December 2024 Income Report

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, the only daily show in the world interviewing entrepreneurs seven days a week. Here we have our income report for December of 2024. It's going to be a great chat with our CPA, Mr. Ron, CPA on fire himself. We'll talk about what went down in December with my interview of the month with Seth Godin and a pretty big announcement and oh, so much more. As soon as we get back from thanking our sponsors. Success Story, hosted by Scott D. Clary, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.

0:40Success Story features Q &A sessions with successful business leaders, keynote presentations, and conversations on sales, marketing, business, startups, and entrepreneurship. A recent episode discussing the billion-dollar health secret with the founder and CEO of Whoop is a must-listen. Listen to Success Story wherever you get your podcasts. Fire Nation, you have a book inside you, and it's time to share your message with the world. That's why I created Author 100, a 100-day program where I will personally guide you one-on-one to create, write, publish, and market your book. If you want daily guidance and mentorship from me, JLD, then head over to author100.com to sign up for a free call with me to chat about the details.

1:24All right, Fire Nation, let's kick this off with our gross income for December at$131 ,587. Our total expenses were$12 ,156 for a net profit for December 2024 of$119 ,431 for an increase of$35 ,348 from last month. The percentage of net profit overall gross revenue is 91%. I love those numbers in the 90s. And Fire Nation, we have a great monthly tax tip from Ron, Mr. CPA on Fire himself, all about tax changes shaping 2025 and beyond. So Ron, take it away. Hello, John, and hello, Fire Nation. This is Ron Parisi with CPA on Fire for your December 2024 tax and accounting tip. Hey, Fire Nation, I thought we would take, here we are in January 2025.

2:21We got an exciting year from a tax perspective, and I just kind of want to visit why that is and maybe make some predictions. You know, as business owners and as obviously personal taxpayers, we have some big changes coming down. So for those of us that were around in 2017, Trump's first go around, he had made some significant changes in what's called the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. And all of those or most of those are set to expire at the end of 2025. And obviously with sort of the Trump II regime coming in, I just thought, talk a little about what's expiring. What do we think going forward?

3:14You know, I think there's going to be some changes pretty immediate between now and the 25 bleeding into 26. just with the midterms, I think his regime is going to be very anxious to work on these sun-setting provisions and maybe do some things as well. So the first thing is, very few people remember this, but the individual tax rates were reduced. So basically, the marginal rates are going up. So we can expect in general that everybody's going to be paying more taxes. We also had the standard deduction almost doubled. The personal exemptions were eliminated. So these are all going to be, it's going to be a wave coming back of additional taxes.

4:13Child tax credit is going to be reduced, good or bad. The one thing is the SALT exemption of the$10 ,000 cap. That's going to be eliminated. So those of us on the coast with some property taxes could have some changes to our standard deduction. But let's just talk about some big things for you, Fire Nation, right? The first thing is the qualified business income deduction, right? This is that 20 % deduction for pass-through entities, partnerships, S-corps, that's going away. So that's going to be a pretty big hit for those of us on the line here. Additionally, you know, the estate and gift exemptions, right?

5:04So that's expected to be decreased, right? So that's going to be another big thing for those of us in the financial planning and trying to determine, you know, whether those estate taxes are going to apply to our estates. So, you know, again, some big items coming through. What do I think is going to happen? I would, you know, if I were to put my genie cap on, I do think a lot of these provisions are going to be reinstated, not sunset, and probably made permanent. So that's, you know, I think a good thing for small business owners. Additionally, for those of us in the C Corp, Trump first go around reduced the corporate rate and I think is aiming to continue to reduce it.

6:00And what's interesting about that is exactly what's going to happen, you know, with those pass-through entities and the QBI. And is there going to be additional QBI? That's a question mark. My knee-jerk reaction is probably not. But just keep that in mind. As corporate rates come down, there could be some implications for the QBI and for S-Corps and partnerships. I think the big thing everybody's talking about right now is these tariffs. What effect are they going to have on baseline economy, on taxes, and helping the Treasury reduce the deficit? So, you know, depending on how those shake out, I think they're going to have an implication on U.S.

6:52tax law So, as in everything, right, we always talk about tax strategy, tax planning Everything is correlated, there's different levers, right, you pull one lever, it has different effects So, I definitely think, you know, I'm keeping my eye out on the tariff situation who knows where that's going to go but how that's going to impact you know these sunsetting changes and maybe some additional additional cuts to our U.S. personal income tax and just remember like when you look at the treasury and where these funds go or come from right a big piece of that obviously is your FICA you know what's get taken out of our W-2 but also personal income tax those two are the big drivers.

