What you need to know about managing money as a creator

You’ve seen the TikToks. You’ve read the tweets. There's financial "advice" and education everywhere. But if we’re being honest, most of it doesn’t apply to the creator situation.

This blog series will be an in-depth breakdown of everything you need to know about managing money as a creator. Part of why I am writing this series of blogs is because we’ve never been taught the basics in school and we’ve never learned how to build healthy relationships with our money. 

At the end of the day, money is just a tool that we have to use along the way. It shouldn’t be scary. From picking a business entity & bank account to knowing how to deal with our taxes. The first topic that we are covering in this blog series is bank accounts.

Bank Accounts

When you’re self-employed, your bank account situation gets a little more complex. Rather than having just a personal account, as a creator, you must also have separate accounts for your business.

Why?

Because if you only have a personal account and you also have business income, business expenses, AND personal expenses all happening together in one account, you’ll never know what your business financials look like or what your personal spending actually consists of.

Combining different income & expenses into one account only causes headaches - there’s absolutely no benefit in doing it. However, most creators still messed up. You used your personal account to receive payments for the first few months because you probably weren’t sure how long you were going to stick with this new life.

How are creators solving it?

The classic mistake to do is to create a PayPal account to accept payments so that you can keep track of that income in a separate place, but you still have all of your money flowing in and out of your personal account. This makes tax filing so much harder than it needed to be because you had to go through all of your expenses and find out what was related to the business amongst all your personal transactions. 

One thing that you might do, is to open another personal account and treat it as a business account for separation purposes. This on paper might look great, but you still won’t have access to major financial services as a proper business account (credit cards, business loans, funding, among others) that you can use to jumpstart your career (as many other sorts of business do (e.g: every single startup)).

Then... what's the right approach?

If you’re not ready to get a business entity set up (SL in Spain, SAS in France, GMBH in Germany, or BV in the Netherlands) and you’re operating as a freelancer, you may not be able to get a business bank account… until now. With Mecena, you are now able to open a Business Account, even though you don’t have an entity formed. Here's a visual breakdown of what a business & personal bank account setup would look like: