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I Just Hit $100k/year On GitHub Sponsors

calebporzio.com

341–350 of 510 posts

Re: I Just Hit $100k/year On GitHub Sponsors

#341
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The option not to have live in San Francisco, a dismal place that very few people want to actually be in anymore. Dismal? Lol I love it here. People are moving out of cities all over the country because of coronavirus, sure, but only because most of the perks of city living are non-existent right now. I know a couple people moving and they're not going far, because of the nearby available amenities, that being exce…

It's a great city in a beautiful location... but if you come from another developed country or a part of the US where homelessness is very uncommon, it's extremely shocking to see people camping on the streets pretty much all over the city, it feels like you're in a shanty town and it feels unsafe.

I could see that if you came from somewhere where homelessness is uncommon, but something that shocked me on a recent roadtrip was how common homelessness is now. It seemed EVERY town we stopped in, except for the extremely remote or tiny, had camps or at the very least people looking worse-for-the-wear at street corners with a sign. I expect the painkiller epidemic combined with covid is not doing great things to this country.

Re: I Just Hit $100k/year On GitHub Sponsors

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Success is more random than we'd like to believe, and there is a risk when failure leads to victim blaming. An excellent sentiment, if less common these days than it should be. Reminds me of a quotation from Chapter XXV[0] of Machiavelli's The Prince : "Nevertheless, not to extinguish our free will, I hold it to be true that Fortune is the arbiter of one-half of our actions, but that she still leaves us to direct t…

Over the course of an entire lifetime, the random good vs bad luck tend to wash out and people usually end their lives financially roughly in line with their capabilities. - my personal opinion and experience.

That's seriously out of touch with the data. Play around with the animation tool at the bottom of this article: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/27/upshot/make-y...

The article it was created for is at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-c...

Re: I Just Hit $100k/year On GitHub Sponsors

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The option not to have live in San Francisco, a dismal place that very few people want to actually be in anymore. Dismal? Lol I love it here. People are moving out of cities all over the country because of coronavirus, sure, but only because most of the perks of city living are non-existent right now. I know a couple people moving and they're not going far, because of the nearby available amenities, that being exce…

Smell the streets at 3am

Er, yea, it's a city lol. If you want to live in the woods, you can do that and still be a 30 minute drive from the city here.

Re: I Just Hit $100k/year On GitHub Sponsors

#344

Reading these makes me sad about the law in my country, Finland. The lowest tier of OP ($7 for no reward) would be illegal here. We have a law called "Money Collection act", which states that to gather donations (i.e. payments with nothing in return), you have to get a permit. This permit costs money, is not given to individuals, and is given only for non-profit activities. So this means that if you see a donation/sp…

You can accept a gift. It's also possible for someone to give a grant. But I'm not sure how they would work out in case of open source. I know that people write books using a grant.

Re: I Just Hit $100k/year On GitHub Sponsors

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what he's generally saying: aggressively deduct expenses used to support your business. This would include rent, home office, computers, phones to conduct business, business meetings, travel, health insurance, retirement, etc. Then the member and spouse would draw low salaries putting you in low income bracket and thus low taxation. The 2017 TCJA further reduced taxation for business owners via the Qualified…

> draw low salaries The IRS has rules (typically unenforced) regarding this. You are supposed to draw a salary that matches your job in your local area. So if you are based in Tinyton, Flyover State, you could probably get away with paying yourself $30k/yr, but in NYC (where I'm based), my accountant told me $70/hr is basically as low as I can safely go. So I do $70/hr and then $14/hr in my retirement account. The $7…

> safely

What's the risk - audit? And if so, what's the risk from the audit? A fine for tax fraud? Jail time?

Re: I Just Hit $100k/year On GitHub Sponsors

#346
post #234

Reading these makes me sad about the law in my country, Finland. The lowest tier of OP ($7 for no reward) would be illegal here. We have a law called "Money Collection act", which states that to gather donations (i.e. payments with nothing in return), you have to get a permit. This permit costs money, is not given to individuals, and is given only for non-profit activities. So this means that if you see a donation/sp…

"For each donated dollar, I will create and send you 100 random bytes that you can use in your cryptographic applications." $7 = 700 random bytes $15 = 1500 random bytes + 500 bytes free! $99 = lifetime* subscription for 25k random bytes per year * your lifetime or my lifetime, whichever terminates earlier

I'd buy the $99 option and use it as the trigger for my dead mans switch :).

Re: I Just Hit $100k/year On GitHub Sponsors

#347
post #299
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"For each donated dollar, I will create and send you 100 random bytes that you can use in your cryptographic applications." $7 = 700 random bytes $15 = 1500 random bytes + 500 bytes free! $99 = lifetime* subscription for 25k random bytes per year * your lifetime or my lifetime, whichever terminates earlier

Do you have any collectible limited edition bytes?

Those would be the special one-of-a-kind bytes that we log to ensure no two people get the same bytes twice. Bonus: the logs are numbered, so we can validate those bytes. Downside: we’ll have to ask for a monthly donation to cover storing the bytes and bandwidth ;-)

Re: I Just Hit $100k/year On GitHub Sponsors

#348

His data clearly shows most "sponsors" only sponsor him to view his webcasts. Is it really right to call that a sponsorship, as opposed to a subscription? What are the legal implications? (and yes, I'm aware that this is how most of patreon works too)

I'm a lawyer, but I can't give legal advice here. See https://notlegaladvice.law/.

If you're interested in the issue, however, you might start by reading a little about "money transmitter" regulations. An early payments platform for open projects shut down at least partly on account of it. I suspect the concept of "perks" became widespread in part to differentiate fundraising platforms from money transmitters.

Re: I Just Hit $100k/year On GitHub Sponsors

#349
post #241

Reading these makes me sad about the law in my country, Finland. The lowest tier of OP ($7 for no reward) would be illegal here. We have a law called "Money Collection act", which states that to gather donations (i.e. payments with nothing in return), you have to get a permit. This permit costs money, is not given to individuals, and is given only for non-profit activities. So this means that if you see a donation/sp…

Interestingly, while you can't be donated money in Finland people can certainly and rather freely give gifts to another person. It's even tax-free as long as gifts from one person remain under 4000€ for any consecutive three years. Surely gettings lots of monetary gifts from foreign friends would probably not hold during a tax audit (they'd accuse you of trying to evade taxes unless you could provide a plausible reas…

> It's even tax-free as long as gifts from one person remain under 4000€ for any consecutive three years.

Not something to be impressed by; gifts are tax free in the US under $15,000 per one year.

Re: I Just Hit $100k/year On GitHub Sponsors

#350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you set the entity up correctly and work with a decent accountant, your $112k turns into more like $40k taxable, and if you are married, that $40k drops to $20k @ 10% + $20k @ 12% or ~ $4500 in taxes.

What do you mean set up correctly? And how does 112K turn into 40K taxable?

I'm not an accountant or tax lawyer, so this isn't advise, only my back of the envelope calculation, not even using things like the 172 deduction, or business expenses, but my estimate was actually way off almost double.

Gross Income: $112k

- SEP IRA 25%: -$28k

- Owner Health Insurance: -$15k

- 199-A Deduction (20%): -$12k

Total business income for taxes: $47k

- Married Filing Jointly Deduction: -$24k

- Total taxable income: $23k

Tax on $23k (10% of first $20k, 12% of next $3k): $2360

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