7:41Corporate income tax, estate taxes don't make up that much of a percentage. I mean, the big movers are FICA and our personal income tax revenue for our budget. So just keep that in mind as we see this whole landscape play out in 2025. Nonetheless, Fire Nation, I just wanted to give you kind of a rundown of some of the big movements that are happening in 2025 and maybe that may happen in 2025 into 2026. Again, Ron Parisi with CPA on Fire. You know, our specialty is growing online entrepreneurs, helping them both with the accounting advisory as well as long-term tax strategy. We would love to talk to you if you find yourself in need of those.

8:34Until then, John, Fire Nation, always a pleasure being with you. Ron, thank you for dropping those value bombs. And Fire Nation, please visit cpaonfire.com for any accounting needs that you may have. Just email Ron, ron at cpaonfire.com. That is a great path as well. And let's move on to the interview of the month. This is strategy with Seth Godin. The three value bombs, number one, authenticity is dramatically overrated. Authenticity is for friends while consistency is for professionals. You should not sign up to do something that you hate. People don't want to buy the authentic you. People want to buy the consistent professional you.

9:15And this is something that I try to do every day, Fire Nation, with MicroStrategy today. If you have any interest in Bitcoin, any interest in what I consider a generational wealth opportunity of our lifetime, check it out on YouTube. It's my passion play. I absolutely love it. Number two, strategy isn't tactics, a permanent plan, or a guarantee. Strategy is a philosophy of becoming. It requires us to see the world as it is and to imagine how we want to change it, who it is for, and what it is for. And number three, if you are trying to reach everyone, you will fail. The key is activation, not attention.

9:50You just need to reach someone. Check out Seth's book, This is strategy in his blog and videos for links. And now we're going to take a quick minute to thank our sponsors. If you're a marketer, then you know what it's like to feel like you're moving in a hundred different directions at any given time, like you're spread too thin. Between creating content, launching campaigns, generating and nurturing leads, and more, you barely have a moment to breathe, let alone do your best marketing. What if there was a better way? This is where HubSpot and Breeze, its new built-in AI, come in. When you combine the power of Marketing Hub and Content Hub, you can have your best quarter every quarter.

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11:45They can even help with design and styling. So if you've got an extended trip coming up and need a little help hosting while you're away, you could hire a co-host to do the work for you. Find a co-host at airbnb.com slash host. Now I'll be passing the mic over to Kate Lynn Erickson-Dumas, who is going to be sharing quite a big announcement. So Kate, how are you doing? And take it away. Hey, what's up, Fire Nation? Great to be on the mic with you as always for our December 2024 income report. Holy cow, I cannot believe it's 2025. And the big announcement that we have in this month's income report is that we are actually pressing pause on our income reports.

12:29So a little bit of background on this. Back in September of 2013, exactly one year after the launch of Entrepreneurs on Fire, we published our very first official monthly income report. And about a month later, we followed that up with a recap of our entire first year in business and we called that our first 365 days. That was kind of an annual income report, if you will. As you know, if you've been tuning into the podcast for a while and been listening to these income reports, we've been very passionate about sharing our numbers since the very beginning because we know that not everything in business is super straightforward.

13:07It's never just about a million dollar launch or just about publishing a bestselling book. There's so much more that goes into launching products and publishing books and everything in between, essentially in running a business. And sure, it's great to share your wins and talk about the money that you make, but what about how much it costs to run a business? What about the ads, the consulting, the team members, the taxes? and we set out to share the so much more part to be super transparent about how we run our business not to say that this is how every business runs and the idea behind that was to inspire those getting started and to assure you that running a business is not super easy but it is possible to run a lean business with high profit margins and sharing our income reports has also been an incredible way to hold ourselves accountable to running the type of business that we say we want to run.

14:03And that's to continue keeping those profit margins high and our costs low. Every month when I put these together, I'm literally going line by line through our income, looking at what's generating revenue, what we're spending money on so that we can kind of check in with ourselves and make sure that the money that we have dedicated to subscriptions, software products, all that kind of stuff is actually things that we're using. And I think that that is a blind spot for a lot of businesses because it's really easy to just keep those subscriptions going or to kind of not really have a finger on the pulse of what's working really well that you could double down on that you could probably grow in terms of your revenue.

14:44And so after 136 months straight, which is a lot of months, that's a lot of income reports, we've decided to press pause on publishing these income reports. And it's not because we don't want to be transparent anymore, but it's because we practice what we preach. We're trying something new. We're testing something out. We're going to see what happens. We're going to reassess. And who knows? We might be back in a couple of months. We might be back in half a year. We might start posting these quarterly, semi-annually. we will continue to be a completely open book and let you know what's going on, how it's going, and what we find out.

15:26And we're so excited to continue this journey with you in 2025. So if you have not checked out our first 365 days income report or any of our 136 other income reports, they are ready and waiting for you. If you just head over to eofire.com forward slash income. You can click into all the different years. You can see every single one of our different months. There's some interesting stuff to be found in there. So dive in, dig in. We hope that you've enjoyed these income reports. I've definitely loved producing them. And I look forward to what's to come next. So Fire Nation, don't forget, keep trying new things, keep testing things out, keep reassessing.

16:11And again, we thank you so much for your continued support, for tuning into the podcast, for being a part of Fire Nation, for allowing us to share these income reports with you every single month. So John, what is your take on our big news? Well, it is big news. I mean, 136 months without ever missing a month. I mean, to me, that is a huge accomplishment and I loved doing these reports every single month. But you might have actually heard in the background, one of the more major reasons why we did decide to at least take a pause and just see how this works out. Because we now have a 14 month old son who's getting one month older every single month, obviously.

16:50And he's in the background right now, you might have heard him kind of playing with pens, he's dropping them on the floor, he's kind of whining a little bit, or he's just kind of making some noises, which is totally fine. He's a boy, that's what he's gonna do. He's a baby. But you know, the reality is, we now have a 14 month old son that's taking a little bit more of Kate's time, I should actually say a lot more of Kate's time. And we want to be able to kind of focus Kate's time and energy more to the things that she really needs to be doing, not just is a nice to do, but really needs to be doing.

17:23And so that's going to be part of this process is the fact that now Kate can kind of take what is a big monthly energy expense of creating these income reports and recording them and doing all the numbers and all these things. And just dedicate that time to other things. So we'll see what happens. We'll keep you updated, Fire Nation. But I hope you've enjoyed these last 136 months of monthly income reports. We know that we've enjoyed creating them for you. We hope you found value. And with that, I will break down December 2024's income breakdown. Our total journal sales were 72. We did a$2 ,709 worth, 40 freedom journals, 26 mastery journals, and two digital packs of the podcast journal.

18:08Podcasters Paradise did just under$5 ,000 at$4 ,918. Our podcast sponsorships were at$120 ,570, and our affiliate income was at $3 ,365. Now, our expenses were a total of$12 ,156, including everything. And we do list all those out at eofire.com slash 136. So definitely check those out because this is what we spend money on. And I hope you enjoy seeing what we think is worth spending money on. So again, this is a goodbye for now as far as income reports go, maybe not forever, but my podcast entrepreneurs on fire is not going anywhere. In fact, I've been recording some amazing interviews recently.

18:58I hope you're still enjoying the daily seven days a week of episodes coming out. And I'll pass it to Kate to take it away and give us the biggest lesson learned from the December 2024 month. All right. Biggest lesson learned, nothing lasts forever. And this kind of along the lines of us pressing pause on our income reports. But I've recognized this in so many other areas of my life in business and personal. You never know when you will do or see or experience something for the last time. And this has become way blatantly clear now that we've entered parenthood. But again, it's also true in business.

19:39And I think it's such a powerful reminder. It has definitely helped me appreciate big moments, whether those moments are really tough moments, really exciting, really intimidating, or something in between. Before I started writing this income report, we hadn't even decided that we were going to take a pause and thinking that this could be our last income report ever. It might not be, but it could be. And that's kind of a strange thing to wrap your mind around. Likewise, I was so excited for Bodus Earth Crawling because I knew it was going to open up this whole new world for him. And once he managed that first army crawl, however many months ago, I've never had that experience of him just laying there and taking it all in.

20:25Now he's constantly on the move. And I know it's going to be the same thing with him starting to walk. And you know, that's just kind of, it's a strange feeling to think back and say, Bo is never just going to lay there anymore, not being able to crawl around and soon enough walk around. So just a thought that I wanted to share and kind of have you maybe stop and think about this in your life as well, that nothing lasts forever. So enjoy it while you can. And sure, there's always going to be exciting things up ahead and there are endless lessons to be learned, which is very exciting. But don't forget to appreciate the moments that are happening right now before they are gone.

21:07Success Story, hosted by Scott D. Clary, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Success Story features Q &A sessions with successful business leaders, keynote presentations, and conversations on sales, marketing, business, startups, and entrepreneurship. A recent episode discussing the billion-dollar health secret with the founder and CEO of Whoop is a must-listen. Listen to success story wherever you get your podcasts. Fire Nation, you have a book inside you, and it's time to share your message with the world. That's why I created Author 100, a 100-day program where I will personally guide you one-on-one to create, write, publish, and market your book.

21:48If you want daily guidance and mentorship from me, JLD, then head over to author100.com to sign up for a free call with me to chat about the details.