be as much work because here's my tight system. But even I think back to, I was reading a book by the founders of Basecamp, huge company, you know, multiple millions of dollars, and they had the exact same process you did. They had team members, but they had one central email inbox that was their receipt. I don't know if this is how they still do it. At the time they wrote the book, it was. And everybody just emailed their receipts into that central inbox. And then Gmail's so great at sorting and you can look and uh. And so the system, like you said, can be really simple and doesn't have to be complex. And even if you have a, you know, if you buy on Amazon, it's going to be recorded anyways and so it's. It's going to be there. So I think it's great, but important for people to have like some type of system, especially for physical receipts, that you're documenting those. Before we continue, let's take a moment to hear from our sponsors. This episode is sponsored by Clarity. Here's the thing. We know that food blogging is a competitive industry. So anything you can do to level up your content can really give you an edge. By fixing content issues and filling content gaps, you can make your good content even better. And wouldn't it be awesome if you could figure out how to optimize your existing blog posts without needing to comb through each and every post one by one? Or I. I know some of you have done this Create a mega Excel sheet with manually added details for each post that's soon to be outdated anyway. That's why we created Clarity to save you time, simplify the process, and make it easy. So with a subscription to Clarity, you can clearly see where your content needs to be optimized. Like which of your posts have broken links or missing alt text. Maybe there's no internal links or what needs to be updated seasonally. Plus, you can easily see the impact of your edits in the keyword dashboard for each post. Here's a quick little testimonial from Laura and Sarah from WanderCooks. They said with GA4 becoming increasingly difficult to use, Clarity has been a game changer for streamlining our data analytics and blog post performance process. That's awesome. That's why we built it. And it's so fun to hear from users like Laura and Sarah. So as a listener of the Food Blogger Pro podcast, you can sign up and get 50% off your first month of clarity. To set up your account, simply go to clarity. That's C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com food that's clarity.com food thanks again to Clarity for sponsoring this episode. One thing I wanted to ask you about is going out to eat, because I know that things have changed with that in terms of that being expensed and even like I think of for myself. Lindsay and I will go out to eat, we'll talk about business stuff, we'll talk about other things. There's maybe been like one or two times in the past year where I have expensed that because it was kind of like we went out as a business meeting. But I've always wondered. It feels like, gosh, if we go out and we're talking half the time about something that's happening within the businesses or ideas that we have, is that technically it feels like a cheat code a little bit because she's a business partner. Like we are 5050 in this business. And if it was somebody that I didn't like going out to dinner with, but it was a business meeting, it would feel more justified. But like I love going out to dinner with Lindsay and it's kind of like a business meeting.

Yeah.

So you, you technically can expense that, but even then it sounds like. Or my understanding is that you business like meals aren't fully deductible within the current tax code. Is that right?

Correct. Yes. So there, there was a bit of like a Covid relief with business meals in order to incentivize people to go eat at restaurants because the restaurant industry was so harmed. And so they gave a bit of like a relief and allowed business meals to be deducted 100%. That went away in 2022. So 2023, they've now reverted back. They've always been 50% deductible. And that is because there's that personal element. You know, you have to eat, you're going to have breakfast, you know, regardless. But if it's a breakfast meeting that you're having with an associate or something like that, then maybe 50% of it can be pushed through the business. It is different when you're married to a business partner and every meal that you have out maybe seems like, like a business meal. And so I, you know, I throw that reasonable word out there. Again, that reasonableness is going to be different for everybody. But I usually tell clients reasonable in just number of times a month. You know, I could maybe see max, you know, two, three times a month maybe. But then also dollar, you know, don't go to a, you know, a big Brazilian, you know, and everything, you know, if you do do that maybe only once or twice a year is what you're doing for business meals. As my husband and I have like a quarterly. We go out once a quarter and I'll update him on kind of how my business is doing. He helps me. He helps me with a few things. So I'll maybe say, hey, I really want to dive into this. I want your help with creating this newsletter or something like that. And we'll have specific things that we chat about. And it's once a quarter is what. Is what we do. But if you're more frequent than that, if you knew where to go, like have a business meeting once a month, I could totally see that being reasonable and definitely something I would push through the business.

