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Posts Tagged ‘business’

One morning a friend of mine was running late for class at school. His wife was throwing together some kind of breakfast while he gathered his laptop, notebook, and picked out the books he was going to need for school that day. He zipped up his pack and ran outside to warm the car up. Except, there was no car. It had been stolen. My friend ran into one disappointment after another that week as he first found the insurance company wouldn’t pay for a rental, then that the damage the thief did to the car would only be covered up to the deductible and that somehow he was going to have to come up with the 500 dollars before the car could be fixed.

He had supposed he had done due diligence by going to one of those car insurance quotes sites and finding the lowest priced quote. He had thought by getting cheap car insurance he had beat the system somehow. In reality, his cheap car insurance turned out to be crappy car insurance. His problem stemmed from a lack of information about his car insurance.

Before you buy your next auto insurance policy be sure you know all of the facts about the company’s service policies. Cheap car insurance is only cheap if the product is as good as the more expensive car insurance. A good place to start is with a free car insurance quote, however obtaining an auto insurance quote is not going to be enough unless you know what kind of service you expect and whether or not the company quoted will provide it. The two A’s will keep you straight. They are, Assets and Assistance.

Assets

You want to make certain that your car insurance quote includes every asset you could want or need in an emergency. When you are high and dry without a car, will your insurance cover your transportation needs? Check to make certain that the company you are buying car insurance from will provide you with an auto rental if something goes wrong. If your car is stolen–as my friend’s was– undrivable, or in the car repair shop for a few days you want to make certain that a car will be available to you. If not, you will be forced to call your in-laws and give them one more reason why you aren’t good enough for their daughter. Check that you have road-side assistance, some variation on lock-out service, and towing service provided by some insurance company. Remember the car insurance quote is only low if the car insurance product is good.

Assistance

Find out what the auto insurance company’s customer service is like before you buy from them. How do you find out something like that? First, there is no way to know for certain what type of people you will end up dealing with, but there are ways to know the probability of having a good experience. First, there is the low tech way of asking your family and friends what their experiences have been. The lemon auto insurance companies will immediately pop up in a network search of that kind, but let’s say that you are a hermit and have no family or friends, or like one friend of mine, your family is all from the catskill mountains without cars or running water. If that is the case then you will need to try the high tech method: use the internet. One way is to make use of the Better Business Bureau’s search engine. At www.betterbusinessbureau.org you can find if any complaints have been registered against the auto insurance company in question and whether or not the company has resolved those complaints. I have checked the auto insurance companies that have treated my family poorly and they all seem to have a complaint–not made by me–against their name.
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Don’t you just hate it when these big-name credit card companies keep turning down your application for a credit card simply because of some financial mistakes or missed payments that you made in the early years of your career, which adversely affected your credit rating? If only you could speak to the account officer handling new applications and politely inform him that you have long since settled those debts and, now that you are gainfully employed, can handle the responsibilities a credit card brings, right? Well, you don’t have to go to such extremes and you don’t have to hope for a miracle because yes, you still can have a credit card. It may not be one of the major ones, but it still is a credit card.

Several credit card companies offer people who have the misfortune of having a less than stellar credit rating a chance to own their own bit of plastic money. The rise of these non-mainstream credit card companies may have been caused by the demand created by those who did not pass the stringent requirements of the big – name players. The credit cards provided by these companies still function like a regular credit card: these have pre-determined credit limits; are accepted in various retail establishments; give cardholders periodic increase in credit limits (naturally this would still depend on your performance as a card holder and your capacity to pay) and may probably even have a form of rewards program. Card holders enjoy almost the same benefits as those who hold well known credit cards. But what’s good about these non-mainstream cards is that they still report to the three major credit rating bureaus and, if you pay promptly and maintain your good standing, these cards will, in time, help improve your credit rating. Read the rest of this entry »

If you are running a business out of your home, then there are many details that you need to keep in mind. You should probably be reading up on as much information that you can get ahold of on having a business at home. One of the most essential pieces of running a bussiness from home that you absolutely need to know from the start is to get a business credit card to use for everything related to your business.

Unfortunately, as a business consultant, I have talked with far too many business owners that come to me after failing at running a home based business. Why? Well, there are a wide range of reasons why people would fail at owning and running a home business, but the surprising number one reason I found for failure was poor management of finances. Far too many people do not invest into a business credit card when they first begin, and that is a very dangerous thing to do.

I thought that the importance of having a business credit card was obvious, but maybe it is not. A business credit card ultimately allows the home based business owner to have the freedom to keep their personal finances and their business finances separate. This is essential throughout the year and obviously when it comes to tax season as well. There is no reason why the finances of a home should be mixed up with the finances of a business. Keeping the two accounts as separate as possible is good in the long run.
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I know a woman in her sixties. She worked for a company for a little more than a decade as an administration and office assistant for a staff of one hundred sales people, who loved her dearly. She always made sure all the faxes got to their desks; the stationery stock was full and each staff member had what he needed.

Beyond her job description, she was like a mother to all of them: making sure the toilets got cleaned, old food was removed from the fridge and decorating the entire floor which the department occupied. She worked hard and never complained. She was always smiling, friendly and polite.

She felt good about being a ‘mother’ to all the people who entered and left that department. She was comfortable with her position. No-one else could do the things she did. And she did them better than anyone else in the building.

One day, she went to work as usual. After doing her morning chores, she was invited to the office, where she was told her services were no longer needed. The company was undergoing certain cost-cutting measures in every department and unfortunately, her role would have to be sacrificed. She was then asked to leave the building as soon as possible. She was assured, however, that before having made the decision, every attempt had been made to find a position for her somewhere within the company.

She has financial obligations to fulfil and she still hasn’t saved enough for her retirement. She still has credit to pay off and she was saving for a trip overseas, something she never got around to doing in her younger years. She wanted to save up to establish a book-selling business. Suddenly, she would have to re-evaluate her plans. Losing a job and nearing retirement age, she will have to relinquish some of the things she had dreamt for herself.

I am sure you have heard hundreds of similar stories like these. Just five months before writing this article, I had already read about companies cutting costs by laying off jobs. Their main reason is to remain competitive, so they would not have to raise the prices they charge to their customers. Companies are outsourcing jobs overseas because the labour costs in other countries are relatively cheap compared to the local currency and sometimes because of significant skills or technological advantages. Other businesses lessen staff when sales drop and they can no longer sustain to pay the same number of people they have on their payroll. No organisation – not even a big, established business – is immune from the need to become leaner in an ever-increasingly competitive market environment.
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