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Dave Hammis - PASS: Self-Employment

Plan for Achieving Self Support. PASS is the acronym for that. In the generalist term, that's a way of getting funding from Social Security to help start a business. It works for a lot more people than most people think. It doesn't work for everyone.

When you use PASS funding in a small business, strategically, it's different than wage employment uses of PASS funding for assisting somebody to get a job in a small business. In the business, PASS, not necessarily by intention, infuses operating cash into a business. No matter how you write it or submit it, if it's paying for business expenses or capital expenses, deductible expenses, anything involved with the business, the PASS in the long or short run just basically pushes cash into a business account. If a business makes at least a dollar of profit in a year, the amount of the PASS plan will eventually become the operating capital of the business. If you are approved for $500 a month PASS plan, say for 18 months, at the end of that you'd have $9,000 of operating capital in your business.

People often look at a PASS as what it will pay for in a business, such as it will pay for the phone bill for the business startup, or it will pay for a piece of equipment for the business, or marketing, or business insurance, or any number of possible business expenses. But the real effect of a PASS isn't so much what it pays for, it's the fact that you're actually putting $500 of your own money into the business account. The Social Security views a PASS and so do the other related systems, such as the IRS, as your own money going into a business account each month.