If you’ve been considering making your side venture a formal separate entity, MyCorporation is offering their LLC formation and incorporation filing services for free for one day only 9/20/11 until 11:59 PST with the coupon code MYFREE (regular price $99). Also included is a copy of Quickbooks Simple Start (though I think this is always free…) and a free domain name registration. You must still pay shipping and the applicable filing fees charged by each state. I’m sure they’ll also try to upsell you some additional services, but you can decline them.
MyCorporation is owned by Intuit, makers of TurboTax and Quicken. Accordingly, you can view such online incorporation services as similar to TurboTax for taxes. Yes, you could fill out your 1040 tax forms all by yourself, but it’s much easier to go through a question-and-answer software that walks you through it and explains the steps. You could also incorporate yourself as well, may prefer some guidance. However, if you’re doing something complex or out of the ordinary, then you should hire a professional to handle it (accountant for taxes, lawyer for incorporation).
When I formed my S-Corporation years ago, I used one of their primary competitors LegalZoom and paid about $150 for the service – not including the state filing fees and shipping. It was good to have someone look over the forms before submitting, while avoiding the $1,000+ fees from a lawyer.
The decision between staying a sole proprietor/partnership or forming an LLC/corporation is not always simple. If you’d like to dig into the details on your own, I recommend the book LLC or Corporation? How to Choose the Right Form for Your Business from Nolo Press. I chose to go the S-Corp route primarily for the income tax savings. You can even have a LLC and chose to have it taxed as an S-Corp, as if things weren’t confusing enough!
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I can’t believe this is not always a free service. Forming a small simple corporation is almost always just three small documents, most of which you can use boilerplate templates for. You’re paying them for the easy part, then they’ll want you to pay them even more for the hard part (taxes).
Thanks for that. 🙂 It’s been many years, but I do remember having questions on the paperwork. For example, how do you decide how many shares to issue in your new corporation? How do you value each share in your corporation? I also got some binder with directions to maintain compliance, which I recall being helpful. The S-Corp election was indeed one page and simple.
Gotta agree… in NY the forms are all online, free from the state. It takes all of 30 minutes to form an LLC.