Health Insurance for Self Employed – How to Find Affordable Health CareSeems like the cost of health insurance is out of control these days. How do you afford to insure you and your family if you’re self employed? Where can you find affordable health insurance? Here’s a few ways to help you get affordable health insurance if you’re self-employed:Self Employed Health Insurance PlansThere are numerous types of health insurance plans available to the self employed including the managed health care insurance plans. These plans go by the names of HMO, PPO, and POS medical care plans. Managed care plans help keep costs down by using a network of health care providers when you’re sick or injured.As a member of a managed care plan, all you have to do is show your membership card to a doctor or hospital within your network of providers to obtain medical care. Most managed care health insurance plans cover doctor visits, hospital stays, emergency room, lab tests, therapy, and x-rays.In order to keep costs down, managed health care plans usually have a copayment fee for doctor and hospital visits. This fee is typically $15 to $20 per visit. Copayments can also apply to prescription drugs, after which the insurance provider picks up the remainder of the tab.Health Insurance Quotes for the Self EmployedOne of the best ways to find affordable health insurance quotes is to go to a free insurance quote website. There you can get competitive quotes from up to 5 health insurance providers so you can compare plans and prices. After you have your quotes, you can look more closely at the policies and decide which one is the best for you.
Brokering Commercial Mortgages – What It’s Really Like
Brokering commercial mortgages certainly can have its perks. It is generally viewed as a very prestigious profession and brokers get to deal with highly sophisticated borrowers on most of their transactions. The income potential is truly uncapped as well as some of the seasoned commercial brokers bring home over 7 figures. This is without having a lot of fixed expenses or a large support staff to manage. It’s no wonder that so many residential brokers are entering the market as their side of the business is still taking the brunt of the capital market woes.However this is a tough and competitive business and one should not fool themselves that it will be a cake walk. Rather new commercial brokers need to be prepared and need to know exactly what they are doing. One of the main differences we hear from residential brokers is the lack of conformity from one lender to the next, in both process and underwriting guidelines. Also, the lack of broker protection is alarming to many newbie’s as they learn that many banks will not accept deals from brokers or allow them to get paid on the settlement statements. Rather some banks will expect brokers to get paid outside of close and directly from the borrower.New commercial loan brokers have to become very efficient in all aspects of the business but especially in pre screening deals. Every time you work on a loan you are investing your time into it and if it has a low (or no) probability of closing you will quickly be hard pressed. It is so easy to work on un-fundable deals. Often the borrower has been through the “wringer” and will be very willing and pleasant to work with. All along they are playing poker with you and not telling you that they’ve been to 10 other banks and 3 other brokers and no one can get it done. So in protecting themselves they will waste your time. So, the successful broker will collect the whole package, sit down with it for 20 minutes and make a couple of decisions 1. Can I get this done? 2. If yes, do I want to work on this deal.The most complicated part of prescreening loan requests is being able to extract all income out of the borrower’s tax returns that can be used to service the proposed mortgage. A lot has been written about calculating DCR (divide the NOI by the debt service) but how do you really get to the NOI. This is often more complicated on owner occupied transaction than on investment deals. This goes beyond just adding back depreciation or interest. The broker has to be very good at reviewing the entire set of tax returns, which on most owner occupant deals is a combination of personal, business and the real estate entities returns.It’s important to remember that most deals get deigned due to lack of sufficient income.The other major part of this is after the broker has a good understanding of the borrowers loan request, they need to know which bank or lender to take it to. Again this goes beyond just the banks matrix or published guidelines. The broker needs to know what the bank really likes. The last thing you want is the phone call from the bank, 3 months into the deal, that underwriting has canned the deal for BS, random reasons. And, unfortunately, this does happen all the time. Again you need to really know what the lenders appetite is and what they are really funding so you avoid this and get paid for all of your hard work.
Small Business Secret #1 – Build Your Business with The End In Mind
Small Business is the toughest industry to break into. If you were a betting man, you would never in a million years want to go into a small business when the odds for success in small business are so bad, that 70% of all small business fail in the first year. Let me be blunt, if you want to succeed in small business, only listen to those people who have built a small business in an industry they no nothing about and succeeded. These are the people who seriously know how to build a small business.I just happen to be one of those people – I am not a business coach – I offer no consulting on small business, just let me share with you my secret to building 4 small businesses from a three thousand dollar credit card.The first secret when building a small business is this, have the end in mind. When I first started in small business, I was like most business people, I was a technician (bit more than that, but this is how the E-myth would describe me) in the IT industry with the belief I could build a better computer training company than those around me. One thing I can tell you about this industry, stay out of it. It is tough and there is no money in it, well that’s not quite true, but there are far easier businesses to make serious money. In fact I married my wife and I decided I wanted to experiment on whether all business was as hard as the training industry or was it just computer training.My wife and I, after much coaxing agreed to setup a car cleaning and detailing business, we new nothing about the business and were simply doing it as an experiment. Two years on, we have a successful thriving business and we are about to Franchise and expand the business to over 10 cities in Australia.The key to building a successful small business is to have the end in mind and to know when you are going to exit the business. Most people when they start a small business simply believe they are going to have a business to make money, come home and do it better than their boss. If you are going to go into business for this reason, quit now, because your life is doomed.There is more to business than simply doing the technical work and this is what most new small business operators do not realize. When you are first thinking about starting a small business, imagine how it will look when you are finished. For example, what image will you have, what logo’s will you have, what marketing material will you be using, where will you be operating from, how many stores will you have, how many people will be working for you, what sort of profit will you be making and more so, how will you know that the business is complete.For example, let us say you wanted to start up a dog washing business. You saw in a market that there was a massive need for dog washing. How are you going to satisfy the market? How are you going to build your business? How are you going to clean the dogs? Are you going to build the business like other? When will you know that the business is finished?These are all the questions you must ask yourself. In fact, if you don’t ask yourself then you will find that your business may grow but without any focus. It will go so far and then become a huge noose around your neck. By knowing what the end will be, you then have a clear goal of what you want to achieve and you can then build the business based on that vision.Let me give you a really good example of this methodology. If you get a chance watch the movie, Concierge with Micheal J Fox. Micheal plays a concierge that has a vision of building a hotel. He first builds a model of the hotel and then sells the idea to a developer. As he says in the movie he knows every aspect of the hotel he has built.You as a small business owner must do exactly the same thing. Before you rush out and start your small business, you must know exactly what you are building know every aspect of it and how to build it. You must know every job, every role, every procedure and how it will work within your business.By creating your business in this way, you will learn very quickly what will work and what will not.Most people who want to start a small business will say that they don’t have enough money. If you have a clearly articulated vision and you can prove that your vision works, then there will always be someone out there prepared to back you. It may take a while to find someone to support you, but there are people out there who will. Just remember it took Walt Disney, 500 plus knock backs for Disneyland before he found that one group of people that would back him.If you truly want your vision to work, then you must be prepared to be relentless in your pursuit of success. Remember the first secret in small business success, is to build and develop your business with the end in mind.