hello ,

i use mystery shopping as a way to get the income i need for my obama care health insurance. I complete roughly 50 shops a month. I am wondering if it would be beneficial if i had a separate account just for the expenses and the payment of it ??

That's what I do, just not for that reason. I do it so that I have an account to use when I have to pay upfront for a shop. Plus if I screw up a shop and have to eat the cost (I'm sure at some point that will happen), it doesn't really hurt me because that's the only thing I use that account for currently. At some point I'll use some of the money for a vacation or something but for now, it's just secret shopping money.

It really depends on how well you do your record keeping and how much separation you want.

I find it is convenient to have Paypal, direct deposits and checks from shops all go into the account that also receives my SS direct deposit. That yields really good tracking of income. Other checks I receive go into a different account as they are usually rebates, reimbursements not associated with shops (picking up groceries for a neighbor and she writes me a check), birthday checks and other miscellaneous checks.

As for expenses, I pay most everything out of the account that receives my income. There are a few expenses (birthday checks, donations, etc.) that I pay out of my "other" account.

When I first started shopping I established a 'shop kitty' that I could feed reimbursements into so that I would have some limits on how much I would outlay at any given time because usually it is 30 to 60 days before you are reimbursed. My 'kitty' has evolved into a savings account that is 2X what my maximum outlay for shops per month should be. When I set up my bills to be paid I will transfer money back and forth to the 'kitty' as needed. Once all the bills are set up to pay, anything left beyond the minimum deposit to keep the account free gets transferred over to my brokerage account for investment.

I think its wise to do so for a multitude of reasons, including the one you've mentioned. For myself, I keep this separate for tax purposes since I know I will getting a boat load of 1099s at the end of the year. I want to make sure my record-keeping is pretty on point. I have an EIN that I used to open a separate bank account specifically for this. I tied a paypal account to this bank account so everything is in sync. I can use this to pretty much tell me what I earned this year, and know approximately what I need to set aside to pay taxes (minus my expenses, of course).