You know you're an adult when......you suffer through a Thirtysomething Crisis.

I spent an hour or two on the phone with my friend J---- last night. She's having a Thirtysomething Crisis. She loves her job, but she's also under more stress than any human being was meant to carry. Having been through this sort of thing myself, I can empathize completely with what she's going through, so we both wound up sniffling and crying while we were talking on the phone.

I have several friends who have suffered through this type of crisis in the past couple of years, and I can only wonder why Life has chosen to haul off and punch us in the gut at this particular age.

It can't be called a Midlife Crisis, because we're only in our thirties. And it's not an Existential Crisis, because it's NOT triggered by a search for significance, but rather by an external voice telling us that we're failing at the one thing that we thought was our purpose in life.

Being an adult is really hard sometimes.

You know you're an adult when......you start your own company

This week, I'm in the process of filing out the paperwork for our LLC. The three of us (myself, my husband, and one of his friends from work) will be providing sales support, customer training, and consulting services on behalf of two software companies that make special engineering applications. For right now, I will be the only one working full-time for the new company, since they're both keeping their corporate jobs, but they'll also be doing some part-time consulting work and providing their expertise with one of the software applications.

There are lots of things to learn about starting a new company. Today I put together a summary to explain our options to my partners. (Yes, of course, I could explain this all to my husband without typing it up, but our other partner lives in New Hampshire.) And they say that the best way to learn something is to synthesize it, so I guess I'm benefiting from this experience as well.

Here's what I've learned so far this week:

1. LLC's have a choice between being taxed as a Partnership or as a Corporation.
   
   
   • Partnership - The IRS default is for an LLC to be treated as a Partnership for tax purposes, which is also referred to as "pass-through" taxation. As far as taxation goes, this is pretty straightforward. The owners of the LLC simply pay personal income taxes on whatever money they receive from the business. They still have to file tax forms for the LLC every year, including Schedule K-1 forms, which summarize the profits (or losses) for each member, but the LLC doesn't actually pay any taxes to the government.
     
     In this model, owner-members of the LLC are not considered employees, and they do not receive a salary or wage. Instead, they generally get paid by receiving their share of the profits, based on the amount of capital that they have invested. Members can, however, create "special allocations" in their operating agreements, to redistribute profits in ways that are different than just the percentage of the business that they own, but they have to be able to convince the IRS that there are legitimate business reasons for doing so. We're planning to do a special allocation because we all want to get paid a fee based on the number of hours that we work for the company, but beyond those fees, we plan to split the profits equally, because we're all contributing equal amounts to get the business off the ground. My next step will be to check with a lawyer to make sure this is all legit in the eyes of the IRS!
   
   
   
   • Corporation - The downside to this option is that the tax situation gets more complicated. For this structure, it is assumed that the active members receive salaries from the business, and that a significant amount of the profits will be reinvested in the business from year to year. The business writes off the member's salaries as an expense, so the business isn't taxed for that amount, and the members pay personal income tax on their salaries. That's simple enough. But when it comes to the profits, things get a bit more convoluted. The LLC pays taxes at a corporate rate (just 15% for up to $50,000) on all of the profits generated by the business, and then individual members pay additional taxes (aka "double taxation") on the profits or dividends that they receive.
     
     So essentially, if you're reinvesting most of your profits, you might save money by being taxed at a reduced business income rate rather than paying taxes at the personal tax rate. (With pass-through taxation, you wind up paying taxes at the personal tax rate on profits that you never really received because they were reinvested in the business.) The good news is that you can change from Partnership to Corporate taxation at any time, by filing a simple form with the IRS, but the BAD news is that you're not allowed to convert back to Partnership taxation for at least 5 years. So generally, most LLC's don't make the change until they're well established and making a significant profit from year to year.



2. Management Methods - LLC's have a choice between Member-Managed or Manager-Managed.
   
   
   • Member Management - Most LLC's are managed by all of their members, and this is exactly what we want to do. The key requirement here is that all of the members (owners) play an active role in managing the business. Otherwise, everyone's share in the business could be considered a "security" (i.e. an investment, like stock, where you expect to make a profit based on other people's efforts) and then you might have to file for an exemption with the SEC. Or, worse yet, you might not get an exemption and you'd have to comply with all of the disclosure requirements.
   
