As was said, an LLC is only going to protect you if you treat the business assets and money separately from your own..which isn't that hard. Also, the LLC Is only part of it, you also have to decide how you want it be taxed. Likely individually from the sound of it. Get a business account, run expenses through it, pay yourself if there are profits....or not. Whether or not you pay yourself that income is going to hit you at years end, but if you're busy enough, taking a paycheck for your work is nice.
There will come a threshold where the tax savings will be worth electing as an S-corp. You save about 14% on payroll taxes if you pay yourself as "distributions" instead of salary. You still need to pay yourself a reasonable wage for what you do, but you can fudge that to the low side and pay the rest as a distribution to save on taxes. Honestly, there are a lot of ways to minimize taxable income. We set up a separate business to allocate the maximum amount of non taxable "income" to my partner's children (that are old enough to qualify) so that we can avoid any taxes on that portion. Little things like that.
Remember, it's all foreign to everyone the first time you go through it, and then only slightly less foreign each subsequent time. Ask lots of questions, find mentors or at least someone you can trust to ask questions. But always remember what works for someone else may not work for you. If you're not sure, a good small business accountant can really explain to you the pros and cons of different organizational structures and help you take advantage of as many of the breaks that everyone get's mad at big businesses for taking advantage of. Of course you should minimize your tax burden and so should they. If you need a recommendation on a good accountant or book keeper, let me know.
DBA's are cheap and easy to register to any entity, so if you decide you want to do something else or change the name, it's not that big of a deal.
Cody