It's almost like, what is the intent with it? And if the business intent is leading, hey, let's go out and talk through this, and might as well get a breakfast burrito, as long as we're doing it versus let's go get a breakfast burrito. And while we're there, we end up kind of chatting on the side about some business thing. It's easier for me to imagine in a scenario where it's like, hey, let's do a business meeting, and we're going to do that meeting over dinner or lunch or breakfast or whatever.

Right?

And then within books, then it's just in a category called meals and entertainment. Is that right? And that at the end of the year, the CPA will know to take 50% of that versus all of it.

Yeah, yeah. Most tax softwares, you'll just input the whole thing and then most tax softwares will automatically only take 50% of it.

Got it. And which is why that categorization is so important because some of those categories operate differently than another. Like let's say your computer as an example.

Exactly.

Let's keep going down the line. So that's, you know, we talked early stage, we talked kind of middle stages are starting to get started. Being strategic with expenses. Once you actually start to make money, there are some things that you can do that save you quite a bit of money just by changing what type of businesses it is. I'm thinking of an S election or setting your business up as an S Corp specifically. It gets a little bit into the numbers and the nitty gritty. But can you talk about this? No brainer step. That is the S election. And at what point of profitability should a business owner look to have an S election within their business?

Yeah, so the S Corp has been kind of a big talking point with a lot of business owners frequently. And it's something I like to talk about very early. Just because it is such a game changer when it comes to taxes. It can save thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars when done at the. At the right time. But it does. I'm also upfront. It comes with a lot of these nuances as well that I'll kind of chat about. But typically when a business is profitable, I like to see around like 50,000 in profit is. Is pretty much the range that I like to see. When we start talking about the S Corp, that's when the benefit of making the S Corp starts to outweigh the cost.

So you have $100,000 in revenue, $50,000 in expenses. You have $50,000 left over at the end of the year. If you're in that range, the numbers could look different. You could have $75,000 of revenue, $25,000 expenses. But right around 50 is when you'd want to start.

Yeah, yeah. Right around 50 is when that. Because there is a cost involved with the S Corp. 1, there's going to be an extra tax return. So there's actually a business tax return that has to be filed and it's due a month before personal taxes are due. So it's going to be due March 15. And nowadays it actually is a pretty hefty tax return. You've got shareholder Basis that you've got to track. You've got, you know, all these different things. It's basically the business's books. When the bookkeeping is done correctly, it makes, it makes it a little bit easier, but it's a pretty hefty business tax return. And so you've got that cost involved, but then you also have this little thing called payroll. And that is one of the requirements of being an S corp is that the owner has to be on payroll and they have to be being paid a reasonable salary. And that comes with the cost. You know, whatever processor you use, if you use a QuickBooks or Augusto, there's a bunch of them out there. It's going to cost you at least about 40 bucks a month just to kind of maintain that. And I'm biased, but I do feel as though if you're an S corp, you'd probably need someone verifying that, hey, the quarterly reports are being done correctly. Some states are now requiring people to file monthly. We got to make sure that that's all buttoned up. Payroll taxes are just not something that you really want to mess with. You want to make sure that they're done correctly. And so all that kind of mess comes with making the S Corp election. The benefit of the S Corp comes with the reduction of self employment tax. So when someone's an LLC or a sole proprietor and you know they start to make a profit, they're going to get hit with this self employment tax. You know, they kind of like to hide it. It's called other taxes. It's in a line item on your tax return called other taxes. And it's a little bit over 15%, but it's the full flat 15.3% on top of the entire business profit. So as you make more money, that tax is going to continue to go up. It can be pretty harsh. It doesn't care what tax bracket you're in. And so that's where the S Corp comes into play. It's going to remove the self employment tax entirely from your tax return. And basically the catch is that you need to be set up on payroll and you will be paying payroll tax, which is basically the same thing as self employment tax, but you can kind of divvy it up. So if you have a $50,000 profit, maybe you start running $30,000 through salary, but you've now shifted $20,000 away from the 15% tax. So you've saved roughly $3,000, probably a little bit more than that. So that's kind of where the cost starts to. To be lower than the benefit is worth with at that $50,000 mark.

