5 financial moves I wish I'd made sooner as a creator entrepreneur
The boring stuff that saves you money: taxes, contractors, and retirement
Hi, I’m Hannah! Welcome to Nonlinear News, where I write for smart, ambitious people choosing the nonlinear path.
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This post is sponsored by Relay, a business banking platform. Relay is a financial technology company and is not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Thread Bank, Member FDIC.
When I posted my first Instagram video in October 2024, I never thought it could become a business that makes multiple six figures a year. It felt like a fun creative outlet, and “content creator” didn’t sound serious enough to be a real career.
My first brand deal came in January 2025 and it shifted my mental calculus. I made $5,000 from posting a single video.
For most of 2025, I made anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 a month. It still felt like fun money. A nice bonus on top of my 9-5, not a business.
The end of 2025 felt like a turning point. My brand had grown, and a few things hit at once: tech layoffs, AI slop taking over every feed, and brands that suddenly wanted real storytelling from real people. The creator economy was growing fast, and creator-led businesses were becoming a serious path. Going into 2026, I decided to treat this like a real professional asset instead of a side project.
A big part of “taking it seriously” was the financial side. Even though I started my career in finance and knew the importance of finances, it took me a long time to get around to organizing mine because it felt like boring admin that took me away from growing my business.
But “boring admin” is what turns a side hustle into a business. “Boring admin” saved me money and helped me make more.
I’m not a small business finance expert by any means, but here are the five financial moves I wish I’d made sooner, and what I wish someone had laid out cleanly for me when I started.
1. Form your business entity (usually an LLC)
Before you can do almost anything else on this list, you need an actual business entity. For most creators that means an LLC. It gives you liability protection and lets your business income pass through to you without a separate corporate tax.
I did it after realizing I should separate my business income for taxes (which I needed an LLC for), but wish I knew a few things earlier:
You don’t need to set up an LLC on day one of posting content or starting a business. You can run a side hustle as a sole proprietor for a while before it’s worth the cost and paperwork. Form it once your income is consistent, not the first week you post, consult or advise.
In New York, there’s a publication requirement. Within 120 days of forming, you have to publish a notice in two newspapers the county picks for you, for six consecutive weeks, and it runs from a few hundred dollars upstate to well over $1,000 in the city, plus a $50 filing fee (NY Department of State).
After you form an LLC, you can turn it into an S corp to save on taxes (in most cases). S corp is not a separate entity, it’s a tax election you make on your LLC that starts to make sense once your net income is consistently above roughly $80,000, because you can pay yourself a reasonable salary and take the rest as distributions that skip self-employment tax (it’s location dependent; in some cities like NYC, S corp doesn’t save you as much).
Further reading:
2. Separate your business and personal bank accounts
I ran everything through my personal bank account for way too long. Brand deal payments, my expenses, my rent, my groceries, all in the same place. I couldn’t tell you which part of the business was profitable or how much I’d actually made versus spent.
I put this off because setting up a business banking account meant paperwork and sitting in a branch. I switched to Relay recently and wish I’d known about it earlier, because I set up my account in about five minutes from my couch.
Once the money was separated, everything got easier. I could see what was coming in, make decisions, and pay people cleanly.
Relay also makes it easy to set up separate accounts for different parts of the business, which used to be a hassle. You can also give logins to your accountant, a contractor, or an assistant without sharing your own password, which is huge once you start delegating.
3. Set aside money for taxes every quarter
When you’re running a side hustle next to a 9-5, you have a hundred things going on, and this is the one that’s easiest to ignore. I’d seen other people say to set money aside for taxes. I knew I “should” do this. But I figured I wouldn’t make enough in my first year for it to matter.
Then Q4 2025 happened and I made a lot more than I expected, all at once. Come tax time I had to pull out a huge chunk I hadn’t planned for. It would have been so much less painful if I’d been setting money aside quarterly the whole time.
Now I do this with my accountant every quarter. It’s a hassle, and it saves you from a five or even six-figure tax bill you didn’t see coming. The moment a payment comes in, a set percentage goes into a separate account I don’t touch, so it’s already there when taxes are due.
Further reading: IRS — Estimated taxes.
4. Open a self-employed retirement account
A perk of having self-employment income, if you’re not fully self employed, is that you can open a retirement account built for business owners, on top of any 401(k) you already have at a day job. The two main options are a Solo 401(k) and a SEP IRA, and once my income was consistent, my accountant walked me through both.
The difference (do your own research or talk to your own accountant before acting on this!):
A SEP IRA makes sense if you want simple. It’s employer contributions only, up to 25% of your net self-employment income, no employee piece, minimal admin.
A Solo 401(k) lets you save more, especially if your business income is still modest. You contribute as both the “employee” (a flat amount up to $24,500 in 2026) and the “employer” (up to 25%). Because the employee piece is a fixed dollar amount and not a percentage, you can shelter a bigger share of a smaller income than a SEP IRA’s 25%-only cap allows. It also has a Roth option.
The part I missed at first: you can fund one of these on top of a 401(k) at your day job. A SEP IRA is fully separate from that plan, so there’s no overlap to worry about. A Solo 401(k) is trickier, because the “employee” contribution limit ($24,500 in 2026) is a per-person cap shared across all your 401(k)s. Whatever you defer into your day-job plan reduces what you can add as the employee of your own, but your “employer” contribution to your own business 401(k) is separate.
One rule of thumb my accountant shared: your day-job match is free money, so contribute enough there to get the full match, then figure out how to load up on your own plan.
If this is confusing, which one you pick matters less than starting. Starting early beats optimizing later.
Further reading: IRS — Retirement plans for self-employed people.
5. Get a business credit card
3 reasons to get a business credit card:
It builds credit for your business. A business card reports to the business credit bureaus under your EIN, separate from your personal credit. Build that history for six months to a year and you can qualify for financing to invest in the business without leaning on your personal score. This matters more as your business grows. I’ve been talking to creators who started YouTube channels, launched podcasts, or moved into in-person events, and all of it needs money upfront: videographers, studio space, gear.
It protects you from fraud. If a charge is fraudulent, it’s easier to dispute it and get the money back on a credit card.
Points. Not the main reason, but you’re spending on the business anyway, so you may as well earn rewards while you do it.
Relay offers a business credit card too, so you can set it up alongside your accounts: The Relay Visa® Credit Card is issued by Thread Bank, Member FDIC, pursuant to a license from Visa U.S.A. Inc.
Further reading:
Forbes Advisor - Top business credit cards
When I started my LLC, I kept wishing someone would lay all of this out for me in one place as a creator entrepreneur and 5-9 business owner. Nobody did, so I figured it out one piece at a time, and each thing I set up made the business feel more real and me (a little) less anxious about running it.
So don’t try to do everything this week. Start with getting an LLC and separating your business finances.
Thank you to Relay for sponsoring this newsletter!
I got to have dinner with their team in person last month and sat down with their CEO Yoseph West (made him take a pic!) to hear about everything they’re building for solopreneurs and small business owners. It feels like a platform that’s going to keep evolving with me as my business grows, so I’m excited to introduce you to it!
The useful shift here is treating boring admin as infrastructure rather than an interruption to creative work. Separating each tax payment the moment income arrives, instead of trusting a future calmer version of yourself to sort it out, is the kind of small system that lets a volatile creator income feel genuinely sustainable.
Such a good resource, thanks for this!