How to maximize business income, minimize taxes, and saving/invest for retirement - in priority order

This is a brief summary of the levels of how I would approach maximizing income, minimizing taxes, and investing/saving in order of priority:

1. On the business side, be sure to collect all money possible (soundexchange, youtube, streaming mechanicals, etc) and be sure you have a system in place to be sure no checks go missing (on a busy tour, they do often, I assure you).

2. Minimize your business profit with deductions. Be sure you claim gov't per diems for every night you are away from home for work, keep track of all mileage, deduct home studio space, all travel related to work, cell phone, spotify subscription, computers, software, etc. All of it that is related to work.

3. Next, I would look at health insurance and also retirement savings. Both of these could be on the personal side (not business) but they can also be on the business side. Depending on how your business(es) are structured you could do a SEP IRA or you could do a 401k. You can stash a lot of pre-tax money into these accounts for later down the road and invest them in index funds for low fees. Then you can also do personal IRA (like a Roth IRA which isn't tax advantaged).

On the health insurance tip you can set up an HSA and stash money there and invest it also and treat it like a 401k. You can also make health insurance a business expense so it's pre-tax. Some of this depends on your business structure (LLC taxed as S Corp, sole proprietorship, etc)

4. Lastly, after all of these things if there is still money to invest, then I'd look at Real Estate, regular investing, crowdfunding investing, etc. There are some new low risk ways to invest in real estate now with companies like Fundrise. Notes on this mentioned in another blog post.