And you hear people talk about this idea of, like, a corporation is a person. Like, it's this kind of separate entity outside of people, outside of, like, your personhood. And where you can kind of see that is as it plays out on a tax return, where, like you said, suddenly you have a new return. And it's almost like, hey, here's this other thing on the side. It's a corporation. There's different types of corporations, but the one that we'd be looking at would be an S corp. And so it's like, how much did that thing make? And taxes are treated differently there. And you, like you said, have this W2 income that's coming through and you're getting paid. So for us, as an example for us is we use a company called justworks, which is a peo. So they do, essentially, they do all the heavy lifting of all that stuff that you talked about, like the, you know, state taxes, federal taxes, payroll taxes, all of that. If I go in and look at my salary, which I have a salary that I get paid from the business, and I click down to see all of the little percentages and stuff, it's like, oh, my gosh. I try to do it on my own for like six minutes 10 years ago. And I was like, I gotta figure out another solution. Because it's so complicated. And especially if you start to have remote team members and other places. But the basic idea is you go from. If you just have an LLC or a sole proprietorship, you go from everything that you are earning being taxed as if it's like straight income to you, to things kind of being separated out into different buckets. So you have your W2 Inc. In an S Corp situation, you have your W2 income, and then you have things on top of that which aren't taxed as much. Now, some people might say, well, then how do you get that information? Or how do you get that income out? You just take it as a. You just transfer it over. Like, it's still money that you can get whenever you want. It's just categorized differently. So it feels a little bit like a cheat code by just taking this election and changing how you are paying yourself. But you have to make sure that the salary you're paying yourself is fair and appropriate. So how do you come up with that number?

Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, the S corp, I mean, it's. I tell people it is not some, like, shady loophole. It is there for small business owners to make that election because the self employment tax can be so high and there's like, you know, maybe a few rules that you have to meet in order to do the escort. But most food bloggers do, do qualify. Basically you got to be a US citizen. You can't have over 100 shareholders. So there can't be a hundred people that own your food blog and you can't be owned by a foreign corporation. You know, most food bloggers are like, check, check, check. But most Fortune 500 companies will not be able to make that S Corp election. So it's not some weird loophole. It's definitely there for small business owners to make.

Yeah. I should clarify when I say cheat code. Oh yeah, no, adjacent to, adjacent to tax law. It's not actually cheating anything. It just feels so easy like you're entering in this one thing on a tax return. And obviously like you said, there's additional considerations. Payroll, it costs more from a reporting perspective, but there's not really downside. And I think technically s Corp or LLCs with an S election have like a lower audit risk than just like standard LLCs or sole proprietors. So there's. Yeah, it's like if you're at that point where you're making 50,000 and you haven't made an S election, it kind of seems like you should. Probably should.

Yeah. Yes, yes, absolutely. Yeah. And the election form is so easy. It's literally a two page form and it requires, you know, one signature. And I, I kind of joke and I'm like, it's so easy to make that election. It's what happens afterwards that you want to make sure it's buttoned up with the payroll and all of that. You mentioned the reasonable salary. That's probably like the biggest red flag when it comes to an S corp that you want to make sure is buttoned up is running a quote unquote reasonable salary. So it's a little backwards versus if you were interviewing for a corporate job, you want to try to negotiate a really high salary as high as you can. But when you're an S corp, it's kind of backwards. You want to talk yourself down into a very low salary because whatever you run through payroll is going to get hit with payroll tax. So it's that 15%. And so whatever you can shield out of that salary piece reasonably is going to save you that much more money. And so the word reasonable is kind of what we've been given by the irs. I wish that there was some threshold that they could say, you need to pay yourself at least this, this minimum. And unfortunately that's not. It's up to, to us to decide what that is. It's going to be different for everyone. Most accountants are going to agree about $30,000, $40,000 salary is kind of, you know, reasonable nowadays. Like I said, it depends. I've got a few clients that are, that maybe don't operate their food blog full time. They need some. It's still a profitable food blog, but they may be only working at 15 hours a week and they're fully remote. They're full time mom or something like that on the side. And I'm like, okay, well you were to go get this, this job elsewhere and work 15 hours a week. Maybe we can justify a $30,000 salary and you know, and whatnot. So it kind of varies person to person with that reasonable kind of, kind of range. I can tell you with a lot of accountants, this is like highly debated, but the ratio of what you run through salary and what's available for the owner distributions that you talked about is, you know, is kind of different. So most accountants are going to see like a 50, 50 ratio. So whatever, you're making a profit. Think a 50% run through salary. 50% is available for owner distributions, but that can kind of be wiggled up and down a little bit just depending on personal circumstances.

