The Ultimate Blog Podcast - 133. Bookkeeping for Bloggers with Ansley Beutler

Episode Date: July 2, 2024

We had Ansley Beutler on the podcast. Ansley has a unique perspective because she is a CPA and a food blogger. She is sharing her journey from accounting to running her blog, The Fit Peach, and founding Pitch Perfect Financials, an accounting firm for bloggers. She emphasizes the importance of setting up a business correctly, maintaining clear financial records, and using accounting software. Ansley offers advice on deductible expenses, shares the significance of bookkeeping, and making quarterly tax payments. We also touch on preparing for retirement and managing health insurance as a self-employed blogger. If you are wanting to dive into the financial side of blogging, which is not always fun but so necessary, then this episode is for you!Thanks for listening! Let us know your thoughts on Instagram: @sparkmediaconceptsWe would love to have you join us in the Ultimate Blog Membership in 2024. HERE is the link to join!Check out the show notes (link below) for more information including links and resources mentioned in today's episode!SHOW NOTES: www.sparkmediaconcepts.com/episode133

Welcome to the Ultimate Blog Podcast with Amy Reinke and Jennifer Draper. We are on a mission to empower women who want to start or grow their own blog. This podcast is for women who want to learn blogging basics and who crave inspiration and encouragement. Whether you are just getting started or have been a blogger for years, we are excited to welcome you into this space where we are passionate about creating community over competition. We are bloggers who want to encourage you to believe in your potential, step outside the norm, and step into a life where you create your own schedule, your own success, and your own story. Join us for weekly episodes as we navigate blogging and work from home life,

all while raising a family and having some serious fun along the way. all while raising a family and having some serious fun along the way. Welcome back to the Ultimate Blog Podcast. Today is going to be a really insightful episode that Jennifer and I are really excited to share with you because we're going to talk about kind of the business side of things and the financial side of things. And to do that, we brought on Ansley Butler with Peach Perfect Financials. And what I love about Ansley, and she's going to share more of her story, but she is a CPA and a blogger. And she kind of married both of these things together to help bloggers, but she has experience because she is a blogger. And she is the blogger behind the Fit Peach, which is a food blog. And she shares delicious recipes with a healthy twist there. And

so Ansley, welcome to the Ultimate Blog Podcast. Thank you so much for having me. Well, when I stalked you online, I immediately it was like, we have to have her on the podcast. This is, this is what we've been looking for. And I'm so glad I found you. And I do not have any recollection how I came across your website, but I did. I'm going to guess it was the powers of Google. And so Google works first and foremost, because I was looking specifically for this and I found you. And today we are going to talk about the financial side of blogging, like how we can prepare

ourselves to be financially independent, how we can prepare ourselves to be financially independent, how we can be fiscally responsible, making sure that we're taking care of things. But before we dive into that part of the interview, I would love for you to share just a little bit more about your story and kind of like I said earlier, how you're a food blogger and a CPA and how that all came to be. Yes, absolutely. So yes, I'm going to take it back to like right after college, I started what I thought was my dream job. I worked at a big four accounting firm and was auditing the company that owned the New York Stock Exchange. So it was very kind of financing, very big, big audit team. They obviously had a really big job going on there. And kind of interesting, you know, that was the only client we had a lot of audit

clients, multiple different clients. And this one required the team to be there full-time. Very quickly realized that this is not what I wanted to do long term. But to kind of get out of a square box of accounting, I actually did start the food blog while I was there. I caught up in the off season. I did it over the summers when it started evolving. And that's also kind of when Instagram kind of started to kick off a little bit. This was maybe 2016 or so. And kind of had to put it down, obviously, at the beginning of the season because we were working this crazy, crazy hours and kind of picked it up that again. But I kind of saw other bloggers really taking off and kind of making it, you know, other people's full-time jobs. And I kind of thought, hey, this accounting thing, it's been great for a few years,

but I don't want to be doing this for 20, 30 years. It just, I didn't feel like it fit into my, my family goals, my lifestyle that I wanted to build for myself. And so I kind of pivoted and I really went into the food blog and said, I'm gonna, I really want to make this my full time job. I'm going to focus on photography focused on just building up the website. This was while I also had the accounting job and took it full time in 2020. It was probably the biggest jump, probably will be the biggest jump of my life. I was pregnant with my first. We had just bought a house, April 2020, just bought a house.

