Hi all,
I'm happy with my gig and arrangements, but DW is eyeballing the world of software contracting. She currently works for a large company as a regular employee, and likes everything about it except the fact that they expect her to come in during the summer. Her goal would be to keep things more or less the same, but loosen her connection to the company. She's is very senior in her group, and does a lot of technical leadership and mentoring, as well as cross-team coordination. Not a lot of what she does is actually hammering out code any more.
Meanwhile, I'm eyeballing that situation and thinking about all the tax savings that could fall out of us being able to deduct the home office (neither of our employers requires us to have one, so we can't right now), and possibly get a solo 401(k) for more pretax contributions.
I'm curious if anyone here has any advice on making such a transition. Some of my burning questions include: could she retain her current scope and responsibilities while going independent --how much latitude is there with the IRS on that? She has so much freedom already, that the distinction they seem to be drawing between freedom of action and control of details doesn't seem meaningful to me. She's not a people manager, but she's enough of a technical leader that she already gets to decide the details. Also, what should she look out for in terms of setting a rate? Can you do contracting that essentially makes you available to do work for them that covers broad duties like cross-team coordination, training, work scoping and planning? Does the change in relationship limit what she can do for them, or just how much say they have over where, when, and how she does it?
Any such transition here would be a long way out, so for now, I'm mostly concerned with helping to figure out if it's a decent fit for her. I'm also concerned with trying to make sure she's fairly compensated, and any rules of thumb in terms of salary <-> hourly relationships would be useful for that.
Very generally: any advice would be welcome. This is totally alien to us.