Sure. And I've heard too, people talk about, you said this, kind of alluded to it. If you were to go out into the open market and you were to hire for that position, what would that be? And an example might be you might be an owner of a business. This probably wouldn't happen. But like, you might have a, you might have hired a CEO and they come in and then your role is you are playing the role of marketer. And so you might have somebody in your business who's earning more than you. You're in the marketing position. But it, but you'd have to, it seems like you'd have to be able to justify, hey, here's what's happening within the company. Here's why my salary's at this point. An example was year or two ago, Lindsey went down to three days a week. She was previously working. I don't remember what the shift was. Four days a week, you know, four and a half days a week. And she went to three days a week. And so we reduced her salary strategically as a part owner of the company, you know, but my salary that year went up a little bit because I didn't change My hours. And we wanted to, you know, accommodate for inflation as an example. So yeah, it. It feels like that's maybe a good starting point too, is just to think about what is your. If you were to go out into the open market and hire for this, what would this, what would this be on the market?

Yeah. And the example that the IRS gives, I laugh at it because it's about. It's about a janitor and what a janitor would make going out into the world. Like, what would they be paid? And most janitors I feel like are W2 employees, not S corp people, but I think it's that they use that as an example. But as a food blogger, think about what you're doing. It's a lot of social media, it's a lot of recipe development. Basically a bunch of contractors just kind of rol up into one. And so think about what you would maybe pay someone else to do that and then start kind of extrapolating into a salary component.

And it's probably hard to find somebody who would do all those things. Maybe that's the point you're making, is somebody who just would post to social media might not be that much, but somebody who is taking pictures, posting to social media, developing recipes, thinking about marketing, that's probably a pretty rare, unique position.

Right?

You know, all those things kind of rolled up into one should be a consideration.

Yeah.

So marching along here, we've talked through these different considerations. The S Corp one, even if you don't understand, for anybody listening, all the different components of tossing these things out, S Corporation LLC with an S election, both of those are kind of operating the same way. It can be confusing. The point is basically, if you are making $50,000 in profit or more, you should make sure that you have this. Talk to your CPA about it. If you don't have a cpa, you should probably find one at this point. But moving along, businesses become more profitable, you start to make more money. You start to think strategically around going back to that idea of CEO, hey, what does it look like to diversify? You've done that within your own businesses. You have your blog, but you also have multiple operating businesses. You also probably start to think about, with this income that I'm getting, should I invest it in other places? What have you seen? Because, and obviously you wouldn't talk in specifics, but you have a really interesting X ray vision into all sorts of different businesses, all sorts of different financial situations. You get to see how people are thinking strategically about their finances, investments, diversification, what Are some of the things that you have seen people do strategically, maybe things that you have done or even recommendations that you'd make to people listening as they get to make more and more money within their business and how they can start to be strategic with the allocation of that money.

Yeah. And that this is like a huge topic that I've been chatting with my own clients about. Just with the, you know, kind of volatility of the ad revenue, you know, the Google changes and all of that are kind of maybe making some people say, hey, I can't rely just on ad network. I need to diversify more. I want to get some sponsored stuff maybe. You absolutely hate working with sponsored. So that's not an option. Affiliate stuff. There's e books. I've seen people do membership sites as well. So it's kind of the same thing that you're doing with the blog. But maybe people are paying for no ads or something like that is kind of any way that you can diversify outside of an ad network is only going to make it more beneficial for you. And so I'm having kind of different conversations with people about that, not only with the actual revenue stream, but also the traffic. I'm seeing people diversify with YouTube or with, you know, TikTok or all these other revenue streams. Facebook is getting to be really, really big again. And so diversifying there is also going to be super important. The, like the, the one that I'm seeing just kind of sprint towards the front is actually affiliate revenue. And I have this like, theory that sponsored, sponsored content is going to be replaced by affiliate revenue. I just see a lot of marketers that are, instead of paying a food blogger, you know, $5,000 to go do this holiday campaign about their stand mixer, instead they're going to go contract with, you know, a variety of, of platforms that are going to offer some sort of affiliate kind of kind of commission. And so I'm seeing this just kind of, kind of really increase in affiliate revenue myself as well as with a bunch of my clients as well. And I just have this theory that it's going to kind of surpass sponsored content. I think it's easier for marketers to track that. Hey, we, we spent $5,000 into this campaign and it produced X amount of revenue where it's difficult to, to do that when you're doing a sponsored post to see how much that food blogger is actually generating in revenue. And so that, that affiliate thing I think is very interesting to see how people are, are kind of navigating that and what they're kind of dipping their toe into. But I think that's definitely one not to sleep on. Is that a. Yeah.

