August 28th, 2010 by admin

Are you actively planning and managing your wealth? Or do you go through life on autopilot?   Most people get up in the morning, go to work, come home, eat, get an hour (or more) of TV, go to bed, and then get up the next day and do it all over again. They know there’s more to life, but they don’t know how to get it and don’t have the energy to figure out how.   This routine can go on for years. For some, it adds up to a lifetime lost. If this scenario feels painfully familiar, you might want to step back and take a hard look –

How do you really want to live your life?

It’s hard enough to achieve your goals if you have a good map. After all, life throws you plenty of curve balls. There’s conflicting advice from various people — including your advisors — who all have different agendas. There may be real estate management headaches, problems within the family, rising costs, changing government laws, and more. Those are hard enough to handle even with a good plan. Imagine how you’d do without one.

Unfortunately, most people live their lives on an event-by-event basis and end up doing their financial planning the same ad hoc way.  When some sort of financial crisis comes up, they go get a fix for that problem.  This sort of  ad hoc “planning”  results in a hodge-podge of conflicting objectives — with dire consequences.  People needlessly lose hundreds of thousands (and sometimes millions) of dollars from taxes, lawsuits, legal fees, market fluctuations and more.   All of that is avoidable.  What’s missing is a sense of the whole picture, with an understanding of where and how each component fits in relation to the others.

So how do you get a sense of the whole picture?

Start by designing your ideal life. Then design your wealth management plan to serve your real goals.  If you’re like almost everyone else on the planet (including most wealth advisors), you don’t know the plethora of options available to you to manage your wealth.

Don’t let that stop you.  There are competent advisors available whose whole mission is to understand the big picture and all your options. They can help you decide which ones actually help you accomplish your goals instead of serving the private agenda of the “other” kind of advisor who gives you only a few of the traditional options that make him the most money.

Still, designing and implementing your wealth plan is not the first step.  Designing your ideal life is.

August 28th, 2010 by admin

Tougher times are expected for small and medium sized business. Business failures are expected to rise by a staggering 50% which means that failed businesses could peak around 32,400 in 2010; this would be the highest level recorded since 1992. The Federation of small businesses said that they had recorded a dramatic increase of 214% in the amount of calls to their legal advice line on redundancies from concerned small businesses in the fourth quarter of last year.

Their members are concerned about jobs and how to hold on to jobs; small businesses are usually the last businesses to make employees redundant. The calls are asking how to make employees redundant, how do I do it, what action should I take, this is extremely worrying when it is thought that 32,400 business may go bust. On average each small business employees approximately 5 members of staff; this means that 150,000 people could lose their jobs from small businesses this year.

The federation of small businesses is the voice of small and medium-sized businesses in the UK; they have over 215,000 members, who employ more than 1.3 million people with a combined turnover of £10billion. The federation of small businesses are proposing a five point plan. They believe that small business can help to get us out of this recession if the government were to give small businesses more contracts, the government improves employment paperwork, government improves access to traineeships or apprenticeships and improves the position of the banks giving money to small businesses. This will rely on the bank mangers releasing and relaxing the money supply to small businesses and not having a knee jerk reaction to this recession. As quoted by Stephen Alambritis.

This government under Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling need to realise that small businesses are the back bone of the economy and that they need to ensure that this recession is as short as possible. To do this they need to spend copious amounts of money to implement a massive job creation programme to keep unemployment down and taxation revenues up. Then hopefully we may ride out this recession!

It’s not just a case of the government supporting the Banks and the Car industry; we need more far reaching initiatives for employment across the economy. The recent incentive released by the government was to assist employers recruiting people who had been unemployed for six months or more. This initiative is flawed as the government will provide £2,500 to employers for training any new recruits as long as the new employee has been unemployed for more than six months. So now employers may be tempted to only recruit people who have been unemployed for six months or more for the additional money that is available.

Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling should look across the pond to Barack Obama’s newest policy to create 3 million new jobs in America. This initiative is expected to cost some $850 billion to implement along with other help offered to their car industry and the banking sector.

August 28th, 2010 by admin

all listening attentively about lenders on the radio, television, newspapers, and the Internet of promises to be “small business friendly”, “small business oriented”, wanting to be your “personal small business advisor” and a panoply of packages taking care of all your business needs. What small businesses really need is money, not personal hand caring services. So is there anyone out there really making small business loans? Yes. If you know where to look you can find one.

You can generally categorize banks into: 1) 10% that are actually making small business loans now and are serious about doing so, 2) 70% who will talk to you directly and indicate they are not making small business loans at this time because of the economy, and 3) 20% that slap you on the back, invite you in, and readily take your application. It is the latter group that gives us the most heartburn. It is not unusual after the initial review of your application papers for a bank represented to signal you have a good chance. Overjoyed, you begin to make plans, including executing contracts and receiving quotes for inventory, raw materials, or merchandise. Two months later, after the fourth loan committee review, you get a call that they have decided not to make the loan. The reason has little if anything to do with credit. It is typically something that was never been mentioned before and after reflection, it seems like an excuse not to make the loan in the first place.

Loan brokers such as myself are victims of the same misleading behavior. I cannot tell you how many banks have looked me in the eye and said: “Sure, we are making lots of loans. For unsecured loans of $75,000 to $150,000, we just need a credit score above 680, in business for over a year and a half, and decent financials. Real estate security is not required. We would love to entertain your applications.” Right.

What they really do is pour over the applications and pick 1 out of 100 that has the following fantasy credentials: a platinum credit score that Bill Gates would be proud of and which could support a small country, gushing positive cash flow, little competition, executed contracts stacked high on your desk, then a booming market niche. In other words, someone who doesn’t need the loan in the first place. You know the old adage: banks only give money to people who don’t need it.

It is simply psychology 101. Banks are filled up with loan officers and they have to show they are busy. If their boss walks into their office and sees nothing on their desk, they might be laid off. They have to show they are busy earning their salaries, which means receiving applications and going through the review process. It’s gotten so bad that the other day we had a client whose grandfather helped found the bank, whose father was best friends with the president, and who had received two successful loans before. Even he was turned down. Nor do they tell you the large SBA commercial loan department job layoffs of employees throughout the nation.

To prevent being too caught in this trap, look your banker in the eye and ask these questions:

1) “Tell me honestly. I don’t want to waste your time or mine. I know the credit crunch is quite depressing and there is really no secondary market. Are you actually entertaining small business loans at this time or should I wait.”

2) “How many small business loans have you personally made in the last 30 days?”

3) “What are the loan terms of the last three loans you made, including interest rate and monthly payments, for the amount of loan I am seeking?”

4) “How long will it take before I get a definitive answer?”

5) “Can you briefly describe to me the process I have to go through to get the final approval? Will you be the one making the final decision? What other people superior to you or committees will make that decision?”

But do not despair. There actually are real live prime lenders out there making small business loans. They just need to know where to look. In the next article I will discuss if such loans are available to startups.