Business & Finance

Archive for December, 2009

I needed to make some big changes in order to fix my cash flow situation and feel more financially secure. I started by changing the terms of my payment policy. A good friend of mine at the time was working for a company called Alliance Payment Technologies. She opened my eyes to something called an Automatic Clearing House. After doing a little research, I realized that this was exactly the solution I was looking for in order to minimize my accounts receivables, without having to go down the dreaded road of accepting credit cards. So what, you ask, is an Automatic Clearing House? In plain English, according to Google, an Automatic Clearing House is a secure, private electronic payment transfer systems that connects all US financial institutions.

Using an Automatic Clearing House helped me to make the changes I needed to stop having large Accounts Receivable balances. So how did they do this exactly? Companies like NetDeposit who specializes in Accounts Receivable Truncation, Direct Deposit, Electronic Check Conversion, Web Check and my favorite Recurring Billing. The Recurring Billing enabled me to have my flat fee monthly recurring projects taken out of my client’s bank account automatically on a monthly basis – no invoicing and no waiting. I also changed how we handled our onsite bookkeeping clients by setting a weekly minimum based on an estimated number of hours worked that would be taken out of the client’s bank account on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. On top of all of this, I also changed my billing to be monthly in order to reflect adjustment bills from if we had gone over/under the minimums in the month for onsite clients set up as recurring. Even though I had changed my billing to be done on a monthly basis instead of biweekly, with this new automatic payment system in place, my receivables would be minimal.

This turned out to be exactly the solution that I had been looking for to solve all my collection and cash flow problems. It made a dramatic impact on my cash flow situation and minimized my collections almost completely. It enabled me to be able to budget and manage my cash flow issues on a more regular basis. So if you have ever found yourself in the position of feeling strapped for cash while you’re waiting on your clients to finally get around to paying you for the services you have rendered, this may be exactly what you’re looking for. In this tough economy especially, you may want to consider minimizing your accounts receivables by using an Automatic Clearing House to collect your fees for you.

Mortgage rates shot up this week with the 30 year rate moving from 4.81 to 4.94. Rates also moved up substantially last week. So now in the last two weeks rates have moved from 4.71 to 4.94. This is highest the 30 year rate has been since November 5th. Although the other mortgage products have moved up in the last two weeks they have not risen as dramatically as the 30 year rate.

For the last few months the 30 year rate has always been the obvious choice. Since 30 year rates have risen .23 points in the last two weeks while 15 year rates have only risen .11 points and the 1 year arm has only risen .10 points, now it’s becoming less obvious. I would still think 30 year rates is still probably the default choice for most homeowners there are probably rare circumstances where it might make more sense to look at a 15 year fixed mortgage or to look at a 5 or 1 year arm. If one is sure that they are going to move in a few years it might then make sense to look at other options. If one is not sure what they are going to do then with rates still historically low its probably better to lock in long term with the 30 year rate.

In addition to straight mortgage rates it’s always good to look at actual mortgage payments. We took today’s rates and used a mortgage calculator to translate them into a payment on a 200,000 loan. We also did the same thing with rates from December 3rd and June 18th.

So what are rates going to do moving forward? Although rates are expected to rise long term after rising so quickly in the last two weeks its likely we could see a bit of a pull back in rates. Long term though we should expect to see rates substantially higher in the next year or two.