   
   • Manager Management - This structure allows an LLC to be managed by a) a subset of the LLC members; b) a mixture of some members and some non-members; or c) a person (or group) who isn't a member. In the case of Option A, an LLC could be managed by two members who work in the business full-time, while three other members (who aren't interested in actively managing the business) just invest money and hope to make a profit. Option B - An LLC receives some capital from an outside investment group, and, in exchange, that group asks to have one of their partners or employees involved in running the business. Option C - The owners of an LLC hire a CEO to manage the business on their behalf.
     
     In the case of Manager Management, the shares in the company will certainly be considered securities, but there can be some tax advantages for the non-managing members. Members who are managers of an LLC have to pay self-employment taxes, including the full tax amounts for Social Security and Medicare. (If you're an employee of a corporation, your company pays half of these taxes for you.) Non-managing members get to skip these.

P.S. I am not in any way an expert on this subject, and I am certainly not offering any legal or tax advice here. I just thought that this was sort of interesting, in a convoluted sort of way, and since I had already done the work, I thought I'd share it, in case anyone out there is interested in learning something new. Or not.

You know you're an adult when......you hire a lawyer.

The negotiations are still going on, so I can't discuss any details here. But it's definitely an adult moment when you go downtown and sit across the desk from someone to discuss legal issues. It's also one of those moments where you think to yourself, "I never imagined I'd be doing this. This is not in my plan for how my life was supposed to turn out." But you find yourself doing it because it seems like it's the only way to get someone to acknowledge that the situation is just completely and utterly not right.



(PV31W and I have both experienced this particular YKYAAW moment.)

You know you're an adult when......you get your dream job, and then someone tells you that you've failed completely at it.

NOTE: This entry was originally posted in a different blog, but after Blogger added the label feature, I decided to consolidate everything here.

WARNING: This entry isn't going to be a light-hearted as the other postings on "YKYAAW..."

I have three blogs, and they fall into three distinct categories:

1. My day-to-day blog - Also includes travel and vacation stories.
   (It's now out-of-date by 2.5 vacations, but that's not really the point right now.)


2. Wonder - Thoughts about philosophy and religion.


3. YKYAAW - This blog was originally conceived as a pseudo-ironic look at how a person occasionally (and unexpectedly) realizes that he or she is actually becoming a grown-up, even though he or she may really feel like a little kid just pretending to fit into adult society.

Unfortunately, the subject matter at hand fits most closely into the YKYAAW category. And so, instead of some light anecdote, you're going to get a full dose of reality here. Ready?



I have worked at the same company for the past eight years. Within the first year of starting work, I knew that I wanted to be a Design Engineer in R&D, and for almost six years, I pursued that goal relentlessly. A year and a half ago, that dream came true, and I finally, officially became a Senior Design Engineer. In January, I received my first performance appraisal-- which was basically, in a nutshell, "Your performance is completely inadequate, you're on probation, and you have 90 days to convince us not to fire you." Two years ago, I got the highest rating possible (reserved for just a handful of people in the entire company) and a huge bonus. So this was a shock, to put it mildly.

Since then, I've gone through several of the 5 stages of coping with catastrophic news:

1. Denial & Isolation - Yep, been there, done that.


2. Bargaining - I'm trying to figure out if making contingency plans for a lawsuit falls under "Bargaining" or "Denial"


3. Anger - Oh, yeah, I've definitely fallen down hard right in the middle of this one.


4. Depression - Plenty of this one too.
   I cry...a lot. If you count the days when I break down sobbing vs. the days that I just manage to hold on by my fingernails, I'm probably averaging about 50/50.
   And I'm really tired, all the time. Of course, lying awake all night thinking about work will do that to you. And even when I am asleep, I still can't escape from those thoughts-- On Saturday night, I had a very disturbing, very realistic dream about running away from my life.


