Monthly Archives: March 2020

It saves Time If you run an online shop and continue to use the old invoicing method manually. Don’t it bother doing all the invoicing material?

Not only does it take loads of time that can be used for many other tasks, but it’s also very easy to make expensive bugs in your invoices. This is especially true if you don’t keep them regularly in one position.

Customers do not like mistakes, but you want ratings of five stars! Here is your guide to understand why your future is in online invoices.

With invoicing software you can save a lot of time. You don’t have to spend hours completing the invoices physically, but you also get the invoice faster.

You can rest assured that your invoice comes on time and you can easily track it through a digital invoicing tool. If the correct e-commerce software has been chosen for the task.

Most electronic invoicing software can also be used to send invoices online with just one click by PayPal or by credit card. This is time-saving and easy to use, and we call that a double win.

You do not even have to worry about invoicing when you select an invoicing software that automatically creates and sends your invoices, but you can focus on something else a business needs.

Paperwork is no longer in use.

You don’t have to fight online invoicing tools with paperwork, as you have your entire accounts online.

Automated software invoicing ensures the correct numbering of invoices and correct invoice details. The invoices can be sorted by days, months or quarters, copied or printed by a retailer so you can pass them on.

If you’re not in the office, suppose you need somebody’s invoice. You don’t need to carry a paperwork binder any longer. You can just log onto the app and can use the invoices online, and all of your accounting is available at any time on your smartphone, tablet or computer.

Keep track of your cash

In contrast to manual billing, you get a great overview of all your purchases and invoices with invoice software. You never lose your debtors ‘ track, so you don’t lose your money.

High-quality invoicing software sorts your bills by order status, allowing you to keep track of your invoice based on different variables: sending, paying, due or overdue invoices.

Unlike the dealer who manually creates an invoice, it is possible to send reminders using automated invoice software when the payment due date (which you would certainly like to keep track of) passes on to your customer!

Finally, when it comes to monitoring your money, and invoicing software can also be used to check your own inventory so you can properly track all your sales and everything you need to be restored.

Your invoices are legal

The Invoicing app is especially useful in legal matters. It is highly recommended to keep records of your financial transactions to keep your accounts clear (if not necessary).

A software invoicing ensures that your “paperwork” is always in order. The facts can drift to the back of your mind now. You have much to remember. You don’t need hours of devotion for tax or other legislative purposes to find and prepare them.

As a seller, you know that, in accordance with national tax policies, the invoices must meet certain standards. You can become a sweetheart to try to stick up various factors and the tax rates when you sell to countries all over the world!

This blog post can be divided into really like three general chunks. First, I’m going to explain what an LLC is, and why they’re so popular. Second, I’ll explain the downsides of an LLC and why you might not want one. And third, I’ll walk through some other options you have for protecting your assets. First, let’s talk about what an LLC is, and what it isn’t.

An LLC is not a get out of jail free card. You can be sued with an LLC, and you can lose everything. An LLC is not designed to prevent you from ever being sued, an LLC’s designed to help you manage and contain the fallout from that lawsuit. So, according to the United States, Small Business Administration, SBA, a limited liability company is a hybrid type of legal structure that provides the limited liability features of a corporation, and the tax efficiencies and operational flexibilities of a partnership. According to this definition, an LLC’s benefits are threefold.

If you were to get sued, your liability or the damage to your wallet may be contained to the assets within the LLC, not everything else you own. In other words, if an LLC is set up right and you get sued and lose, the creditors probably won’t be able to come and take your personal house or your car or garnish your W-2 job wages. There are ways a judge might pierce the protection of an LLC and go after those things. If every I was not dotted and every T was not crossed. All right.

The LLC is fairly easy to handle during tax time, especially if it’s a single-member LLC, which basically means you own it or you and your spouse. LLC’s are known as pass-through entities, which means the income and expenses flow magically through the LLC, and are instead reported and paid by each individual member on their personal income statement. There is no corporate tax a corporation may pay. This can definitely make taxes easier and less expensive than let’s say, a big C-corp. That said, while a single-member LLC does not require its own business tax return, a multi-member LLC with partners does. Don’t make that mistake.

An LLC is fairly flexible in terms of running it. You don’t need a thousand documents, you don’t need a bunch of stock issued. It’s fairly easy to set up, barely inexpensive depending on where you’re at. So, it’s easy to see why an LLC might be advantageous to a real estate investor. I mean, let’s just say a tenant slips on the stairs, bam, and broke their hip, right? The tenant decides to sue the landlord for neglect, and the court sides with the tenant. For whatever reason, let’s say, your insurance doesn’t cover all the legal penalties and you as the owner are required to pay $500,000 out of pocket to the tenant. Well, if you own the property without an LLC, the tenant could have your wages garnished and force you to sell all your properties and drive you to bankruptcy. You’ll probably end up eating cold beans out of a can under a bridge while pigeons sit on your shoulder.