And obviously, COVID was going on. But my blog was doing fairly well, like most blogs. And my blog was kind of just trickling along there for a while. And it got a big boost in 2020. And kind of what also catapulted a lot of this was a food photography kind of retreat that I went on February of 2020. And I met some other bloggers. And when you mentioned that you're an accountant, it was just wild. Everyone, can you help me with this? Can you help me with that? Can you do this? I had kind of thought, you know, that like, Hey, when I take my food blog full time, then maybe I do create a course or do something I kind of that was kind of the vision, but it was not to create an accounting firm and to have hundreds of clients and to be filing taxes and doing all this stuff.

That was definitely not the initial vision. But I just thought it may, May 15 2020 is kind of when I say that was that's when I left my corporate job. That's when it's actually the day that I transferred my food blog also from Squareface to WordPress and when things started taking off. I got a few clients that just had me do bookkeeping, do some taxes, stuff like that for 2020. And that was the start of it. So it's been a wild ride since.

I still do the food blog. I'm publishing two recipes a week. It I still do the food blog. I'm publishing two recipes a week. It's a fully functioning food blog. I do outsource the things that I don't enjoy or that I don't have time to do because I am also running this accounting firm as well. So both of them have kind of grown simultaneously over the last, I guess, four, five years now,

just been kind of neat. But that's kind of how it all got started and kind of how we we came to be today. I love so much of what you said. And first and foremost, I can relate to a lot of it because, you know, I did accounting, as many of our listeners know, for about 13 years before I left. Now, I went opposite from you and I said, don't ever ask me a tax or accounting question. I don't want anything to do with it anymore. I don't want to keep up on it. But I think that people can feel like

whatever they've done in their prior life may not apply to like starting a blog and a creative business. But I think you show a perfect example of how you can marry like the things that you are trained for and the expertise that you have and also be able to create and start that business that gives you that creative outlet. And now you've taken that a step further because you obviously saw a need that other bloggers

had to understand the business aspect of blogging. And I think that is a great need. I think there's a lot of people out there who want to start a business, but the idea of the legal piece of it, the accounting piece of it, the bookkeeping, the taxes, that all feels like so foreign and overwhelming. They don't want to dive into that at all. So I would love for you to talk just a little bit about,

you know, when you start a blog, what are some of the first considerations that you should take into account when you think about like, okay, I wanna set this up, but I wanna set it up correctly. I want it to be a business, but I have no idea where to start. What are the first few things somebody should think about?

Yeah, that's a great question. And I get that often. I get the question, do I need an LLC? Pretty often. A lot of people ask an accountant that question and I usually defer and say that's a legal question to see whether you want to separate the liability. I will say that with food bloggers, unless you're blogging about nutritionists and maybe calling something low calorie, low carb or something like that. There's not a whole lot of like liability going on there. But at some

point, it is going to be just as you grow, it's going to be beneficial to split the two and have your personal liability, you know, over here and just completely separate the business by creating that LLC. Now, obviously, when you're starting out, I know some states are just have astronomical fees in California, $800 a year. So a lot of people don't want to go do that quite yet. And so if you're kind of even before that, the first thing is to get an EIN, an employer identification number, with the IRS, and it's free.

If you Google IRS EIN number, the first one that pops up is sponsored and it's a scam to make you pay for it. So make sure you're going to like a.gov website because it should be completely free. You can actually register like your sole proprietorship and get an EIN number. And that's just basically allows you to use a different number other than your social security number. When you're, you know, if you're running ads on your site or you're on the Amazon influencer programs, stuff like that, and it's just a general safety measure to have the EIN, then you can also go set up a business bank account with that.

That's like step number two, business bank account. You know, whether you're making money or not, I just think that that's something that needs to be done in order to kind of create a bubble that you can go do all the subscriptions, the plug-in subscriptions, the hosting subscriptions, all that sort of stuff needs to be in a business bank account so that it's just going to make your life so much easier come tax time.

