Typically contracting you'll make 50-100% more per year (if you keep busy) than you would as an FTE. That MORE than makes up for the extra self-employment tax hit and benefits. You don't have to amortize a computer over 5 years -- write it off the first year as a Section 179 deduction. The rule varies in how much you can deduct each year; it's been rising from $20K up to around $25K now, I believe. One or two years in there it was up to $100K to stimulate small business spending in the economy.
Pay for a CPA to give you advice and do you're taxes. The $1-2K/year you'll spend will MORE than be recovered when they show you how to correctly deduct things, etc.
I've always opted NOT to deduce my home office. It's only 150 sqft of a 3500 sqft house, so I can't deduct all that much, and it's not worth the flags in IRS or the hassle in figuring out how much you have to repay when you sell the house in a few years...
Did you try asking them to leave it unlocked? We just bought 3 SE GSM phones and I mentioned that I was buying the T616's for the capability to go to Europe. The guy told me it'd be much cheaper to just get a local pre-paid SIM there than to try and roam internationally. He left all three phones unlocked for us.
This was Cingular -- one of the notorious "we refuse to unlock your phone" companies from some of the 'net comments I've read.
I had Cingular's TDMA nationwide coverage for about 3 years with a Nokia trimode phone. They didn't charge for roaming, even on the AMPS network. Their coverage maps are better than Verizon's (CDMA) and definitly better than the other providers. We had 2 phones, 500/mo on one, 250/mo on the other, and 3000 night & weekend minutes on both, 7pm-7am. The *only* place I didn't get coverage was in Ft. Pierre, SD on a fishing trip. You're lucky to find running water and electricity out there, so I wasn't surprised my cell phone didn't work.:-)
I recently decided that since I rarely travel outside major cities, I could get by with a GSM phone, and got a Sony Ericsson T616, sticking with Cingular. They're trying to get away from TDMA; one way is by offering "rollover" minutes on their nationwide GSM plans.
The SE phone is a worldphone so will work overseas. It also supports 850Mhz; I believe Cingular is the *only* GSM provider in the US using this. Basically this means that while a Cingular user can "roam" onto T-Mobile and AT&T's networks, the reverse isn't true.
So far I've been in 4 cities (Kansas City, Minneapolis, Detroit, and Buffalo) in the first week and the coverage has been great -- the signal & sound is much better than my TDMA. That could be because the phone's 3 years "newer" technology, or that GSM is just a better technology. I dunno.
Less coverage is fine for me since I tend to fly between cities. When I drive, I have On*Star in my truck, which relies on Verizon's CDMA network (which is pretty extensive -- probably second only to Cingular/AT&T's TDMA networks). If that fails, I still have my Nokia TDMA/AMPS phones for backup 911 or calling card calls.:-)
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Typically contracting you'll make 50-100% more per year (if you keep busy) than you would as an FTE. That MORE than makes up for the extra self-employment tax hit and benefits. You don't have to amortize a computer over 5 years -- write it off the first year as a Section 179 deduction. The rule varies in how much you can deduct each year; it's been rising from $20K up to around $25K now, I believe. One or two years in there it was up to $100K to stimulate small business spending in the economy.
Pay for a CPA to give you advice and do you're taxes. The $1-2K/year you'll spend will MORE than be recovered when they show you how to correctly deduct things, etc.
I've always opted NOT to deduce my home office. It's only 150 sqft of a 3500 sqft house, so I can't deduct all that much, and it's not worth the flags in IRS or the hassle in figuring out how much you have to repay when you sell the house in a few years...
Did you try asking them to leave it unlocked? We just bought 3 SE GSM phones and I mentioned that I was buying the T616's for the capability to go to Europe. The guy told me it'd be much cheaper to just get a local pre-paid SIM there than to try and roam internationally. He left all three phones unlocked for us.
This was Cingular -- one of the notorious "we refuse to unlock your phone" companies from some of the 'net comments I've read.
I had Cingular's TDMA nationwide coverage for about 3 years with a Nokia trimode phone. They didn't charge for roaming, even on the AMPS network. Their coverage maps are better than Verizon's (CDMA) and definitly better than the other providers. We had 2 phones, 500/mo on one, 250/mo on the other, and 3000 night & weekend minutes on both, 7pm-7am. The *only* place I didn't get coverage was in Ft. Pierre, SD on a fishing trip. You're lucky to find running water and electricity out there, so I wasn't surprised my cell phone didn't work. :-)
:-)
I recently decided that since I rarely travel outside major cities, I could get by with a GSM phone, and got a Sony Ericsson T616, sticking with Cingular. They're trying to get away from TDMA; one way is by offering "rollover" minutes on their nationwide GSM plans.
The SE phone is a worldphone so will work overseas. It also supports 850Mhz; I believe Cingular is the *only* GSM provider in the US using this. Basically this means that while a Cingular user can "roam" onto T-Mobile and AT&T's networks, the reverse isn't true.
So far I've been in 4 cities (Kansas City, Minneapolis, Detroit, and Buffalo) in the first week and the coverage has been great -- the signal & sound is much better than my TDMA. That could be because the phone's 3 years "newer" technology, or that GSM is just a better technology. I dunno.
Less coverage is fine for me since I tend to fly between cities. When I drive, I have On*Star in my truck, which relies on Verizon's CDMA network (which is pretty extensive -- probably second only to Cingular/AT&T's TDMA networks). If that fails, I still have my Nokia TDMA/AMPS phones for backup 911 or calling card calls.