Is that on social? Like, is that primarily. You're probably seeing it within the numbers a little bit and then you're able to see where that result. The res. The. The. Where that originated from. But even just on the market itself, people. Is that primarily where you're seeing it or on sites or.

Yeah, no, I'm seeing it on sites as well. I'm seeing it on. On websites and on social media. The evolution of the deep link. I don't know if you've heard of deep links before. I feel like that whole like into.

A, like a really specific product versus like a general landing page or. What do you mean by deep link?

Like a, like Amazon's a big one. And so typically get on social. If you are in the Instagram app and you go click on a link and someone's trying to take you over to Amaz. Amazon, Instagram will not let. Let you leave the app. It'll open up the Insta. The. The Amazon webpage inside the Instagram app. Sorry, tongue twisters. But it's not. It doesn't have you logged in. So you then have to go log into your Amazon account and no one's going to do that. And so you've basically lost that commission. And so Deep Links is something I'm seeing a lot of people use. I know URL Genius is a big one. And it basically, it has code that's embedded. And so when you go put that into your Instagram story, it basically tells Instagram to open up the Amazon in the Amazon app and it'll do it for Target and Walmart and a bunch of these other partners as well. I mean, it's. I've seen clients, and myself included, like quadruple what my affiliate revenue would have been from Amazon when I started using deep links. So that's definitely something interesting to look at.

So the basic premise being there's a specific type of link you can use when you're doing affiliate that will allow you. That will be interpreted within a phone to open the app where somebody's already logged in, as opposed to the generic site where somebody's not logged in. And you can imagine if you go and you see the Buy now button in the app, it's going to be so much easier than it is if you have to log in. And as little work as that sounds, I think for most people it's like too much work. I'm not going to buy it. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, that's great. I didn't know about that and maybe folks on our team did, but I'll make a note of that just personally. How about beyond. Let's say you have a business that starts to create revenue. Are you seeing or advising or do you even have opinions on what to do with some of the surplus income that people are starting to make? Let's say you're a creator and you make, you know, 50,000 and you don't have additional expenses. You know, you have 50,000 left over at the end of the year. Let's say you, you've paid everything you need, you went on your vacation. How, how could people. I know it's a little bit outside of the box of like bookkeeper, cpa, but you also probably have opinions on how you can think strategically as a business owner about allocating that money just as we close out. What are your thoughts on doing that? Kind of at the 301 level? You've built a business, it's profitable, it's covering your needs, you kind of have this surplus in income. What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, yeah, there's a bunch of stuff that we can do. This is again, a common question I get. I get asked. So it's going to be with a bunch of S corps that are maybe generating more, more income than they're, than they're spending. 1. I'm big on retirement accounts. I think that it's literally taking money from one purse and putting it into basically a purse in your other hand. No, you can't access it until later, but it's still your purse. And it's also going to be a bunch of tax advantages to that too. So I like to recommend that to clients first if they're like, hey, I've got some extra cash in here. It's actually timed really well for a lot of food bloggers because you can contribute to most retirement accounts until their taxes are filed in April. And that's usually when that Q4AD network is paying out. And so maybe there's a little bit of a bump in cash there and we can maybe reduce the taxes and it all flows pretty, pretty nicely. So retirement is going to be one of my first recommendations. Now, obviously that's going to change person to person depending on your goals. If you're saving for a down payment for a home, maybe you don't go shove it into a retirement account if you're 25 years old, but that's one thing that you can do. Second is Actually opening up a like business brokerage account so you can open those up. Fidelity has a business brokerage account, Schwab does. And it's basically putting money into something that can make money for you. So different types of investments and whatnot. There are all sorts of robo advisors if you want to kind of, kind of do that. You can also hire an actual financial advisor to go kind of run it, run it through for you if you want and kind of go invest in different stocks and bonds and all of that. It kind of helps, helps your money make money for you instead of just sitting in a business bank account. If you do want it to sit in a business bank account, there are all sorts of high yield savings accounts that you can do as well that will give you a little bit, a little bit extra. It's not going to be anything astronomical, but at least your money's working for you. So I'm going to lump that into kind of those are. That's like option number two is that brokerage account or the high yield savings. And the third, which is gaining a lot of popularity and you mentioned it before as well, is going to be the rental properties. I'm seeing a lot of people do that as well. I do recommend shifting that over into more of a, of a personal element or starting another business. I would not. Rentals and S Corps don't mix. So I would definitely take an owner distribution and either wrap it into another LLC or start some sort of personal rental as well. That's a great spot to go invest your money. If you have a good chunk that again, hopefully you're not going to need it anytime soon. It's not going to be very liquid, but that is going to be a really good investment option.

