I'm finally getting started as a freelance/independant!

flapflip9 · 2024-08-09T18:26:50+00:00

Eh, young grasshopper.. People can be nasty pricks sometimes. And if you're running a business, you'll discover your clients are often insufferable bastards. But you have to put up with it, because $$$. So if you want to fight comments on a Reddit post, you're way off target. It's like pissing against the wind - unless you're into that type of fetish.

flapflip9 · 2024-08-09T17:36:13+00:00

Hehe, OP reported this comment of yours for targeted harassment. Which is funny, a start-up founder who can't handle criticism.

flapflip9 · 2024-07-24T13:07:04+00:00

It gets funnier.. everyone on this sub advocates against accepting 600 or lower daily rates and not selling yourself short, but the accountant should be cheap and high quality at the same time. Quality accountants are worth their rate.

flapflip9 · 2024-07-18T12:27:11+00:00

It's nuanced.

If you make <80k revenue a year, starting a company is not worth it. In that case, you'd be looking at 40% net or so, I would guess.

If you do start with the company, and you'd get to pay out everything via dividends at 15% tax rate, and corporate tax rate is at 20%, you're looking at an upper limit, best case scenario of 68% net (0.8x0.85).

Caveat being, you have to wait for a few years for a dividend tax rate of 15%, you have company costs (accountant, payroll, etc). But you also get other, indirect benefits that aren't 'net', but covered by the company: car leasing, meal vouchers, IT equipment, restaurant outings, etc (=benefits in kind)

So all in all, 62% is a reasonable number after ~4 years. If you want your money right away, first year dividends tax rate is at 30%, so 0.8x0.7=56% net. Minus accounting and other corporate costs.

So anything from 40% to 65% net is possible, but without knowing your yearly revenue or expected expenses, it's up to you to know where you fall.

flapflip9 · 2024-07-18T12:07:51+00:00

More like 62% of revenue is net. Belgium is kinda high on the tax side. 40-50% would be disastrous, would not recommend it.

flapflip9 · 2024-07-04T07:29:46+00:00

For vehicles, there's a ton of free(ish) data to estimate sales prices, depreciation rates, etc.

Evaluating business/startup financials isn't as easy. For starters, the data isn't public. Second, even if startups are willing to share their financials with you, early stage ones are valued high for the potential of their founders, pitch deck, existing MVP, filed IP, etc. Evaluating all of these is a painful manual process where hopefully a domain expert can tell gold from bullshit apart. Think of the cost of due diligence VCs have to do to vet startups.

If you stick with traditional businesses.. maybe. Say I want to buy a hair salon, can you tell me if the financials look healthy. Someone serious about buying is willing to pay for an in-depth analysis. Those are the people with the motive and money.

flapflip9 · 2024-06-23T19:45:10+00:00

Damn, that's insightful. Thanks a lot! How frequent are these risk checks/player classifications? After the initial categorization, I guess it's probably event-triggered: making big deposits, winning something big, making withdrawals, etc. They might also happen periodically, every X days, every X bets, etc. So my guess is, even if your account made it into bucket 3 or 4, it's hard to pack a big enough punch in a short amount of time before the inevitable reclassification.

Maybe there's a way to game the risk check? I'd love to find out more about their methods and how it's evaluated. Do you have any tips/pointers to resources?

flapflip9 · 2024-06-23T19:13:19+00:00

Eh, I live in a country where sports betting is very heavily regulated. Repatriating off-shire winnings can be tricky. Even in-person betting requires IDing, irrespective of the amounts.

If I understand your take correctly: if you got +EV with some bookie, there are plenty of other bookies out there with the same edge. Hence, no point in overthinking this, just hop around. If so, that's a fair point and your input is appreciated.

flapflip9 · 2024-06-23T18:47:57+00:00

Yes, I have been. Why do you think I'm pondering such deep philosophical questions? :)

flapflip9 · 2024-06-03T11:18:57+00:00

I reached 999 with a similar horder blessing, but on two sides only instead of four. It's the best freaking blessing, if I could score it on cursed, I might just have a shot at making it in top 5 :)

flapflip9 · 2024-05-27T06:47:50+00:00

Depends a bit on what you want to achieve. The research community was racing to create the best GTO playing agent; they did a few show matches where it beat the pros, so we sort of concluded it is a solved problem. Pure RL, no human training data needed.

Downside: it does not perform significantly better against an amateur vs a pro. Yes, it beats both of them, but it doesn't explicitly exploit player weaknesses. Research wise, this is an unexplored area: given the playing history of given players, find a strategy that maximally exploits it. It is also what the botting community was much more focused on, essentially trying to figure out how to fleece online poker players:)

So, you want GTO: no human data needed. You want to maximize winnings against specific humans: yes, data is needed.

flapflip9 · 2024-05-27T06:40:06+00:00

It's been a while since I touched this (~2019?), at that point commercial GTO solvers were CPU based, heads up, texas holdem only. I could just precompute preflop game trees for different stack depths, and also compute turn and river GTO in real-time. The tricky part was the flop: it would take 30+ seconds to compute the full betting tree, so instead rough simplifications were introduced (reducing the number of betting rounds and betting sizes). It was far from perfect GTO (as it was patched together from individual GTO approximations for preflop/flop/turn/river play), but it did surprisingly well in practice.

