What other things do you do?

What are some of the other things you do for money/ other companies that you own?

Everyone knows I own Easy Recycle but I have other things I work at as well.

I own a small holding company Harz llc and it simply holds/owns my equipment for tax reasons and Microlending Servicing that is a small town auto dealer/auto lender in Texas. We have started to do repairs and financing those repairs. I am starting to work harder on Easy Recycle now to get it back to where it use to be!

Originally Posted by mthomasdev

Easy,

I never had a good understanding of this part of business. What tax benefits do you get out of a seperate holding company for your equipment? Can this work with a sole propreter, or do you need an LLC, S Corp or something similiar?

Can be anything, I went llc due to being easier with paperwork and I know how to file for my own LLC [I own 2 now] but you would NOT want to do it as a sole propreter. It has some major benefits and you can start your own Holding company if you study/learn how or you can join a holding company and get the benefits [I'm openly letting others join in on mine for a small % ownership]

The Key benefits are
1. if your company [company A] gets sued..none of the equipment owned by company A..the Holding company owns it so the lawsuit cant touch it an you can lock up extra funds that way to limit lawsuit risks as well.
2. one fed number needed for all payroll/reporting
3. cheaper book keeping to a point as a book keeper is already doing work for the other companies and your company books fall inline with those so its a cost sharing.
4. if a holding company owns your company you have all the same protections of a llc. ontop of being able to limit your company risks
5. splitting up the companies income over the whole book [a company takes a loss the companies that are in profit can use it as a tax wright off]
6. Company A "rents" the equipment from the holding company [a tax wright off] the holding company can wright off the depreciation value of the equipment.

Benefits of joining a holding company over starting your own.
1. Depending on how strong that holding company is/becomes it can be the source of lending.
2. Have other people you can talk to within the holding company that wants to see you grow/free help
3. being able to use other equipment that is held by the holding company at a cheap/low cost if its in the area

and ect...there are alot of great things with holding companies and this is why so many companies are OWNED by a holding company. Mine is no where near the big boys but I am planning on growing it with my companies that I own/buy or others who join. But I will say this. If yo own a small company its not worth it. Now...I hope this does not look like a sales pitch but putting all the facts out there kinda makes it look like one but if you want to know more just shoot me a message.

I work as a ranch hand, farm hand, and gigolo. Just like other commodities, the gigolo business is down (so to speak). When the scrap metal and gigolo business is down I just stockpile both and go hunting and fishing. When they rebound, so will I. Mostly I am retired.

I continue to do ewaste but testing and reselling parts occupies much of my time.

As I recall you were highly involved in Ubuntu. I have am wondering if you have any knowledge of an issue I'm trying to deal with without causing me more problems.

So here it is: I have an ASUS laptop that started out as a Windows 8 machine. It has been upgraded to Windows 10. Since the laptop came with the embedded COA rather than the COA one a sticker. I installed Ubuntu on 10+ computers but this one does not want to cooperate. It seems that there is an problem with computers that have the embedded COA. Any suggestions? Mike

Mike, do a clean install of 10 on a fully erased drive, it will still find and use the 8 coa that's embedded. It's not cooperating because I'm betting the factory backup is on a partition. (typical asus).

Me? I tinker. Constantly. I was an engineer for procter and gamble. My degree is in materials engineering focused in use in process aka automation. Not to complicate it even further but process engineering has slown so much it is no longer a course offering at UW... My family owns a robotics company but they have been slow the last couple years and have branched out into refitting elderly cnc mills and lathes. I saw the writing on the wall...industry is failing, there is more used equipment available than the value of building a machine for a custom process (my forte). I make less now but haven't looked back.