It’s not a fun place to be. On the other hand, if the owner of that property was the main street investments LLC, then the LLC is the owner getting sued. The courts could make you sell that property, but they likely won’t going to make you sell the other properties owned by other LLCs. They won’t take your primary residence, you won’t be eating cold beans. Of course, this example is a bit overdramatized and unlikely to happen. And I actually don’t mind eating cold beans. But it does illustrate the fear that drives most investors to want an LLC. However, even though it sounds like I might be encouraging you to go get an LLC right now, hold your horses. There are some other important factors to consider. So, LLC’s can be awesome, but let’s talk about the problems with an LLC and real estate.

LLC’s are great. I’m not going to deny that. However, they might not be great for you. There are some fairly important considerations to make before you jump into the LLC bandwagon that could affect your decision. For example, and maybe most importantly, lending on an LLC is almost impossible for residential properties. That’s right. If you plan on using a loan to acquire an investment property like a single or duplex, triplex, fourplex, it’s unlikely you can have an LLC own the property. Most residential lenders simply will not lend on property inside of an LLC, and that makes you have to go to a commercial lender, has higher fees, higher rates, shorter terms, something you probably don’t want to do. Now, many investors simply transfer the ownership of the property into an LLC after purchasing the property in their own name, but that does present some risks as well.

If the bank finds out, and they probably will, due to insurance reasons, they get updated to that. They might call your note due, because of the due on sale clause. Of course, you didn’t actually sell the property, but you did transfer the title from one entity, your name, to another, your LLC. Now, in the past, this has never really been a problem as banks generally turn a blind eye to this, but it seems it could change in the future. And it’s really only expected to get worse as interest rates go up. So, if you plan to go that route, I recommend, speak with your bank, get permission in writing to transfer the property into an LLC. This is really the only way you’ll be truly protected from that dreaded due on sale clause transferring from you to an LLC. All right. One other issue with an LLC, well, ask yourself, what are you really protecting and spending all this time and energy doing?

New investors automatically think they need an LLC to protect themselves, but when you’re first starting out, how much wealth do you really need to protect right then? Think about it, you’ve got a property or maybe two with very little equity. You got car payments, you don’t have six figures in the bank, you want to go through all the trouble to protect your wealth? Now finally, there are also a lot of additional documents and paperwork and hassle when working inside of an LLC. Just something to consider. While LLC’s are definitely easier than corporations when it comes to paperwork and taxes. They still add a lot of complications to the mix. This is especially true if the LLC contains several different unmarried members, as individual tax returns are not enough. You’re going to have to do business tax returns. It’s a mess. Setting up the LLC takes money as well. Maintaining it takes money. Filing taxes takes money. And that property, you’re probably not making that much cash flow anyway.

Think of this, imagine spending two grand a year on this LLC, and the house’s only cashflow is 1200 a year. Yeah, the LLCs can turn a good investment into a bad one. Right? Okay. So, now that you know some of the pros and the cons of LLCs, let me dish out some cold hard truth here to all the new investors. Here’s the thing that I’ve noticed. People like to set up LLCs because it makes them feel like they’re taking action, but in reality, they aren’t. In fact, the idea of an LLC is probably the number one excuse people have for not taking action. I see it almost every day on BiggerPockets. I want to invest in real estate, but I don’t know what to do about an LLC. So, I’m going to sit on the couch and eat cold beans. Now, help sir. Right? The truth is, people, use the concept of an LLC as an excuse so they don’t have to take action. Because it’s easier to say, I don’t have an LLC yet so I can’t go and invest than it is to say, I’m scared.

However, LLCs are no substitution for taking action. If you don’t have any wealth to protect, maybe you don’t need an LLC. And when you find yourself building wealth and creating a sizable business, well then maybe that’s when an LLC will come in most handy for you. By that time you’ll be able to afford the proper attorneys and CPAs who can handle setting the LLC upright. And maybe at that time they’ll tell you that you really don’t need one, or maybe you do need one, or maybe they’re going to set you up with something completely different. You’re not going to know unless you ask. All right. Finally, let’s talk about some of the other options besides LLC’s.

How do you protect your assets if you decide not to get one? Right? What should you do instead of an LLC? Looking back at the three main benefits of an LLC, there’s the tax efficiency, limited liability, and operational flexibility. So, what other legal structure can help you protect yourself from losing personal money if you get sued? And it’s easy to manage and pay taxes? I’ll suggest two things. Insurance and leverage. Let’s talk about both. Number one, insurance. That’s right. Good insurance can help you avoid eating cold beans under a bridge with the pigeon, right? Get the right insurance and get enough of it. Talk to a good insurance agent about your options, and let them know your fears. They’ll be more than happy to sell you the best policy possible. Two, leverage.