I cannot tell you how many people have horror stories of having to print off 12 months of their personal credit card statements and having to highlight, you know, what's what's business. And I'm just going to tell you, when you're in April, you're not going to be able to go back to the previous January and figure out what was business and what's not, especially for food bloggers, because you have groceries. And I'm sure you're shopping for groceries personally. And it's not, especially for food bloggers because you have groceries. And I'm sure you're shopping for groceries personally. And it's just not a good idea. That's all I'm really going to say. So a business bank account, there are so many options out there for business bank accounts,

wherever you personally bank, ask about a business bank account and set that up. Whether you have an LLC or not, That's kind of step number one. And then using that, either the business debit card or if you go a step further and get a business credit card, just using that for all of those business expenses. Like I said, all the software, the plugins and everything like that. And then I'll go ahead and tell you the groceries are absolutely business expense. If you're using them for the blog, I get some questions about if I eat it, can I expense it and all that sort of stuff. So I'm definitely yes, groceries for developing recipes are absolutely going to be a business expense. So use your business

debit card or credit card or something like that for those expenses. So that's kind of how I would get it all set up and kind of, you know, step number one, are those two things. I like that you encourage that because I think when a lot of people start blogging, and they might start a blog thinking, yes, I want this to be a business someday, but it's not a business yet because I'm not making money yet. But there's still that recommendation to be doing it the right way from the start, which is something that we're pretty passionate about. And you brought up a really great point there about going back over a year or more

and trying to figure out those expenses. So while it might feel like when you're setting these things up in the beginning, like, why am I doing this? I think you just shared why it's so important. Right, yeah. And it's, I mean, a lot of people will also have a spreadsheet.

Like if you do, you're like, I don't wanna do the business thing yet. Maybe you do, you're like, I don't want to do the business thing yet. Maybe you do that for a year if this is truly your hobby. And you're like, I don't know if I really want to make this a business. But people that are really going forward and that say, no, I'm going to make this my business, the business bank account needs to come at some point. But with the spreadsheet, it's just the manual stuff with it. And just you got to make sure that you're keying the numbers correctly.

It's just an extra thing you got to do. That's why I recommend the business make count. Kind of speaking on to the idea of keeping track, do you have, just as a CPA, do you have a recommendation for bookkeeping, how people to keep track? There's Quicken or QuickBooks or Wave. Do you have a favorite one that you recommend generally? Yes, it is QuickBooks, unfortunately, because I hear lots of people that do not like QuickBooks. I will go to Quicken is worse. Quicken is yes. I'm Quicken and I hate it. Yes, I've heard Quicken as well. Now, QuickBooks, QuickBooks is, and I have my grievances with them as well.

I mean, I hear people that are like, I can't deal with this anymore. I hear them, it's built for an accountant and they have way too many bells and whistles in there. I've actually like submitted like feedback to them before. I'm like in a QuickBooks accountant, like I have one of those. We can submit surveys and I'm like,

create something in between the QuickBooks self-employed, which I do not like. It should be called QuickBooks hobby. And the QuickBooks simple start, which is the one that has all the bells and whistles that most of my 90% of my clients are on that, which is like the lowest tier version of QuickBooks, but it has way too many things going on. But it is, it's robust, it grows with you. It has all sorts of reporting capabilities, which I try to stress to go pull those reports to see, analyze how the business is doing, actually make business decisions,

and stuff like that. Well, a lot of the other ones unfortunately don't have. The other one I recommend that I don't work with as much is Xero. It's X-E-R-O. I do think it's a little bit cheaper than QuickBooks. It's kind of a new one in the market. It's a little bit behind QuickBooks. But those are kind of my top two recommendations. Just kind of with, if you want to go the software route, which again, at some point, you're going to have to as the business grows. I've mentioned spreadsheets.

If you're good with Excel, I have a few clients that are using a spreadsheet and they're like, wow, me, I've seen some really good spreadsheets in my day. And I've had some people that have graphs in there and all sorts of, you know, tax estimates that they're pulling into different accounts and all that stuff in a spreadsheet. So I mean, know yourself, if you're going to keep the spreadsheet up to date and you're actually going to, you know, use it properly, then a spreadsheet is completely fine. It's just going to take a little bit longer to do it all because it's going to be manual. Yeah. So let's talk about whether you're going to use a spreadsheet or you're going to use a software. What things are we putting into this software? What things do we need to keep

track of? You mentioned groceries, which I am so glad you did mention that. I know in the food blogging world, there's a lot of controversy and drama around whether or not that's an actual deductible item. So can you talk about what some of the other things are as well that we need to be keeping track of? Yeah. So in the food blogging space, we kind of have it. It's a good thing and bad thing in that the margins with a food blog are typically pretty high because there's really not a whole lot of expenses, which is a good thing. Obviously, you get to keep more of your money that you're earning, but also you get to pay a lot of taxes because the profit is larger.