Yeah, it's actually one of the things I love about it. It's not liquid. It's like I can't access it.

Right.

If I'm tempted to buy something really big, which not often am I tempted to do that. But it's harder to access, which I really like. And I'll throw out just a couple specific resources that we found helpful for personal. If people wanted like high yield personal savings accounts, there's one that we've used Max My Interest, which has this like stack of high yield accounts. And I think the business equivalent of that is called American Deposits. And then one of the things that we do is with all the accounts in our personal account too is we keep like a rolling three months of expenses. So we look at the past 12 months for any business and for Also personal. And we say how much have we spent over the last 12 months on average? And then keep three months of expenses within those, which is maybe a little bit aggressive in that it's not three, it's not six months. But when you kind of look across the businesses, there's cash reserves there and then anything above and beyond that, we're saying, okay, how do we like keep this money working? And like you said, it's stock markets, is brokerage accounts, real estate, potentially. What do you see and what would you recommend from an expensive like savings three months, six months. And any approach that, that you'd take personally from what you've seen, because you don't want to have too much sitting in there, but you also don't want it to get too lean where suddenly you have to have a tax payment and you can't make it or some other big expense comes up and you can't cover it.

Yeah, yeah, I like three months is actually like a textbook accounting. It's usually three to six months months just due to the like the margins of a food blog though I think three months is a pretty, it's a pretty good amount to keep in the bank account. That's personally what I do and it's what I recommend to a lot of my clients is a good three months. It also depends on like where you are in the year. Like right now when we're in Q4, you know, your, your cash is probably going to pop up a little bit more vice versa. But yeah, three months and then I take everything else out and I go and invest it in different, different opportunities. And if I am maybe planning on, hey, I really want to invest in this mastermind, it's going to be a bigger expense. I just transfer the money back in. Maybe it's from a brokerage account, but at least it spent a year, you know, making money. And then I'm just going to go transfer it back in. So what you just don't want to do is go spend it all, you know, tax payment, you know, that's what I, that's like my worst nightmare is someone to spend money and they haven't paid tax on it yet.

Yeah, like they've made, let's say extreme scenario. You're super successful, you make a million dollars in a year, you spend it all, but then you're like, oh wait, I need to pay $400,000 in taxes that you didn't plan for. And like you said, kind of worst case scenario.

Yeah.

So that would be, maybe we can put a pin in that as we come to the end. Just make sure that you plan for those quarterly tax payments as well as you start to become more profitable. That's a consideration as well. My guess is, Ansley, people coming out of this are going to have more questions. Some questions will be answered, but they'll see additional questions or opportunities. Really might be interested in kind of leveling up, starting to do a better job of bookkeeping, doing their taxes, seeing the advantage of doing that, Potentially interested in working with you if they want to do that. What's the best way to connect with you and your team?

Yes, so you can look at our website, peachperfectfinancials.com we have a little inquiry form that you can fill out and I'll hop on a discovery call and kind of chat with everyone. I like to have a personal chat with everyone to kind of get to know their business and whatnot. But you also see you'll see a bunch of our services there too to see if it'll align with what you need there.

Awesome, Ansley. Thanks so much for coming on again. It was great to talk.

Yes, great to talk to you.

Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and thank you so much for listening to that episode. We really appreciate it. If you liked this episode or enjoy the show, we would really appreciate you leaving a review or rating wherever you listen to your podcast. Podcast episodes, ratings and reviews help get the show in front of new listeners and help us grow our little show into something even bigger. We read each and every review and it makes us so happy to hear when you're enjoying the podcast or what you would like us to improve or change in upcoming episodes. All you have to do is find the Food Blogger Pro podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, whether it's on Apple or Spotify or another player, and enter a rating and review. While you're there, make sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss a new episode. We really appreciate it so much and it makes such a huge difference for our show. So thanks in advance and that's all we have for you today, so have a great week.