How to Claim Up to $32k in Self-Employment Tax Credits (with Alisa Cook)

00:00 - Sarah St John (Host)

Welcome to the Frugalpreneur podcast. I am your host, sarah St John. This episode is what I refer to as a showcase episode, where I feature a bootstrapped entrepreneur and they briefly share their tips, tricks, tactics, techniques and tools that help them bootstrap their business, and the successes and failures along the way. My hope is that each of these showcase episodes will provide at least one valuable takeaway that you could implement right away in your own bootstrap business journey Now on to the episode.

00:35 - Alisa Cook (Guest)

Hey there, I'm so excited to be on this show first of all, and really looking forward to talking to fellow entrepreneurs. And the main reason I became an entrepreneur was because I felt jackaled, I felt handcuffed, I couldn't make my own decisions, I couldn't do what was best for my clientele, and at the time I became an entrepreneur, I was working as a school administrator, I was working as a principal of an elementary school specifically, and I just really felt handcuffed, like I couldn't support the teachers the way I wanted, or the parents or the communities, much less the kids. I had to do what the superintendent said, I had to do what the legislation said, I had to do everything except what I knew was right for the kids, for the teachers, for the community. And so that's why I became an entrepreneur. I wanted to make a difference in my community, in the world, and not be told by people who had never stepped foot in the classroom, who had never lived the life that I had lived and wouldn't understand what was the best thing for my clientele, which were the kids.

01:34

My initial foray into entrepreneurship was a tutoring company, an education company. It was fantastic Sold the business and worked at home, created an Airbnb business and that was fantastic and decided to retire and move to Mexico and continued the entrepreneurship foray with eventually going into marketing and working with a few clients that needed my help with marketing. So that's what I'm doing now and I love it. I'm really, really enjoying it, helping small businesses grow, just like I had grown my own small businesses. We bootstrapped everything.

02:13 - Alisa Cook (Guest)

I mean I was manually downloading and scraping contacts off of email lists. We did a lot of networking. I got to a lot of events. I would reach out to people we were friends of Brian's to see if they needed all kinds of hub work, especially as we were growing this marketing business. And so it took, I would say probably four to six months to get what I would consider a first client that was willing to pay what we felt we would work, first client that was willing to pay what we felt would work, and I'm still with that client to this day.

02:50

By the way, we talked about seven years ago when he first started this marketing for it. So we proceeded to bootstrap. I had gone to New England and the connections there. I looked at a conference, leaders and the workshops that he had connected there and that was there and went on all the freelance platforms Fiverr, upwork putting ourselves connected there and it was there. He went on all the freelance platforms Fiverr, upwork putting ourselves out there and he eventually built this great, solid network.

03:12

So the business has really been taking off and now I'm excited to share things that other business owners can do to get money to reinvest in the business. We went on the support funding sources, sources and that's when I stumbled on the tax credit, and so we did some research and we found out that there's 50 million small business owners, entrepreneurs, 1099 workers, freelancers that qualify for the $30,000. Well, no, I think that they caps it. It's going to be $32,000 or $33, dollars because they're going to be looping and so called a great way to get money because, well, they definitely affected our business and affected our finances. And here was relief that we got in billions that went right back into the business and hopefully made that investment in marketing our business and ramping up our capacity. That's been the business that I've been facing. That's my mission right now is for that.

04:12

People know about those self-employment tax credit funds that are available. You can apply directly through the IRS. It can take five to six months to get that. If you have a need to get false funds, certainly want to reinvest in a bootstrap organization sooner. There's programs available for that where you can get that money, less than one. The one I use is mygovrefunds.com. It's M-Y-G-O-V-R-E-F-U-N-D-S.com, so mygovrefunds.com. We got our money. It was about one a day, so it was definitely worth it for us to do that.

04:54 - Sarah St John (Host)

I hope you enjoyed that episode and were able to take away a valuable nugget of information that you can implement right away in your own business. If you feel your story would be valuable for the listeners of this show, please visit frugalshow forward slash guest.