Archive for March, 2010

Business Cost Savings Through Safety

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Posted 25 Mar 2010 — by Admin
Category Saving news

Business Cost Savings Through Safety

Setting a health and safety program in place will reduce costs. Having a program will reduce accidents and will lead to lower company workers comp premiums; further business insurance companies prefer their customers to have health and safety programs. These insurance companies might even discount the premium if a program can be proved to exist. The average cost of an accident is 68,000. Direct costs in accidents such as workers comp and fines levied can close a business. Indirect costs such as low morale of employees, legal fees, and retraining can be as costly if not more.

A working program will:
1) Improve employee morale Shows care in their well being
2) Reduce revenue loses Fewer accidents keeps all employees at work
3) Give a boost to the customer Makes sure business is operating optimally

Small businesses that have a voluntary health and safety program in place have fifty percent less accidents and reported insurance claims than that of their counterparts according to OHSA stats. Most small businesses fall below the legal requirements for having a formal health and safety program in place due to number of employees on staff. Sixty eight percent of reported accidents are in the service industry which shows even businesses such as retail establishments are not free of accidents.

A health and safety program can be started by writing a health and safety policy; this is simply values that a company wishes to convey in its work processes. Secondly, is how communication between all employees and owners will function. And lastly, put procedures in place to ensure safe practices.

To find unseen hazards and unsafe practices, an audit needs to take place. Take a hard look at the workplace and record all factors that may lead to injury. These hazards might be dangerous chemicals or as simple as a letter opener. Identifying these hazards will lead to procedures to controlling them. Controls such as Dont run with scissors in your hands are effective. Write all procedures in a manual.

Implementing these health and safety procedures will be done with behavioral change. Some programs become weak and non effective because of:
1)No definition of safety practices No written processes
2)No teamwork Safety is communication from the top to bottom and vice versa. A well written plan will describe what roles everyone plays in safety policies.
3)No effective goals The accident free days poster will come as a result of sound safety processes.
4)Wrong incentives Money as a reward does not work well. Health and safety should be fun and worth employees effort. The right incentive plan can be cost effective and have obtainable goals. Incentive plans can include movie passes or simply free coffee on the boss. The insurance industry reports for a pound spent on health and safety yields four to six pounds in savings.

Once all of the hard work of developing and implementing the health and safety program is done, set aside some time each month to review the workplace. Record what is found; this is a good practice to see dangerous trends that might occur such as a fire exit constantly being blocked. On the quarters of the year post a meeting with employees. These meetings are a great way to get vital feed-back from employees and keep them involved. At least once a year, do an audit to make sure your health and safety program is current with present business operations.

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Big Savings With a Low Intro Card, If You Can

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Posted 18 Mar 2010 — by Admin
Category Saving news

Big Savings With a Low Intro Card, If You Can Follow The Rules. All of Them.

A common term you might hear in commercials or read in a print ad is ‘low intro.’ Those two words mean that a particular credit card has a lower interest rate when you first get it than it will after some time passes. The most commonly advertised low intro feature, in my experience, is something along the lines of this: ‘and this fantastic credit card is not only guaranteed to make you more attractive, but IT HAS A 0% APR FOR THE FIRST 12 MONTHS!!’ You’ve heard the latter part of that hundreds of times, I guarantee it. All it means is that, if your credit is delightful, you get a year of no interest on whatever your unpaid balance is. It’s shocking how few people know that.

Low intro is more of a feature a credit card can have rather than an actual category of cards, as the majority of available credit cards have a low intro interest rate. Of course it sounds good, and is good if you can get approved for it, but you might be asking just what exactly is the point. Is it just a marketing term that could save you a few pounds but mostly just dazzles the uninformed? Sometimes. Are people impressed by it without knowing what it means or even if they can get it? Usually, yeah. Does it have any actual benefit? Yes, potentially quite a bit.

A very beneficial side of a card with a low intro interest rate is that, if it’s rate covers balance transfers, as a few do, you can shift all of your debt to this one card that temporarily has very little or no interest, instead of on your other cards that are about to cost you a limb and two vital organs each. For each hundred pounds shifted to a low introductory rate card you can save around 12.50 a month. Nothing special until you multiply the 12.50 by 40 to cover the balance on your recent redecorating efforts then multiply by the number of months the intro rate continues. Now we are talking serious savings.

Low intro cards without balance transfers can help as well if you have a lot of spending sprees coming up and you want to only make the minimum payments on them. Be cautious, though, because that is a pretty bad habit to start. If you don’t get back to heavier payments when the low intro period ends, you might find yourself in a soup kitchen wearing your tee-ball jersey from first grade and a newspaper for underwear. Or you might just get charged a hundred pounds or so more than you’d like. Either way, avoid reckless payment-making after the intro period ends by paying down the balance each month.

Another tip; don’t get a low intro card because a telemarketer or letter or popup ad tells you it has 0% APR. Shop around for a reputable bank issuing a quality card. These will likely have easier terms to adhere to during the intro period. As with everything involving credit, low intro cards should only be acquired if you’ve done your research and read the fine print.

