The Side-Hustle Economy MON, Oct 02, 2023
Income Tax
Somewhere in Ohio, there is an office manager who is as sweet as she can be. Unless you cross her. Then you will find she means business.
She is an older lady, dressed well, with a bright crimson shade of lipstick. There is a lot of it. Some are on her teeth, as well as her lips.
Her hair is not exactly tousled nor shabby-chic, but more like a category-three tropical storm. She manages the minutia of the office at the company where you are starting to work.
Right now she is watching you fill out your W-4 form that explains whether you are married, and how many kids you have. She is watching you carefully for two reasons.
One is she wants to be the first in the company to know all about you for general conversational purposes.
The second is so that she can pounce on you if she even gets the impression you are about to do something incorrectly. She controls the game at this point. Offense and defense.
The form you are completing both authorizes the company to sock away part of your hard-earned money for a short period and lets them know how much to sock away.
Once a year, you will be issued another form called a W-2 in lieu of said amount of money. This is sometimes referred to as the regular worker’s economy.
There also exists the side gig economy, or the side hustle/side job/independent contractor economy, where your employer is, in essence, your customer, and they don’t hold back part of your pay.
This economy is more the honor system, but with guard rails, where if one of your customers pays you a lot of money, they give you a 1099 form showing how much they paid you the previous year, But that is to let them get credit for paying you. It’s up to you to keep track of your totals and pay your taxes out of your money, not money that’s been saved up for you. Yes, it is confusing.
This side-hustle economy may not be for everyone. But for some of us eat-what-we-kill workers, it’s just part of our complicated life.
As we look at side hustles here, just remember, being under a few radars doesn’t excuse you from the law. So it's not all sunshine and unicorns.
And some side hustles are hybrids when it comes to actually receiving the money you earn.
As we investigate various ways to augment our incomes when we become less able, or even just less willing to have employment by the old definition, we will try to remember all good sides carry an “other” side.
Thanks,
-don
Originally published at http://don-martin.com on October 2, 2023. (Expanded version sometimes available here.)