The software and applications expense bucket does add up. There's a lot of $5 charges, $4, $4 here, you know, anything that you're using for keyword research, hosting, obviously, any of those plugins that you're paying for your theme on if you're using WordPress, all those sorts of stuff can be conducted. And I kind of call that software an application. I feel like that bucket is huge with just so many things, but they're like teeny tiny little $20 a year, $5 a year type of thing. I did mention groceries. I kind of call those grocery supplies, job supplies, photography

props would kind of fall into that supply bucket. Any sort of like computer related thing. If you don't have headphones, you use for business. I have like a desktop screen that I have so I can kind of edit pictures and stuff like that on the bigger screen. It's going to be another job supply. Let's see. Any like advertising? If anyone does advertising for one of their courses or if they're selling a product or something like that, maybe do a Facebook ad or Instagram ad or Pinterest ads or something

like that. It's going to be advertising and marketing. The legal and professional fees can also be one that's of substance if you do have an accountant, a lawyer, if you are honestly doing something where you have a professional that's teaching you how to do something, it would kind of go into that bucket. And the other one that I do see is obviously contractors. So if you do have people that are working with you, a VA, you know, web designer or something like that, that would go into that contractor bucket. Those are the main ones that I see you being able to expense. That's what you're keeping track of in a QuickBooks or in a spreadsheet and stuff like that.

Okay. I have a question on that because we have all different kinds of bloggers who listen. So for the sake of that, I just want to like, let's do a rapid fire. So travel blogging, is all travel able to be written off as a business expense? If it's for business, yes. Travel blogging is one of those where you really... I'm key on documentation. With travel bloggers. I actually recommend again an Excel spreadsheet with every trip you're taking has its own tabs. And you can kind of calculate how much how many days are business and how many days are personal if

there are some personal elements to it. Because a lot of that kind of comes into play with travel blogging. But yes, all of the flights, train tickets, kind of however you're getting over there, lodging, stuff like that for travel bloggers is all going to be an expense. Okay. What about fashion? So can they write off all of their outfits, makeup, whatever? Yes.

So fashions is another interesting one because typically, you cannot expense clothing. The IRS has actually been, has actually issued a statement on that that work clothes cannot be expensed unless it's in uniform or a costume. And so for fashion bloggers, you kind of have to really read between the lines as well. This isn't really a work outfit. This is something, this is job supplies is kind of what I would call it because they're going to go put it on their website, sell it with affiliate stuff or doing a sponsored post and earning money from putting an outfit together. So that would be kind of job supplies is where I would code that too.

Okay, last one I'm going to ask about, like health and wellness, like a health and wellness blog. And I'm going to ask about two different kinds of things. So let's say the first one is going to be let's say that you, I'm just going to use a supplement as an idea. So let's say the first one is going to be, let's say that you, I'm just going to use a supplement as an idea. So let's say you're an affiliate for a supplement company, are those tax write offs as well? If you are purchasing the supplement, sharing it, whether on a blog post or on social media with an affiliate link, then can you write that off?

I would use like a reasonable kind of word to kind of come up with that just because there's so many things you can be an affiliate for nowadays. If it's something that, you know, yes, with supplements, honestly, I want whoever I'm like reading a blog post to have tried it to tell me how it went for them, you know, and so I'm expecting that to get another job supply because they're having to try it, test it out, write a review about it in order to go create the revenue from it. I would just use that like reasonable term there and to just be like uncle bonkers with with a bunch of stuff like that but absolutely if it's something you're writing a review about and stuff like that like on on a blog or something like that then absolutely that's gonna be a job supply. Are you a blogger and looking for a community of bloggers to network and learn from? We are so excited to share with you that we have created a space for people just like

you to learn, connect and grow in their blogging business. It's called The Ultimate Blog Membership and we would love to have you join us. The Ultimate Blog Membership is a monthly membership that includes two coaching calls each month and a forum to ask questions and get answers from both of us and others in the community. Each month, we have a coaching call

that will help you learn how to grow and improve your blog by bringing in guest experts and coaching ourselves on topics that will help your business thrive. The other live call each month is a Q&A call where you can hop on and connect with other members and discuss live questions that you have or troubleshoot any areas that need assistance. This community has been incredibly encouraging and motivating since we created it in January of 2022, and we are excited for you to apply to join us. If you are interested in joining us, click the link in our show notes for more information and the application to become part of the group. We want to make sure that we can support you the best, so we have just a few questions that we need you to answer to make sure we'd be a good fit.

