Business- Personal anonymity / Professional Appearance

[Patrick Snoke]

How important is separation or anonymity between my business and personal when I'm using my home as the registered place of business for my LLC, and using a work cell phone for investing. It was never an issue in the past when I had rentals. I'm new to note investing and I'm not sure I'm comfortable when negotiating note sellers but more importantly, with non-paying borrowers, having my home address as my registered LLC or on business correspondence, and my work cell phone coming up as my employers name on a land line caller ID.

Should I set up a P.O. Box established for my business instead of using my home address? Does it really matter when LLC registration info is public record in my state?

I use my employer cell phone for everything (work, investing, personal), as I ported my number in from my old business when I started and is the understanding with my employer.  The problem is my cell phone comes up as my (day job) company's name on land line caller IDs.  On cell phones, it comes up as my cell number.  I've considered a second phone line on my work cell or a virtual line through Grasshopper (which doesn't help the caller ID issue), but haven't found a good solution.  Anyone who looks up my name on LinkedIn would know that I have a day job our side of investing, so it's not like's it a huge secret. 

I intend to set up a separate email address and website for my investing business separate from my personal and work email for the sake of separation and for professional appearance.  Should I follow suit with my business address and phone line as well?  

[Mike Hartzog]

Hi Patrick,

I think there are some fairly easy solutions here.  Use loan servicers to handle the bulk of your communications with borrowers.  There are many good reasons for this but one is that the borrowers don't need to know who the lender is.  If you do interact directly with borrowers, keep your home address out of these communications.

If you are worried about somebody looking up your home address from your business entity filing, you can use an agent.  If you do this, the agent's address is on the filing and not yours.  These agents are in business primarily to provide the required local presence for out of state folks who are creating business entities in the state, but they can service in state filers as well.  I use one for a couple of entities I have in Nevada (and am in WA).  Cost me $100/year.

Regarding the phone question, I use phone.com to provide a business number and route the call directly to my cell phone.  When people call this number, the caller ID shows as my business number and not my mobile number.  I can use their smartphone app to achieve the same thing for outbound calls.   I believe Ring Central provides a similar service, and there are others as well.

Mike