How much profit do you take as a wage? Mine gets lower ever month...

What proportion of profits do you give yourself as a wage? 

20 months ago when I started up I envisaged having a good business which would effectively pull in a more than comfortable wage - I'm there. The "problem"? I want to grow the business well beyond where it's at now, and as a result, my priorities have shifted massively...

As a result, I actually "earn" less than I did 20 months ago - that said, I have the control to earn as much as I like, and beyond what I consider comfortable...

Do you live more for the now and take a higher wage? Or do you push everything back into the business to make it grow? 

Personally, I would grow the business if it has growth potential.

I took a 75% pay cut to grow the business a few years ago and am happier for it.

As long as you can afford to invest in the business without damaging your family I'd say go for it.

Don't be greedy and plan for the future - Take what you need now, invest the rest.

I make sure that my responsibilites are taken care of and the rest stays in. Quite how I've managed to get so many 'responsibillities' is beyond me, but there you go...

I guess somewhere along the lin eI must have grown up without realising it

Take what I need, invest the rest...

Being a geeky accountant I take out what makes sense to me from a tax perspective.  However, in terms of business profit, I fully understand where you're coming from.

For all the freelancer type people/service businesses...what are you investing in?  Are we talking investing in the business (eg equipment, staff, premises) or just investing the spare cash on external things (eg stock market, BTL property etc)?

For us wages are the highest cost, and in the short term, employing people is a terrible idea.  Your workload goes up as you have to do everything you did before and explain things to the new person, and also you have to pay them too...what a rip off.  Of course the hope is that a couple of months down the line they can do lots of work without too much input, and you can charge them out at more than you pay them.

PS love Neil Pie's answer.

If you can grow it grow it.

I am only starting to push mine now and I have be at it for nearly six years.

My mistake, 1: Waiting for the phone to ring.

Mistake 2: to slow to notice customers buying habits have changed.

Mistake 3 : Not being bold enough and I don't mean hair.

Grow but don't go to mad, save time and money for self too.

When I was in the hotel trade, the industry mantra was "Year 1 you support the business, Year 2 you support each other, Year 3 the business supports you". Not sure about the precise temporal and mathematical accuracy of this, but you get the point!

I pay myself enough to cover all my personal bills and then only £100 disposable income on top.

I would rather get by personally and have a profitable business than milk the company. I consider it an investment in the future because if the company becomes large and makes loads of money later on I'm sure I'll be in a position to reimburse myself.

That being said, I do buy the occasional pizza on the business when working late :)

I take salary up to the tax/nat insurance thesholds, and the rest is dividends paid out according to the profitability of the business,

I kept my operating costs extremely lean and - having gone down the "let's create a big web agency" route and decided that's not actually whatt I want - am purposefully avoiding growing beyond being a one-person enterprise, so there isn't a great need for reinvestment.

I've managed to develop the business to a point where I no longer have to actively market myself, the work comes to me now - my next step is to reduce workload without impacting profitability by bringing a more passive element to what I do (largely through developing my own resellable systems)