When someone is going to go sue you, what is their goal? To get as much money from you as possible, of course. That’s why leverage can actually be a large help in protecting your assets. By leverage, I mean, having little equity, low down payments. For example, if you owe 100 K on a property and the property is only worth 110 K, you are likely leveraged pretty high, right? People often look at that like it’s a bad thing, but asset protection is actually a huge benefit. What kind of lawyer is going to go after someone, spend hundreds of hours litigating and force them to sell their rental, only to have no blood to be squeezed from that turnip?

On the other hand, if you own a rental property free and clear, and it’s worth 110 K, suddenly the idea of suing you becomes much more exciting for an attorney, because they know there’s a ton of money for them to take. I’m not saying you should go up there increase the leverage on every property you own, right? That’s why we have insurance. But, what I am saying is that when you’re first starting out, you’re likely going to be highly leveraged. Thus, you’re not a very big target for lawyers to come after. The question still remains, should you get an LLC? Well, you’re not required to have one general, but I want to end this section with an answer that everyone hates. I don’t know. Talk to an attorney and a CPA.

CPA because only they are going to be able to tell you if you’re ready for an LLC. It’s a powerful legal entity, but only if it’s set up correctly, and only if it actually benefits you. And there is no easy way for me on this video to tell you what the case is in your life. However, I would encourage you not to let the LLC question stop you from moving forward with your real estate ambitions. Don’t let it be an excuse. Don’t let the fear of a lawsuit stop you from achieving your dreams. If you want an LLC, go get one. Go ask the right person.

Well, starting a photography business from home is something I did 20 years ago, so I can give you a few tips and tricks to do it successfully.

The first thing you’re going to want to do is please get yourself an education. I don’t care if you do it through college, university, or you hire a mentor, but you’ve got to know what you’re doing with that camera and you’ve got to know what you’re doing with the people on the other side of the camera.

A top photography hack that might surprise you, take a course in psychology. Understand how people work, because as a photographer, your clients should not remember you at all when they look at the pictures. When they look at their pictures, you want them to remember how fun it was for them to be together, to be with each other. Their job is to create memories. Your job is to document it, not to be this super-stressful photographer that’s trying to get the dad or the child to smile the whole time while the mom’s just fussing around trying to create clothing that’s not wrinkled or keep handprints off herself. They wanted to have a fun experience.

Get an education in photography and your camera, read your camera manual, and get some kind of education in psychology and how the human brain works and how to just work with people, especially if you’re doing portrait photography.

The first thing you’re going to want to do is to start building your portfolio. This means just going out there and shooting. If you’ve just created your portfolio with no images in it, there’s no reason for anyone to hire you as a photographer, so go shoot everything you possibly can and find your niche. You might find that you like landscapes. You might find that you love working with babies. You might find that you love doing families. Maybe you love to travel photography. Maybe you love weddings. Maybe you want engagements or maternity or couple shoots, or single or high fashion. There are so many different kinds of photography that I haven’t even scratched the surface on, so shoot everything you possibly can. When you do that, you’re going to find what you love to shoot most.

When I started, I literally shot everything. I would do still lifes. I would do travel. I would do macro. I would do this grunge feel. I would experiment with everything, and gradually I found which kind of photography that I love doing most. I had to go through a lot of weddings to learn this. I had to go through a lot of family shoots to learn this. I finally figured out, as I was sitting there on the beach in Mexico and I was watching this family play, that I was having the time of my life traveling and taking these epic pictures of not just families and couples, but of the architecture and of things that people don’t get to see every day. Travel photography and travel couples photography, that’s my niche. That’s what I love to do.

Will I do the occasional wedding every now and then? Sure. Will I do professional headshots every now and then? Absolutely, if I love it, if I want to work with that person, but my favorite thing to do is travel photography. That’s my niche. Discover your niche just by shooting everything that you possibly can, and save it for your portfolio.

A tip from the pro, get yourself an external hard drive, please, at least a few terabytes in size. I bought a two-terabytes external hard drive off of newegg.com a couple of years ago. That thing is almost full and it’s growing quickly, so get yourself an external hard drive for storage.

Also, please, pretty pretty please, back up your work offsite using a site like Carbonite. You are dealing with huge files here. You’re dealing with many huge files, and you’re dealing with priceless memories that you can’t get back. Unless you have a triple backup, meaning your hard drive, your external hard drive, and something offsite, you don’t have a backup at all, so triplicate or nothing, onsite, offsite, and on your hard drive. Please, please, please back up your work.

Also, something that I wish I had done when I was first starting out, metadata. If you don’t know about metadata, learn about metadata. Metadata is this little sidecar file, it is what it’s called. It’s all the information about your picture. It’s got the location of your picture. It’s got the time your picture was taken. It’s got your camera’s data on there, what f-stop, what aperture, what shutter speed. It’s got all of the information on there. You can actually manipulate that metadata to put some extra information in there.