We are so excited to connect with you even more in the ultimate vlog membership. Check the show notes to apply today. Okay, last question. Kind of in that same one for like health and wellness or fitness. What if somebody is sharing like different videos on their blog or social and sharing like different workout ideas and they have a gym membership? So they pay a monthly gym membership fee, they're recording videos at the gym. Would you be able to use that as an expense? Because we can write off the space in our office. So how can you do that? Is that even possible? So yes, I would say yes. And I would again use that like reasonable kind of word and

say, are you using the gym? How often are you recording? Is it every other time you go to the gym? Is it every single time you're going to the gym? And kind of use one of those percentages, you know, if you're using the un-big-on percentages. With this area, so many things can be so great because there's so much of a personal aspect to them, like you are benefiting, that you kind of have to come up with some sort of, okay, 50% of the time I'm using the gym membership recording. So maybe you're able to deduct half of the gym membership or something like that is kind of how I would calculate that type of expense. Okay. I just think that's helpful for people to understand like, because a lot of times what people are sharing on their blog is something that they're passionate about. I mean, I would say most of the time. And so thinking kind of outside the box about

how what you're already purchasing or already doing can also be a business expense, but just keeping a really good track. And I think that you've made that like super clear. Like that's a really key part of it. Yes. Yeah. This blogging stuff, I'm like waiting for the IRS to do something because currently they haven't said anything about, I mean, not even influencers. Like this is like a, you know, bloggers that maybe have a website and they're actually reviewing something that are actually writing an article about something to come out with some sort of like just literature

on how exactly to go about these. Cause right now a lot of people are having to rely on other accountants in the industry that may or may not even like know the ins and outs of the industry to say, hey, can I write up groceries? You go ask your accountant down the street and they say no, cause you typically cannot deduct food. It's, you know, you can deduct 50% of a business meal but groceries, they're gonna say no, because you typically cannot deduct food. It's you know, you can deduct 50% of a business meal, but groceries, they're going to say no, unless they know that that's actually

being used to create a recipe to go produce revenue. What I say with expensive is if you can tie revenue to it, in like one degree, then it's good, there's gonna be some sort of write off there, whether it's full or whether it's partial, that, like you said, fashion bloggers, what's the purpose of you buying a shirt? Oh, it's to put an outfit together, to write in a blog post about to earn on revenue, to earn affiliate revenue, and to gain more followers, to get sponsored posts or something like that. There's like so many revenue streams with that.

Now, if you're buying a dress to wear on a cute cruise, you know, there's no revenue stream that you can kind of tie that to. with that. Now if you're buying a dress to wear on a cute cruise, you know, there's no revenue stream that you can kind of tie that to. So what about when you're first getting started that first year or two, you might not be bringing in a lot of revenue, but you do have some of those expenses that you're outputting to try and obtain those opportunities or to get that growth. What do we do with those expenses? Yeah, so the first few years you can actually take those expenses. That's when bookkeeping is actually very important because if you're losing money, you may have another job that you have as well and that income can go offset some of that, which is

on saving money and taxes. So the first few years while you're, because that's normal for a business to operate at a loss while it's kind of getting off the ground and keep tracking of all those expenses while you're trying to go down and own an ad network, create more affiliate income, that sort of stuff. I will say now with affiliate income, I feel like it's a little bit easier to create that first just something $5 to kind of show because the IRS doesn't love it when you have zero in income and all these expenses. It's very easy to be like, this

is a hobby. You're not even trying to go earn income. And you used to be with bloggers, you had to go on the ad network and that can take a while to actually show that you're trying to make that first dollar. And now with affiliate stuff, it's just if you even make $5 or something like that, even to show, hey, I am trying to make money. For the first few years, absolutely keep good track of those expenses because they can be deducted from your other income that you have on your tax return. I think that that is great advice because what I don't and what we hear is like, well,

