[ksdale]

Being a single person LLC absolutely does gives you the legal advantages of an LLC, provided you maintain separation of personal and business, eg keeping business bank accounts and routing all income and expenses through them, keeping proper accounting books, signing contracts as the LLC and not as yourself, holding company meetings w/ minutes, etc.

In practice this protection isn’t worth as much as it is for larger businesses because, for example, any bank lending to a new single person LLC will require a personal guarantee anyway, and most single person LLC don’t have a lot of situations where they might incur a life destroying liability, like an accident in a warehouse or something, but that protection still definitely exists for single person LLCs.

[ioddly]

> holding company meetings w/ minutes

How do you hold meetings with minutes in a single person LLC? With clients/subcontractors/advisors maybe?

I'm not being sarcastic, my accountant wants me to form an LLC and if doing this helps with liability I'd be happy to go through the ceremony of it.

[jjoonathan]

Write down your plans, decisions, and reflections. It's something you should probably be doing anyway.

The only silly part is calling it a meeting, but people do seem to agree that's the terminology the IRS wants to see.

Actually, I guess there are two silly parts, although the second is arguably more sad than silly: you must be 100% clear that you are engaging in these activities with a profit motive and not for the love of learning, doing, helping... and if the IRS decides that your motive is not sufficiently (im)pure, you will owe considerable back taxes, interest, and fees.

[ksdale]

Haha it is rather ridiculous, but you can formalize big company decisions in a sort of company secretary’s binder. Honestly though, keeping the finances and contracts separate will basically always be enough to avoid personal liability. Basically you just want everything to be partitioned enough that no one you do business with would ever think that they are dealing with you in a purely personal capacity rather than as a representative of your company.

[zhte415]

Send an email to yourself? CC your accountant/company secretary.

[diN0bot]

How do you sign something as an LLC? Do you just write the LLC name?

[couchand]

Generally, anyone that a company has duly authorized to sign will be able to sign on behalf of the company. I'm just guessing at what the GP meant, but I think the most important thing is to just negotiate the contract as the LLC. I suppose it makes sense to be particularly clear on the signature page that you're signing as manager/agent of the LLC.