For example, if you went to Mexico and you shot a family on the beach there, then you would go into that metadata and add the word Mexico, add the word family session, add the word Puerto Vallarta if they happen to be there, add whatever color they were wearing, or add the word beach, anything that describes that picture because you never know. You never know when you’re going to be inspired by a contest and want to pull your beach pictures, and then you want to find that one, but you’ve got so many files, you can’t find it because you didn’t add the beach to the metadata sidecar file. Manipulate that metadata sidecar file as soon as you shoot the picture and get it into your Lightroom. Add that metadata. I promise you, do yourself that favor right now.

Another thing you need to know when considering photography is Instagram. Instagram is where all the photographers hang out. In fact, a lot of photographers don’t even have a website anymore just because they’re using Instagram exclusively. Instagram is all about images, so start a very high-quality Instagram profile. In fact, you can check out some more of my videos on how to create a very stunning Instagram profile, which you’re going to need for your photography business.

That being said, you need to master hashtagging. Hashtagging is almost like adding data to your sidecar file in your pictures on your hard drive, except now you’re doing it for the public. If you have a wedding that you shot, make sure you hashtag #wedding and the location of your wedding. If you have a family, make sure you have all of the relevant hashtags with that. In fact, I have another video for you about how to find the most popular hashtag for your images. Become a ninja at hashtagging.

When you’re starting your own photography business, it’s so important to have contracts in place. If you’ve watched any of my other videos, you know that I care a lot about managing customer expectations. That’s why I’ve recorded so much content on it. Those are going to be all outlined in your contract, and you need your contact to cover you in case there’s some kind of a dispute. I don’t care. If you’re photographing friends and family and think, “Oh, I don’t need to do a contract for this one,” wrong. Get a contract. Have everyone read it and sign it.

On top of that, make sure you have an insurance policy. You can get a million-dollar insurance policy for usually less than 500 bucks in this industry. You should have that in place. You never know when someone’s going to trip and fall on a shoot. You never know if an accident is going to happen on a shoot. Heaven forbid, let’s be real here, but you want to have an insurance policy to back you up just in case. I promise you won’t be sorry.

You can also ensure your equipment on that policy. Every time you buy a piece of new equipment, add it to the policy. It shouldn’t cost you extra very often unless it’s a giant, huge piece of equipment. But include it all in your insurance policy.

When you’re starting your photography business, you want to define what your goals are. Do you want to just build a massive portfolio? Do you want to have a certain dollar amount that you’re making every year? Really be clear, crystal clear, on your goals and understand that you’ve got to deconstruct them and reverse engineer them.

For example, if you want to make $10,000 a month doing photography, how much are your portrait sessions? Maybe they’re $500 for a portrait session. How many times does 500 go into 10,000? How many of those $500 sales could you do in a week? How many people do you need to gather at your specific closing ratio, meaning how many closes with sales can you do out of how many people you talk to? How many of those can you close in order to get however many you need every week to get that dollar amount per month? Reverse engineer your goals and then have a daily action step to do with each of those.

We’ve talked contracts, we’ve talked about what to do with your images, we’ve talked storage, so I want to actually go to a question that came in on Quora. This question is from Tiberiu Tesileanu. I hope I pronounced your name right. Forgive me if I didn’t. And the question is this. Is photography meant only for the rich?

I want to tell you about one of my favorite photographers of all time. His name was Edward Weston. If you look up Edward Weston, you’re probably going to see a black and white photograph of pepper, a bell pepper. Now, this bell pepper was photographed by Edward Weston because he was so poor. He was so poor, and he wanted… He was a brilliant photographer, but he really didn’t have anything to photograph, so he made this black and white photograph of this pepper, which has turned out to be one of the most popular photographs in the black and white photography industry.

So is photography only for the rich? Absolutely not. It’s for the creative. If you’re creative, get behind the camera and start creating some beautiful work.

Photography is also for those that want to document. Some of the most valuable photos in history are not because they’re technically beautiful, not because they’re photographed well, but because they exist. Imagine if we had a photograph of the man who shot Kennedy in the action of doing it. That would probably be a hugely valuable photograph. Imagine first-edition photographs of people like Abraham Lincoln. Or imagine if cameras were around in the time of George Washington, how valuable that photograph would be.

Photography, it’s for everybody. It’s for those that want to document and remember, it’s for creative artists, and it’s for anyone that values looking at a piece of history.

I look forward to seeing more of yours there, and I’ll be checking back in. But if you’re interested in starting your photography business at home, I’m going to encourage you to just get started. Go out there and shoot something super cool today.

Thanks for reading this blog post today. I hope you enjoyed this. Go out there, start shooting, create amazing images.