I'll do that when I start making money. I'll start keeping track when I start making money. But I think it's just a reminder that if you've, for instance, if you've taken the ultimate blog boot camp, you've invested in yourself, you've created your website, you're going to have some of these expenses with the plugins and things like that. Go ahead and keep track of it and use it, you know, to your benefit for the first couple of years as you are building it and growing. I just, I really want people to take that away. If there's a, if there's a big takeaway here, that's what I want is take the

time to record what you're spending your money on because you can submit that to taxes, even if you're like, I don't know if I'll spending your money on because you can submit that to taxes. Even if you're like, I don't know if I'll ever make money on this. If you're trying, like Ansley's saying, if you're trying to, then you can use that. And I mean, you heard it, you heard it right from a CPA. Right, and also from like an analytical perspective,

that's why I like the book he thinks that I'm so big about. Yes, it does make taxes not much easier. But you also get to see where am I spending all my money? Is your software and applications bucket, like absolutely astronomical and not covering whatever you're bringing in, like consistently, that may mean that you're not that you're spending money on a subscription that you may not be needing, you know? And so I like looking at the reports to see, okay, what month did my profit really start to go up and why was it? And then just kind of doing a little spot check on the

expenses and be like, Whoa, why were groceries so expensive this month? Oh, it's because I batched 10 extra recipes or something like that is kind of why. So I like the analytical component to like tracking the book and the bookkeeping stuff as well to kind of make business decisions. Yeah, I think that's so important and it's easy to kind of ignore because you're trying to do all the other stuff. You're like, I'm really going to sit down and run reports and things like that, but it is so important. So can you talk a little bit more about that piece of it? Can you talk about how often should we look at the numbers and the finances of our business?

And like, what are some of the important reports we should be looking at? Yeah, so with bookkeeping, I mean, ideally once a month is when at the end of every month, I'm like, hey, go categorize whatever transactions that form through your business bank account. That's when I go pull a report is at the end of every month. I'm like, Hey, go categorize whatever transactions that form through your business bank account. That's when I go pull a report is at the end of every month. Profit and loss statement is going to be the number one report you're going to want to get. And that's going to be

whatever revenue you pulled in, plus all of the expenses so that you can see what your bottom line is. In QuickBooks, it's very easy to pull that report. I mean, once you categorize all of your transactions, it's like a click of a button and it'll show. I like to piece out my reports by months so that I can see each month and I can maybe see the profit move around and I can ask myself, wow, my profit really dipped here, what happened? And I can kind of, again, do that little analysis very quickly and kind and see that. Now for tax stuff, you're going to have to do a profit and loss every tax quarter to figure out what to make an estimated tax payment.

So yeah, at the end of every month, bookkeeping, every other month, you can probably get by with that. And at least every quarter, you're going to want to go clean up the books and categorize things. Okay. You brought something up there that I want to give a little bit more airtime to and that is like quarterly tax payments. So if somebody's not currently working with a CPA, maybe they're doing their own taxes, this might be their first year blogging. Can you explain how they could start doing that? That way, they don't go from one tax season

to the next and then end up with a huge tax bill that they're paying and kind of be blindsided by that. How can we prepare ourselves with the revenue that we're making each month for next tax season or quarterly? Yeah, that's a great question. So typically, the rule of thumb is about 30% of your profit to kind of shift that away for taxes. I think that's going to depend on your seats and whatever other income streams you have going on.

So I would kind of use that as like a barometer. Probably 30% is what I would shift away. You absolutely can Google Georgia estimated tax payments and it'll bring you up to exactly how you make that tax payment online. I'll go ahead and say we say quarterly estimated tax payments, and they're not due on calendar quarters. I wish that they would move that because it's very confusing. We're sitting here May 6th, the Q2 estimated tax payment is due June 15th.

So before Q2 has even ended, and then same with Q3, it is due June 15th. So before Q2 has even ended, and then same with Q3, it's due September 15th. So before Q3 has even ended. So it's kind of backwards there. So definitely take that into account because I know that's very confusing for a lot of people, but literally just Google how to make an estimated tax payment in the state of whatever.

And it should, like, there's so many websites out there that will walk you exactly through how to go do that online. And that's how you would go make estimated tax payments. The other thing you can do, if you have owed taxes in the past, is you've probably gotten a voucher from your, whoever was your accountant, or if you used a TurboTax or something like that, then they've given you vouchers

with estimated tax payments. Now, that's going to be based off of last year, off of whatever income you had last year. So again, take that into account if you're expecting your income to double, triple, quadruple, you may want to double, triple or quadruple the estimated tax payment voucher that they have. So that's kind of how you make that online and kind of 30% is the standard to put that away for taxes. But I highly recommend making those to get the money out of the bank account. I personally am one that does not, that gives me anxiety to have something in my bank account that's not mine.

