Keeping Your Business and Home Life Separate
Whether you’re dabbling in self-employment, or you run your own full-blown business, here’s a good example of why you might want to dissociate your business address from your home address… A process server showed up on our doorstep on a Sunday morning awhile back. What a nice Sunday surprise! No, they didn’t show up looking to serve papers on my wife or me. Rather, they were looking for the guy that used to own our house. As it turns out, he’s a home builder, and someone is suing him. While his business partner was listed as the registered agent, they ended up using his (our!) address as the physical address of their business. While we got a good laugh out of this, it certainly reinforced the idea of using a P.O. Box for business-related mail, and also using something besides your house as the physical address of your business whenever possible.
Disclaimer: Discover is a paid advertiser of this site.
Reasonable efforts are made to maintain accurate information. See the Discover online credit card application for full terms and conditions on offers and rewards.
Filed under: Self Employment
About the author: Nickel is the founder and editor-in-chief of this site. He's a thirty-something family man who has been writing about personal finance since 2005, and guess what? He's on Twitter!
Related articles...
» Carnivals – Week of 02/05/07» From the Archives (January 27th – February 9th)
» More on the Home Office Tax Deduction
» Claiming the Home Office Tax Deduction
» Managing and Maintaining a Home Office
» The Best of January 2007
» Buying Life Insurance: One Company or Two?
» The Home Office Tax Deduction
Was this article useful? Please sign up to receive our content via e-mail:
7 Responses to “Keeping Your Business and Home Life Separate”
Leave a Reply
Top Cards by Category
Earn 100 Reward Dollars after you make $1,000 in purchases in the first three months of Cardmembership.
Earn 25K Membership Rewards(R) points after you spend $2,000 during your first three months of Card membership.
Consumer friendly credit card with a great low rate of 7.25% and save on interest charges. No balance transfer fees and no annual fee.
The new Discover it card is out to change the way people think about credit cards. No annual fee. No overlimit fee. No foreign transaction fee & no pay-by-phone fee. No late fee on your first late payment. And Discover won't increase your APR for paying late.*
The new Discover it card is out to change the way people think about credit cards. No annual fee. No overlimit fee. No foreign transaction fee & no pay-by-phone fee. No late fee on your first late payment. And Discover won't increase your APR for paying late.*
Consumer friendly credit card with a great low rate of 7.25% and save on interest charges. No balance transfer fees and no annual fee.
Limited Time Offer: Get 25,000 Membership Rewards(R) points after you spend $5,000 in the first three months of Card membership. Enroll and select a qualifying airline to receive up to $200 annually in statement credits for incidental fees, such as checked bags and in-flight refreshments, charged by the airline.
The new Discover it card is out to change the way people think about credit cards. No annual fee. No overlimit fee. No foreign transaction fee & no pay-by-phone fee. No late fee on your first late payment. And Discover won't increase your APR for paying late.*
- How to Become a Millionaire
- How to Get Out of Debt
- The Best Dollars I've Ever Spent
- How Our Estate Plan is Structured
- How We Paid Our Mortgage In Less than 10 Years
- Money Making Ideas
- How to Manage Your Asset Allocation with Multiple Accounts
- Consumption Smoothing - Save While the Saving's Good
- How to Save on Groceries
- How Much Life Insurance Do You Need?
- Eleven Great Books About Money
- Dave Ramsey is Bad at Math
- Dish Network Customer Service SUCKS
- $8,000 Homebuyer Tax Credit
- Pay Off Mortgage Early or Invest?
- How to Claim the First-Time Homebuyer Tax Credit
- Termite Control: Sentricon vs. Termidor
- How Much Should You Pay a Babysitter?
- Ethanol Blended Gas = Lower Mileage?
- Reduced Credit Limits? Share Your Experience
- $15,000 Homebuyer Tax Credit
- Will Mac OS X Lion Kill Quicken 2007?
- Buying Furniture off the Back of a Truck
How to save money on insurance
- Working longer: Fallback or fallacy?
- More money, more happiness: Do you think money can buy happiness?
- Overdraft fees soared to $32 billion in 2012
- How do you combat prom inflation?
- How should you choose a bank? Look in the mirror.
- The cost of clean water
- College debt 101
- Is it possible to live debt free?
- How to prepare for a home appraisal
- Home prices are up: good news or bad?
January 30th, 2007 at 8:33 am
Good idea about the PO Box. I expect to register my wife’s business this year and probably switch to a PO Box. Luckily, the post office is nearby and convenient.
January 30th, 2007 at 9:55 am
Keeping business and home life separate idea is good for business and home life.
Which will give you peace of mind and at the same time to the family. Good idea Nickel thanks..
January 30th, 2007 at 9:26 pm
I don’t think you can use a PO Box as the address for the registered agent, however. You’ll either have to pay someone to act as your reg. agent or use another “real” address.
January 30th, 2007 at 9:58 pm
Jonathan: Correct. We pay our attorney $50/year to serve as the RA.
January 31st, 2007 at 5:45 pm
My solution to this problem was to, instead of getting a PO Box, get a mailbox at The UPS Store (or one of its competitors). Since this will give your business a real street address, you can serve as RA for your company. Plus, there always will be live person available to sign for any packages you receive and having a real street address will allow you to receive shipments from anyone (some shippers won’t ship to PO Boxes). One added benefit is that it makes your business look more legitimate than listing a PO Box on your business card.