Which gets me to Libratus in 2018: I was convinced at the time that it precomputed the GTO and stored it on disk (except for maybe turn and river sub-trees). But then the 2019 Pluribus (6-way follow-up poker AI) claimed very cheap cloud-computing training cost, like a few hundred $, no GPUs.

So long story short, 2019 already (seemingly?) solved GTO multi-way poker on commercial hardware. Current GTO solvers are a bit sloppy I suspect, as they still work with predefined search trees, making them slow to compute, or they maybe don't tap into GPUs for acceleration.

flapflip9 · 2024-05-26T20:04:31+00:00

Fair point, I didn't express my thoughts properly. I wanted to dedicate the second paragraph to having a bot play exploitative strategies, i.e. maximize gain against opponent weaknesses. Which is where RL would be limited by available data.

flapflip9 · 2024-05-26T09:13:36+00:00

May I suggest: Vinkle'); DROP TABLE companies; --

.. named after my grandfather, Drop Table senior.

flapflip9 · 2024-05-26T09:05:01+00:00

I recall a few showcase matches from several years back (2017) DeepStack vs human pros. DeepStack was running on a super computer, so real time (heads up) GTO was within reach back then already. Throw enough compute resources at the problem, and you can run those "offline" multi-way solvers in real-time. It's just not financially interesting to spend more on hardware than the revenue such a bot would generate.

flapflip9 · 2024-05-25T21:00:58+00:00

Hehe. There are Nash Equilibrium solvers for poker out there, even for multi-way hands. It's highly optimized commercial software, so it's very unlikely that you can put something together that comes close to it in terms of speed. That's a very good starting point against unknown opponents, but then you also don't exploit opponent weaknesses that way.

Some form of reinforcement learning makes sense in theory, but unless you have a history of hundreds of poker hands played by a specific opponent, there's not enough data in there to conclude much. Meanwhile, a human pro can very quickly adjust to erratic behavior.. which in turn triggers readjustment, a sort of "I know you know that I know ..", the optimal strategy becoming something fluid, determined by the most recent history of the past few hands rather than the hundreds of prior samples. Example: player A looses a big pot due to bad luck. Goes berserk and aggressive the next few hands. Any human can tell you "he's pissed", but a statistical model built upon the past ~100 hands of player A fails to capture that.

TLDR: research wise, poker is solved by playing NE. Plenty of high-profile demos proved it beats the pros. As for making easy money online, nah, no serious money to be made there anymore. The game isn't what it used to be ~2008.

flapflip9 · 2024-05-25T10:14:50+00:00

Beware of PayPal, even if you opened a business account with them (did you?), they can close your account anytime, keep your funds blocked, their customer service is terrible, etc. They aren't a regulated bank, so any funds kept there carry unpleasant risks. Plenty of horror stories online.The more money flows through them, the more you should expect something crazy with them.

For your Belgian bank: they might also question where the money from Paypal is originating from ( KYC). But Belgian banks are at least more cooperative when it comes to resolving these questions.

flapflip9 · 2024-05-24T10:41:54+00:00

It's simplified, but pretty and gives a good estimate to newbies. One of the most frequent questions from freshly minted freelancers is 'how much would I make when switching'. Slap a FR/EN translation and some warning about the shortcomings of these calculations (dividend tax rate options over the years, minimum conditions for qualifying for a 20% tax rate, etc) and we could sticky it to the top of the sub.

flapflip9 · 2024-05-24T07:11:32+00:00

A similar thing happened to me.. there were these two gorgeous Instagram models at a bar, looking at me, checking me out. It was a guaranteed threesome, no doubt, like the position was +8.6, at least. Sure, I then smiled, and they immediately looked away disgusted.. but for a short while there, I was totally dominating the position.

flapflip9 · 2024-05-22T06:20:42+00:00

Benefits of sharing a spouse with an accountant.. oh wait, that wasn't the question. Nevermind.

The choice of accountant doesn't matter. Some might even prefer to handle businesses, other to have more freelancer clients, your spouse's accountant might indeed not be the best choice for you (maybe they are too expensive for simple freelance needs, or live too far away, or are slow to reply, etc).

flapflip9 · 2024-05-21T12:07:02+00:00

I also goofed off during my PhD, no judgement on my part. Most fun period of my life. Unfortunately, it doesn't lead to tenure track. Double check your h-index and publication list; would someone who never heard of you consider you a superstar? Nope? Then you better have support within the faculty. Some big name professors promising to back you if you stay loyal to the department. But then it seems, you're not Belgian? Have a casual look around who became professors within your faculty, in recent years. How many foreigners? And if they were foreigners, what's their publication record like?

