LLC or corporation???

I would guess most O/O's are sole proprietor's. I am and have not found any compelling reason to incorporate.

 

Depends or how much you net. If 70k or more consider LLC, filing taxes as S-Corp.

 

Incorporation offers more protection from law suits. LLC is better from a tax point of view. A corporation if you take stock dividend its a double taxation. Profits taxed at the corporate level and recieved dividen taxed one your personal taxes.

 

If you are doing the driving, incorporation offers no protection from lawsuits. If you do incorporate, elect to be an "S" corp. This eliminates the double taxation as profits are passed through to the stockholders who then pay personal income taxes.

 

Like the others have said, the company/corporation can be sued in an accident thus protecting the owners/shareholders. But if you are also the driver they can then sue you personally and get everything you own including your truck and corporation.

 

If you were sued as a sole prop they could come after your house or any asset you had. If you were incorporated they couldn't assuming you were an employee of your LLC/Corp and everything was the property of it and not you as well. I was a sole prop for years as a telecom/construction contractor until exactly that happened to another guy I worked with. He came very close to loosing his WIFES house! She bought it before marrying him. but marriage makes you legally the same person and since his company wasn't shielded from him and was being sued it was temporarily on the table.

 

If "something" happens, and you are driving the truck when "something" happens, they can sue the LLC/Corp, and they can also sue you personally as the driver. understand ? There may be a rare event where your LLC/Corp becomes liable for something non-driving related where the LLC/corp would offer you some protection. However, generally in the trucking business your liability stems from driving incidents. If you are the driver, incorporating does nothing to protect you as an individual from lawsuits in those circumstances. In fact, it would only make the lawsuit more costly and time consuming as you would be defending your LLC/Corp and yourself too.

 

A half decent paralegal could get thru an LLC/Corp and take everything from you, let alone an attorney. It's a waste of time and money, not to mention the headache of it all.

 

I guess the other not so obvious point is that many of us O/O's probably do not have an extreme amount of personal asset's for someone to go after anyways. If you do have a few things like property or vehicles it may not be that difficult to transfer them into someone else's name and protect yourself that way.