5. Acceptance - I didn't think I was here yet, but last night I found myself filling out an application to go back to school for an entirely different career, so maybe I'm starting to dabble in this one.

(Oh, and I also think that Humiliation, Frustration, and Overwhelming Indecision need to be added into the middle of that list as well.)

Sometimes, it feels like it takes every bit of courage I've got just to get out bed and go to work. I wake up with a headache that starts in the muscles on the sides of my skull, and by the time I swipe my badge and walk in the door to my office, I feel like I'm carrying a 25 lb lead weight in my stomach. By 10am, the headache has encompassed my entire scalp, and my throat is sore because I forget to swallow when my jaw is continuously clenched. By 4pm, I'm mentally & physically exhausted from the stress, and I still have a few more hours of work ahead of me.

I am trying to keep some sort of perspective. Certainly, things could be worse. No one in my family is sick or dying, my husband is a source of strength, and we have enough savings to survive for awhile if I do lose my job. But I've been looking, and I'm just not seeing the silver lining here, or even the light at the end of the tunnel.

I feel wounded.

Broken.

And I'm starting to wonder if courage even means what I've always thought it means. Because right now it just feels like a word that describes a lack of any better options. What are my options? Should I fight? Should I quit? Right now I don't even know which option is fighting and which one is quitting.

The thing is... it's still my dream job. I can't think of anything else that I would rather do. I love being an engineer, and I thought I was good at it. Certainly, it's a huge part of my identity, which is exactly why this ordeal has made a such deep wound that hurts all the way down to my core.

What I'm wondering now is... Will it heal? Soon? Eventually? Or do I need to cut it out like a disease and throw it away? How deep will the scars go? How long will it take for them to fade?

How obvious is it that I'm broken?

You know you're an adult when......you buy a house.

From PV31W:

Shopping for a house is fun.
Buying a house is not fun.

Envisioning one's stuff in the purchased house is fun.
Actually moving the stuff is not fun.

Dreaming of decorating a house is fun.
Actually handing over the cash required is not fun.

Getting a paycheck is fun.
Working for the Man is, well, not so much fun...

You know you're an adult when......you complete your taxes. TWICE.

My husband has spent the better part of the day working on our taxes. One of the major aggravations of being an adult is having to file your own taxes. But it's even worse being a married adult, because you actually have to prepare two different tax scenarios-- married filing jointly and married filing separately-- to figure out which way you get less screwed by the combined efforts of the federal and state governments.

In our case, we can avoid being taxed an extra $1200 if we file separately. We think. But then again, with the tax code being what it is, we could find ourselves being hauled off to jail and having our house, our dog, and our cat confiscated for not paying taxes that we didn't think we owed.

We'll really miss the house and the cat.

(They'll probably give the dog back as a form of additional punishment.)

You know you're an adult when......you decide to spend a significant amount of money on something really mundane.

In this case, the mundanity is having leaf-guards installed in the rain gutters on our house.

But the true YKYAAW revelation-moment actually occurred when I found myself having a conversation with a coworker about the costs and benefits of different types of leaf-guards.

You know you're an adult when......your back goes out.

Yesterday I suddenly became 80 years old...

• It takes me about 30 seconds to transition from standing up to sitting down, and a minute-plus to make it from sitting down to standing up straight.


• Getting in and out of my car is time-consuming and painful.


• This morning I had to apply some strategic problem-solving skills to put on my socks. ("OK, so the immediate goal is to get all of my toes into the top cuff of the sock. If I can accomplish that, I think I'll be able to figure out a way to get the sock pulled up over my foot and ankle.")


• When I drop something on the floor, I spend a few moments debating whether or not it's worth the trouble of picking it back up.


• I think I'm starting to scowl at people around me-- partially because I am in pain everytime I move, but also because I know that if anyone bumps into me, I will certainly fall right over, and then I'll hurt worse than I already do. So now I view everyone walking around me as a potential threat to my (not-so-)well-being.

The problem is, I haven't had 50 more years to prepare for being 80-- It came on all at once, without warning of any kind. So I don't know any coping mechanisms.

