Foreign Perspectives

I find myself in the unusual (for me) position of thinking about setting up a company in America.

How did that come about? Well, some back of the envelope calculations indicate that there could be a lot of money to be made were some of my websites hosted in America and in some circumstances it looks like doing that might produce a tax liability for me over there so to ringfence that, it looks like the simplest long term solution would be to run the sites via a US based company. If that situation comes to pass (I’ll not know if it’s likely to for several months) it seems likely that I’d end up running all the income through said US company purely to simplify matters tax-wise for myself.

Anyway, because of all that, I’ve started looking into how one might go about setting up the company and it looks like it’s a whole lot simpler than it is setting up a UK company. The place to form it seems to be Delaware in that if you don’t make any income in that state then you’ve only $60/year tax to pay them which is dead handy for me as the websites are likely to be hosted in Texas. Setting up the company costs around $200 all-in and after that it’s under $100/year running costs although I imagine that I’d be needing an American accountant at some point if things really took off (can’t see it somehow).

One side-effect of doing that would be that I could even move to America if the income were high enough in that I could obviously employ myself.

Still, all that’s dependent on the website working really well in America and, of course, it might not.