You know, and so I'm just like, nope, every quarter making a tax payment to get it out of there because no one likes surprises come April of the next year. No, that is not fun. Not fun at all. Okay, so I think that we've given them some really great tangible things to consider and think about, especially on the front end and the basics. I would like to give just a little bit of time to talk about once a blogger starts making money, how they can be preparing for retirement and what that looks like. How can they set

themselves up? Because a lot of bloggers may have come from like a nine to five where health insurance is a benefit and a 401k is and things like that. But being self-employed, things look very different. So what are some of your encouragements and advice that you have for bloggers as they start to generate more and more revenue? Yeah. So, I mean, I'm just so big on viewing the blog as a business and that while that means, obviously, going after ways to increase your revenue, diversifying your revenue, a lot of bloggers tend to be very focused on increasing revenue.

And all this other stuff gets left behind. We were chatting before this about the pros and cons. There are all these pros being self-employed and being your own boss and being able to create your own hours. And then there are some, you know, quote unquote cons, which is the stuff that's just you need to do in order to kind of have these pros and be able to really have a full functioning business and kind of function that way. So all of that stuff does need to be tidied up at some point. We also have health insurance. This is one of the most common questions I get asked about with health insurance. If you are single, then you're over 26, some states have a different age where like you may be able to be on your parents' health insurance up until 26. But if you're in one of those positions where you need to go get it yourself, the marketplace

is going to be the first place I send people. And it's the easiest place to go get a quote. They have different tiers. It's a state by state. So every state has their own marketplace. You can again, really Google the state, Tennessee health insurance marketplace and it's going to pop up. But you can very easily go request a quote from there and they have different tiers. They have like silver, gold, platinum level insurance, depending on what you're looking

for. You can kind of chat with the broker about what exactly you're looking for. They can kind of get a customized quote there. I will go ahead and tell you it's going to be higher than what you may receive in the corporate world. So be prepared for some sort of a sticker shock there. I caveat that with that most self-employed people will qualify for very long word, self-employed health insurance premium deduction, which allows you to deduct the premiums off of your tax return. So you do get some sort of a credit for paying.

I kind of think about it as, hey, I'm paying these heightened premiums, and I'm going to get the credit and I ultimately file the tax return. So something to think about there, let's see retirement. There's so many options for retirement with being self-employed. This is something that I just, I preach to all of my clients because again, the goal is to create a full functioning business and that includes saving for retirement. I know I sound like an old person and like your parents saying, save for retirement, something does need to be set up just because you don't

want to be 80 years old and having to do keyword research and, you know, keeping your blog up, you know? Yeah. But on top of that, there's immense tax benefits with retirement accounts. This means the government wants you to create a retirement account in order to, you know, help you survive later on in life. So they give you all these tax breaks with them. And self-employed people have a variety of options. The two most popular ones is

going to be an SEP IRA, which is an Act-based Self-Employed Pension IRA. That's a very simple account to set up. You get to your maximum is 25% of your business income when you're an sole proprietor or an LLC. It's a little bit different with S-Corps, but it's a very simple account to set up. You can actually wait until tax season to actually make the contribution. The account needs to be set up in the year that you want to make a contribution. But you have until April 15 to actually go make the contribution. And you can chat with your tax accountant on, hey, what happens if I make this big of a contribution? Where does that due to my tax is? You can kind of play that game a little bit. And then the solo 401k is the other one that I

like for a lot of people. That one functions a lot like your standard corporate 401k. But because you're the employer and the employee, you can shove a lot of money into a solo 401k. So eventually, as you make more profit, I see a lot of people going towards that. And I should mention the other two, like the most simple ones is going to be the Roth IRA and the traditional IRA. Most people have heard of those before. They're very easy. The Roth does have an income limit. So if you're in a lower tax bracket, absolutely take advantage of it because it does go away at some point. Those are kind of the options with retirement. Again, for most retirement accounts, you can wait until tax season to kind of see what it's going to do to your tax, tax stuff to kind of figure it out. But just anything you

can put in there is going to be just so beneficial later on. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's so important to think about as you're trying to plan, like your revenue goals and you monitoring your expenses, you should be taking into account as you're growing this business, the fact that you will have the taxes, you will have the health insurance, you will have the money that you want to put away for retirement because those are benefits of, you know, working for somebody else is that a lot of that stuff is sort of