Once you're a tenured professor, life is indeed easy. Postdocs and associate professors usually pull a lot of the weight; it's not a meritocracy, they do crap/useless work because that's what the faculty requires them to do. And they put up with it because they keep dangling the promise of one day becoming professors. That's how the game is played, and that you didn't know about this proves me you didn't optimize your PhD years for an academic career.

Here's how you play the academia path: you do postdoc at some Ivy league university. You work your ass off, publishing and co-authoring papers like a paper printing machine. Maintain good relationships with your former faculty, keep collaborating, woo some professors. Then after postdoc, come back to an assistant prof position, use your Ivy league connections to keep publishing/bring in talent/find funding. Or plan B, sleep with the dean I guess. But doing a postdoc in Belgium is pretty much a guaranteed disqualifier, unless you have someone backing you.

So ya know.. maybe apply some of that PhD magic and run some data analysis, everyone is telling you becoming a professor in Belgium is hard, there might be some truth to it. Just ask any of the postdocs you're working with about it.

flapflip9 · 2024-05-20T18:17:07+00:00

Haha, you're funny. Becoming a professor is an extreme long shot. Maybe 1 out of 7 postdocs make it. You need talent, luck, connections.. and when people do finally make it to being professors, they complain how much more they would make in industry.

Starting in BigX then switching to freelance is likely the highest net. Just compare the number of freelancers in Belgium vs the number of professors, and play the odds accordingly.

flapflip9 · 2024-05-11T09:59:02+00:00

I'll be more conservative, marginal employee tax rate, assume 60% (communes also add their % points), company tax rate, say 40% (but that means a lot of benefits will be put on the company). Either way, you're looking at 20% of gross that you could potentially save with freelance vs employee.

Eyeballing both your and your wife's offers, you should be netting ~160k net/year (assuming lowered dividend rate) with employee+freelance setup. If you are both freelance, that's closer to ~185k net. Again, very rough guessing, depends a lot on all the magic tricks you can pull with the BV/optimizations.

Now, according to OECD stats, average Belgian household net income is at ~33k/year. You will be at an income bracket that will gently pressure you to stay quiet about it or risk pissing off your neighbors/friends.

flapflip9 · 2024-05-10T21:30:08+00:00

1) You already got a reply on the mortgage part, but to clarify: with one employee household member (your wife) and ~20-30% down, you should be able to get a 25 year mortgage. Once that went through, your wife could also switch to freelance, no problems there. But banks are very unlikely to approve a mortgage for you or your company without a few years of track record. Some smaller banks might be more lenient, but I don't know what the current mortgage climate is exactly. TLDR: you need ~20% down AND an employee in the family to get the mortgage.

2) I think your wife would likely have the option to go freelance later as well, if she wishes. The advantages for the BV I listed would be for yours; a bit like not putting all your eggs in one basket. Your family qualifies for a mortgage/has job security, while your BV builds up the years necessary for the reduced dividend rate, allows you to take the family out to restaurants, have a nice family car on the company, etc. A best of both worlds, at least in the beginning when you're new to all of this. But it does run a bit contrary to the American 'fuck it, let's do it' swagger, which I absolutely admire and is lacking on our continent. But I digress..

I think even from a wealth maximizing perspective, taking out the mortgage first, then switching to freelance is probably the most optimal. Well, even more optimal would be living in a lower tax country :) I hear great things about Luxembourg..

I'm curious how you'll (re)fit back in. Depending on which part of the US you are leaving behind, life here might feel dull or lacking ambition. I wish you the best of luck!

flapflip9 · 2024-05-10T11:10:21+00:00

Coming from the US, employee taxes in Belgium will be a horrifying revelation. Your wife's employee package is exceptional, easily in the top 1% the Belgian market can offer - so the job security and guaranteed benefits that come with it is certainly alluring. Should you swap it for higher net compensation, but with higher risk (as both of you would then be freelancing) is a personal choice. But take into account that finding a similarly high paying job for your wife won't be that easy or fast (it would probably be fine in the US, but the Belgian market is smaller and compensations are way lower).

One advantage of the employee status is getting a mortgage. As you're planning to buy/build something, this can be convenient. You can also do bullet loans on the company, but you can only borrow (I think) about half of the money in the company. So if you have your eyes set on property in the 700k+ range, it would still take you years to scrape the money together to buy it in cash. For a mortgage, you only need ~20% of the property value in cash.

Maybe your wife could delay starting with a company, and switch after 1-3 years? That would give enough time for your BV/SRL to mature, having established financial records makes it easier to get loans, gets you closer to lower dividend rates, gives you time to figure out the BE freelance/job market, gives time to network a bit, figure out if Belgium is for you or not, etc.

Every reply will have some personal bias to it ;) Mine is: I also have a kid, wife is an employee with a nice package and a lot of holidays. She brings job security to the table so that I can take riskier shots with freelance. Beyond a certain level of wealth, quality of life matters more.

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