I don't know why my back has suddenly gone into spasm. I wish I did, because then I could ensure that I wouldn't do whatever it was again. I guess I'll have to plan on doing preventative maintenance-- As soon as ski season is over I'm signing up for Yoga or Pilates.

Getting old sucks! I'm not mature enough to be old!

You know you're an adult when......you find yourself following steps A-E.

A> You have a crush on someone. (This step is not necessarily a sign of adulthood!)
B> You're under the premise that said person's spouse has died of a dreadful disease.
C> You find out said person's spouse is in fact alive and kicking, not dead from the dreadful disease that he/she did in fact have.
D> You learn that said person is in the midst of a divorce from undead spouse.
E> You try to talk said person out of the divorce...

(This "YKYAAW..." was submitted by a friend of mine.)

You know you're an adult when......you use a precious vacation day to go home a take a nap.

The past two weeks have been insanely busy for me, and I just haven't been able to catch up on sleep. So on Friday, I used a half a vacation day to go home and take a nap. Now there are very few things that are more precious to me than vacation days. I am desperately envious of the European standards of 4-6 weeks of vacation each year. I only get 3 weeks of vacation, and I have to work for 2 more years before I make it to 4 weeks of vacation. So blowing even half a vacation day for something so mundane as staying at home and sleeping is completely uncharacteristic for me. The only thing that convinced me to splurge was the idea that if I DIDN'T take the afternoon off, I would probably wind up sick for the entire 3-day holiday weekend.

You know you're an adult when......you pay for your heat in the summer because you know you won't be able to afford it if you wait until winter.

This title was suggested by my friend PV31W, who has learned about the cost of heat the hard way. Her last apartment apparently had either a) the least effective furnace in the Midwest, b) completely inadequate insulation, or c) all of the above. It was never warm enough (i.e. above 60) in her apartment, and to make matters worse, she is also a person who just gets cold easily. At one point last winter, she came over to our house and showed us that her hands were a ghastly jaundiced-green color because her body was shutting down circulation to her extremities in an attempt to maintain her core body temperature. Obviously, just putting on a sweater wouldn't solve the problem for her, unless she could also put on mittens, but that would probably have interfered somewhat with her ability to do her homework for college. So she found another apartment, but she also started paying for her electric & gas bill under the level-loading payment plan.

You know you're an adult when......the repair of a home appliance is the highlight of your day.

Our big excitement for today has been that we now have a working humidifier on our furnace. (Keep in mind that we're both sick, so our opportunities for excitement are severely limited by the confines of the house.)

Our house is new-- It was just completed last June, and the furnace was installed probably sometime last March or so. Late in December, we discovered that the humidifier wasn't working. After some preliminary troubleshooting, my husband talked to the manufacturer, and discovered that some of the key components (the humidstat sensor and the external temperature sensor) were never installed. Fortunately, they were kind enough to send us the necessary modules, and my husband tried installing them in January. However, at that time, the main controller appeared to not be working, so he made another phone call to the manufacturer, who agreed to send us a replacement. It came in the mail today, along with installation instructions.

As it turns out, the installation instructions were more critical than the replacement controller. The original controller works fine, now that the wiring is hooked up correctly.

So we will finally have some level of moisture in our air for the remainder of the winter!!! I realize that this doesn't seem like such a big deal, and when I was younger, I would have agreed. Generally, I'm not such a big fan of heat and humidity-- With the exception of scuba diving, my favorite outdoor activities tend to be better when things are cold and dry. However, for the past couple of months, my feet have been making velcro noises in my socks, my fingernails have been spontaneously disintegrating as soon as they reach the tips of my fingers, and my lips have been perpetually chapped. (Like a squirrel, I have compulsively stashed chapstick everywhere I go-- in my purse and in the pockets of all my coats, next to my computer at work, in my car, near the couch, on the bathroom counter, on my nightstand, etc.) So I am eagerly anticipating the relief that the humidifier will bring.

If I had a voice left, I would give three cheers for my husband and the kind technical support woman at Aprilaire.