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MMBinNC
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Joined: 23 Jul 2019
Last visit: 14 Aug 2019
Posts: 1
Posts: 1
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Salary Question 23 Jul 2019, 18:48
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I have a quite unique situation regarding work history due to some health troubles. I have run a small business with my father for the past few years, and it has been quite successful. In this time the pre-tax profit (taxed at individual rates) has risen from ~20,000 per year to this year nearly 600,000. However, last year I had a lung transplant and because of that I took a few months off to recover (I had a terrible experience and was bedridden for nearly 4 months). Due to this and the need to live WITH my parents for the first year afterwards, I did not take a salary and rather relied on familial support (which drastically reduced the costs of the $6mm hospital bill to a very small number). We had decided that once I was allowed to move out I would resume taking a salary of ~$96,000/yr. While this number may substantially increase due to our desire to sell the business (with a few offers in already), the question is, how do I reflect this on an application? My income last year was functionally zero, and pre-illness I had mostly been paid in accommodations/stock. So I'm unsure of how to reflect this? Like I assume a background check would essentially just look at paystubs...which resume in the beginning of September for me once I am "out of the woods" for the short term medically (1 year post surgery). So would my ending salary be $96,000- even though that will not be reflected considering the tax receipts will essentially be zero until this year and with biweekly payments of ~4k my tax return filed in 2020 will not reflect much (something like 32,000?). And if the business is sold, then deciding the disbursement will impact payments going forward but will not impact my current take home pay depending on the structure we decide on (most likely a couple hundred thousand + yearly disbursements). I can't imagine that I am the only applicant who has ever had this issue, however I don't want t state my salary as $96,000 annualized, and have them see I made $32,000 this year and consider it a lie, or that we finalize the sale of the business prior to the end of the year and it be even less, or something else. I honestly am at a loss of how to report this, and I can obviously call each school individually to see how this should be reported, but I was hoping to get a basis of how to approach it prior to that.

I'm not too like afraid of the salary number per se (if we need to report 0 vs. 32 vs 96) rather I just want to make sure I'm not misrepresenting it.