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Balancing A Budget And Saving Money

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Posted 11 Mar 2010 — by Admin
Category Saving news

Your finances are your business. But unfortunately it seems like you need an accountant to help you understand and decode the mysteries of balancing a budget or saving money. At some point you might need to get a loan. When that day comes, this article can help you understand which is the right one to get.

An unsecured loan is simply a loan you get based on your good name and your credit rating. Often the interest rates are higher on an unsecured loan than on a secured loan because the risk is higher to the lending institution. If, for some reason, you are unable to pay back the loan and the lending institution does not get any money back. However, your good name and your credit rating are potentially ruined.

On the other hand, a secured load is a low you get when you put up some assets. The advantage of a secured loan is that you often get more money at a lower interest rate for longer repayment period that you would with an unsecured loan. This is because you have some assets to backup your loan. The lending institution prefers this kind of loan because if you find yourself unable to make payments, they can see your assets as an alternative form of payment. Because the risk to them is diminished they are able to provide you with more attractive loans at a better rate.

You might think of a mortgage as a secured loan. The bank lends you money to buy a home and they use the home as a way to back up the loan. If you do not make your mortgage payments, the bank can seize your house.

Or you can think of a secured loan as a pawn shop that lends you the money you want but lets you still use the goods you pawned!

So which one is the right one for you? Its a tough decision to make. In most cases, a secured loan will get you a better rate, so you just might prefer that.

However, perhaps you dont have any assets available, or you dont want to risk the seizure of certain assets if you are unable to make payments. In this case, you just might not mind paying a little more for the benefit of having an unsecured loan.

Both unsecured and secured loans are good options to have when you are doing your financial planning. You can use them to consolidate your outstanding bills, leverage your home investments, or get the things you need and want. And, with the choices between unsecured and secured loans, you have the benefit of being in total control of your financial destiny!

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Appraisers lower costs for federal tax savings on small property

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Posted 04 Mar 2010 — by Admin
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Appraisers lower costs for federal tax savings on small property depreciation

Tax savings through cost segregation is no longer out of reach for investors in small and medium size properties. With appraiser expertise, fees for analysis are often one-third to one-half lower than those charged by traditional preparers.

Several years ago a definitive court case ruled that tangible personal property included in an acquisition or in overall costs should be depreciated as personal property for asset recovery, using the old Investment Tax Credit principles to classify personal property.

This meant that owners of improved properties could distinguish between real property and personal property to depreciate component costs over varying useful lives. Basically, instead of depreciating an entire commercial property over 39 years, or residential roperty (single-family rentals or multifamily) over 27.5 years, certain components are correctly identified as depreciating in much less time. For about 135 items, useful life periods can be 5, 7 or 15 years. This is known as cost segregation.

The result of increasing depreciation is lower taxable income (which would have been taxed at 35%) and more income taxed at the capital gains rate (15%) when the property is sold. Furthermore, it works for any type of improved property.

Until recently, primarily large accounting firms or engineering firms implemented cost segregation studies, addressing large and newly built properties and sometimes outsourcing the analysis.
Prices for those analytical reports, usually in the 10,000 to 40,000 range, were out of reach for owners of small properties, especially those holding less-than-new assets. Unfortunately, those owners representing the largest segment of real estate investors in the country were mostly overlooked by previous providers of cost segregation services.

Now a revolutionary paradigm shift is opening the door to very significant savings for owners of small properties. Much of the change is based upon introducing the efficiencies of highly knowledgeable real estate appraisers who often apply industry-accepted cost estimation techniques before determining remaining asset life. By not over-engineering the staffing or production process, professional fees are lower. Yet, results can usually meet or exceed those of far more expensive reports. This approach has been successfully field-tested by IRS auditors.

Changes that appraisers are introducing to cost segregation analysis and reporting are addressing: 1) the size of the property being analyzed, 2) the age of the property, and 3) an affordable price point. OConnor & Associates, a nationwide real estate service firm, is taking advantage of such techniques to effect these beneficial changes:

1.Owners of property with an improvement basis as low as 500,000 can benefit from cost segregation. This compares to the limited properties worth 5 to 10 million and above that previously benefited.
2.Existing properties built or purchased after 1986 offer significant savings in year-one of cost segregation, even without producing original cost documents. Capturing non-segregated depreciation from prior years is perfectly allowable by the IRS. This compares to firms previously applying the methodology only to new construction.
3.Fees are no longer prohibitive. To prepare an analysis and report for many small properties, prices are low enough to generate at least 3 times the report cost in the first year.

This compares to the traditional fees ranging from 10,000 to 20,000 and up for comparable size properties.
It is wise to keep the owners CPA or tax preparer abreast throughout the process. For older properties, the CPA may need to complete a Form 3115 to submit with the tax return so the owner can realize savings on items not previously depreciated – without filing an amended return.
Income producing properties worth as little as 500,000 can achieve a 3:1 payback ratio of tax savings over the modest price of a cost segregation report. If owned for 3 or more years, the typical payback ratio is 10:1.

In late 2005, OConnors pipeline of cost segregation work was up more than 100%. As owners are preparing for 2005 federal tax filings, many are tapping into this opportunity to lower their federal taxes. Even general partners who are not paying federal income taxes should use this depreciation method since K-1s will reflect lower taxable income to benefit their limited partners.

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