I have been using solid works and inventor recently to design machines for processing scrap. I've been tinkering with a portable hard drive shear that will plug into a wall and allow you to destroy data in front of your customer and fulfill hippa requirements. Part of the idea to set it apart is a camera built into the machine that takes a picture automatically of the drive prior to punching it.

as my name says I painted Submarines for 30 years and soon will be retiring but plan to still do some clean outs and scrapping

Pineville LA but I spent some time in the offices in Cincinnati as well. I worked on what is now called the single use packaging line. It has initially been developed for cascade dish soap but was found the dispenser cover was protecting the water soluble plastic long enough to prevent separation. We had a hell of a time figuring out how to get it to survive not just water for so many minutes but full agitation. Our first run did not include a softener, eventually it became a 3 part process that included softener. I didn't work there long, I didn't like the corporate environment when 3 people needed to justify their jobs to me when I needed to change a process or reconfigure machinery to decrease rejection or increase production it was a six week affair that involved probably a 1000 man hours of people wasting their time to justify their positions. Yea, imho P&G was and probably still is one of the least capable lean manufacturing companies in the world. We would do say....1300 pallets (literally almost 30 million sheets) of dryer sheets in a brand P&G only sells in say...espanol markets...and it would sit and force us to buy extra warehouse space...but why? Because some manager was trying to make sure their line was running so their people wouldn't get tasked to dry side or liquids...just all kinds of foolery. AKA I worked in the detergents (dish, laundry and softeners) line.


I can be honest that I was a bear to be around. I wanted good equipment, fast computers, less people doing more actual work with little idle time. I'm certain at some point I'd have been fired if I wasn't really good at my job. Good ol' boy system was atrocious. Nothing got to me more than the boss regime. Nobody could do the work of the people they were in charge of. You had an entire office full of supervisors and managers that between twenty people not one had a forklift certification, if they even knew how to use some of the high tech lifts we had at the time (For instance the automated layer picker that build orders). I know some of the Cincinnati engineers would visit and critique processes and say "We need to speed up the box building process for liquids" without understanding they were still being hand assembled and there was only so much 30 people could do in a day. It was a huge affair for instance to install an optical comparator for the liquid soap caps just to make sure all the caps were the correct color and had their labels (some had labels at the time) instead we had people who did that for 8 bucks an hour (temp service).

Ultimately P&G got me into e waste, for many years they just filled shipping containers with it...and the rest is history.

Mike: For whatever it's worth they can be a pain in the ASUS because they're a bit more sophisticated. Maybe it's got a hybrid drive with unusual sector sizes ? There are probably some hidden partitions as well

The win 8 COA is stored in the UEFI on the mainboard. (The UEFI is kinda like an advanced BIOS.) That way the COA is married to the motherboard. I had a win 8 machine come in last week that was being uncooperative. I wiped the drive and loaded a win 8.1 image direct from Microsoft. It authenticated itself as soon as the pc was connected to the internet.

It's a little out in left field, but i wonder if Ubuntu doesn't like to boot from UEFI. If you can get into the UEFI (bios) there might be an option to do a legacy BIOS boot instead. ~ That could go sideways so be careful when tampering with the settings. ~

Edited to add: I found these ...they explain the differences between the UEFI and Lagacy BIOS better than i ever could.

What You Need to Know About Using UEFI Instead of the BIOS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unifie...ware_Interface


Me: I'm a freelance carpenter by trade. Been out on my own since 2001. I love the freedom ( and responsibility ) that comes with being self employed.

I do e-waste, computer parts, and computer repair as a self supporting hobby.I like it because there are always new things to learn and logic problems to solve. Gettin' older and it keeps my mind active.

My wife is a part owner of a company that operates two grocery stores, a filling station,a pharmacy, and apartments. The work in carpentry is seasonal and the economy is slow. When i'm free i jump in there and help out wherever i can. It's mostly maintenance work and plowing snow in the winter but i'm adaptable. If one of the departments is short handed i'll go in on a temporary basis to help fill the need.

When i'm not busy with everything else there's always a ton of work that needs to be done here on the homestead. I'm taking some time right now to get us ready for winter. I've got almost 3 1/2 cord in the basement next to the wood stove so far. A couple of more cord and we should have enough in dry storage to carry us through till sometime in January or February. I've got another six cord in log length that needs to be processed. Also have to winterize the vehicles and do the last mowing of the season if time allows. Also, it looks like the alternator on our 6kw diesel generator is pooched. A bolt holding the the connection block in place vibrated loose and tore up the windings. Have to get a new generator head installed before the rough weather gets here.

I'm kind of an old homebody but it's a pretty full life.

UEFI the thing I was forgetting to look up. Thank you for the link. I am going to wait until Ubuntu deals with the problems. I would prefer to using Ubuntu with this laptop but its not worth messing it up. Maybe I'll clean it up and sell it. I have lots of laptops around here. 73, Mike