Lifecycle
The LLC lifecycle: everything the company will need, in order
Naming it, forming it, feeding it, feeding the state, and eventually ending it. The plain map of every stage an LLC goes through, with the traps that catch owners and their own advisors at each one.
Here is how it actually goes for a lot of owners. They form the LLC themselves online in an afternoon, feeling accomplished. They never get an EIN under the exact name the state approved, because the formation site auto-filled a slightly shortened version. They never open a separate bank account, because the personal account already existed. Two years later a client sues over a botched job. Their lawyer discovers the company’s own tax records don’t match its state filing, the bank statements show years of personal and business money in one pool, and the last annual report was never filed at all, meaning the state quietly dissolved the company fourteen months ago without anyone noticing.
That story is the obvious failure mode, the one any competent formation service warns about. This section covers that layer, and then goes past it. Several of the traps ahead sit at the seam between two areas most single-discipline advisors don’t routinely cross at once: state entity mechanics and federal partnership tax, state entity mechanics and secured lending law, one nexus standard versus a completely different one three doors down, state corporate law’s own fictions versus what the IRS is actually bound to respect.
This page is the map. Every stage the company will pass through is below, in the order it comes up, each with its own page.
Where this section ends and the rest of the site begins
Every stage here routes deeper when the question gets serious: what the wall actually protects lives in State Lines, how to design the company’s structure lives in The Blueprint, and the rules the owners actually agree to live in The Rulebook.