taken care of for you or presented to you in a really easy way. And here as a self employed person, we're having to go seek it out. And it might feel like an extra expense. But then on the flip side of that, what I think the beautiful thing is, is like, but we are our own boss, we're running our own business and our income potential is essentially unlimited. So we just have to take these things into account when we're setting these goals for ourselves so that we can cover, you know, the basic expenses that we need to as, I'll just call it as being a grown-up because it's not always fun. It is, you're right, like we don't want to be sitting here blogging probably when we're 80. We kind of need an exit plan and this has to be part of it, putting this money away so that we know we can safely retire at some point and stop doing this when we don't want

to anymore. Right, right. Yeah. And this is something that is kind of add is like when you're like you've ever been in the corporate world, I know some people just know they want to be bloggers and they go straight to blogging. So they might not even have like gotten a W-2 before. But if you ever have and you've had to go get health insurance from an employer,

it's deducted from your paycheck. I mean, it's not like it's free. It comes out of your paycheck. And same with depending on what type of 401k you have, that may also be a salary deferral again, coming out of your paycheck. And so this is not like a con of being self-employed. It's just something that a lot of people don't think about because, to your point, they may have checked the box and said, yep, I want to contribute to my 401k.

And the employer just did it for them. And now you actually have to think about it. So this is just something to consider as well. If you've ever looked at a W-2 before. A lot of people don't realize that taxes are withheld. You were paying taxes and you were contributing to 401k and paying for health insurance and you're just doing it now. But now you're just seeing all the numbers and all the money come out of your account. Whereas before, then you go into your account. They just did it for you. It's such a good reminder that that is how it works. Because it's kind of when you're working for someone else,

it's the set it and forget it. Like, you fill out your W-2 at the beginning of the year, and then it's done and you don't ever think about it again. But it's just one of those steps with being an entrepreneur that you don't want to miss because like we kind of talked about come tax season, if you don't do this and you've made quite a bit of money. You don't want to end up hating yourself because you didn't do this. I hope that this episode has been really encouraging and like, okay, if you haven't

done this stuff yet, it's okay. But you can do something small today. You can start today and make new choices and get yourself, you know, started on the right foot because you have like half the year left when this airs, you'll have half of 2024 left to make sure that you're setting things up the right way. So thank you so much for sharing all of this. And you offer so many different ways to support bloggers. And so I'd love for you just to share some ways that bloggers can work with you and learn from you. Yeah, absolutely. So yes, I have a website, it's called peach perfect financials.com. One of my goals for this year is to beef up our

the blog section of that to have more kind of free resources, stuff like that for bloggers with different topics and stuff like that. But you can definitely take a check, take a look at our website. We have a variety of services. We have consults if there's that one hour consult type of thing. If you just want to hash that thing out. We have a variety of different packages that you can kind of look at tax prep, CPR and retainer stuff, S-corp setup, all that kind of call it a white glove service because it's you have CPAs helping you do it. If you're more of a self-taught learner and you actually want to roll up your sleeves and come and get to get to know all of the details, we have Blogger MBA School which is our course that

kind of walks you through these different elements. I've actually split it up recently into those modules and so if you're in an earlier stage, that bookkeeping module is gonna be the first one that you should go look at and say, what do I need to be doing to get set up properly with bookkeeping? I have a variety of other things, one for retirement, one for health insurance,

one for S-corp and payroll and all that sort of stuff to kind of, as you're growing, look at those different modules if you kind of wanna really understand the mechanics behind those different steps in your business journey. Yeah, we will put links to everything in the show notes and please connect with Ansley as you're learning and don't be scared. I hope that this, you know, kind of made this more approachable and helped you understand that there are some things that you can definitely do and should be doing. And not to be scared of it, but just to use this

as education is moving forward to make your business the best that it can be and prepare you to for the future. So thank you so much, Ansley, for sharing everything. This is so, so awesome. Yeah, thank you. Absolutely. Thanks so much for tuning in today. If you'd like to continue the conversation about blogging with us, please find us on Instagram at Spark Media Concepts.

You can also sign up for our weekly newsletter where we share blogging tips and inspiration. You can sign up by finding the link in the show notes. For those of you who are ready for the next step and want to start your own blog, join the wait list for the Ultimate Blog Bootcamp. The link to join the waitlist is also in the show notes. Go out and make today a great day.