Buying a home is one of the most monumental moments of any adult’s life. It is the chance for a new start, to take control of your lifestyle and independence, and have the opportunity to start a family with the one you love. On the flip side, buying a house can be the most stressful, time-consuming and costly affairs of your life.

We all know about the major costs of purchasing a property, with the deposit and the mortgage, as well as forking out for furniture for your new home at the top of the list. But there are some unforeseen costs which nobody tells you about until you are already part-way through the process, today we are going to take a look at these hidden costs. It might make you have to rethink whether you can afford to put an offer on the house right now. If you are worried about the down payment on a house, you can always check out this article to let you know how much you should pay.

Attorney’s Fees

The first kicker when it comes to buying a house is the attorney’s fees. You will have already searched for a home, gone for viewings, put an offer in and been accepted before these charges become apparent. It all depends on where you go. There are tonnes of lawyers to go to when you are looking to buy a property, and the fees are relatively standard. However, you can still shop around to find the lowest cost if you like, however, sometimes the lower price is reflected in the service you receive. Consider asking friends and family who they chose and work from there. You may find that the result is a little more pricey, but if you can work with a company that is trustworthy, it is worth the extra cash.

Home Buyer’s Report

When you apply for a mortgage, the lender will ask you to complete a home buyer’s report to check the house for any faults and damage. If the home you are looking to purchase fails the report, the house cannot legally be sold, and you will have to find something else. Although it is an annoyance, it’s in your best interests to have this because it prevents you from buying a damaged property and having to pay out for repairs.

Repairs

If the home buyer’s report passes but comes back with a few minor faults, these are extra costs you will have to consider once you move in. You may have to replace the boiler, make sure windows are double glazed, or tile the roof, which will add to your expenses.

If you don’t opt for a full survey to be carried out, once you move into the property you may be faced with repairs that you weren’t aware of previously. For this reason, it is recommended to get a full survey on any house over 100 years old. If not, you can opt for a slightly less in-depth survey which will still give you information about the inside of the property.

Stamp Duty

Stamp Duty is one of those niggling little costs that only creep up when you receive your contract. Stamp Duty is land tax, which everyone has to pay on their property upon purchase. The tax will range depending on the size and location of the house but is worked out as a percentage of the value of your home. You can calculate it here.

Home Insurance

Home Insurance must be put into place from the data you exchange contracts, meaning that even if you don;t move in on your exchange date, you are already paying home insurance on your property. Paying for your home insurance ahead of moving in is a minor annoyance, however, is essential to secure the safety of your home.

Temporary Accommodation

If you aren’t lucky enough to be living with parents or friends as you go through the moving process, you must think about the cost of your current accommodation. Whether that be your current mortgage or rent, it can eat away at your savings.

Storage Costs

Many people like to start building a collection of items for when they move into a home. You could be beginning to stock up on furniture, appliances, kitchen utensils or towels- but you will need somewhere to store them all. Hiring out a storage unit is a great way to relieve the stress of moving everything from one property to the next, because it will all be in one single location ready to go. However, if you face unforeseen difficulties with your purchase which slow down the process, such as probate or environmental issues, you may have to hire out the unit for a longer period.

Moving Costs

Finally, the day has come where you’ve got the keys to your new home, and you can begin to move everything in. Unless you or a family member have a van you can borrow, you may have to fork out for a moving truck or rent a van for a couple of days to move everything into your home. It can be a long process, but once you have settled, it’s worth it. Shop around to find the best value hire companies in your area.

Random House Costs

Once you’ve moved into your new property, you will be faced with some bills. You will have a few different costs to think about when setting up your home. First up, electricity, gas, and water. Usually, when you take on a property from its previous owner, you can simply transfer the existing setup to yourself- freeing up some time trying to hunt for a new deal. You can, of course, set up your own, and this will involve comparing companies and packages with what suits you. The same goes for broadband, tv, and phones. You may want to set up a package deal with all of these thing included at a discounted rate. It’s up to your personal preference and needs.

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There’s no doubt that the idea of adding to your business costs is rarely a popular idea. When you’re so focused on seeing through each month and generating a profit, it can feel like every debit you have to make to your business accounts is a huge drain. So being told that you need to think about employee healthcare coverage? That’s probably not the most welcome of statements.

The truth is, however, that the health of your employees is vitally important to your business. Without a healthy staff, you’re going to suffer from chronic problems and a huge loss of productivity caused by sick days and absences. Investing in how healthy your employees are is an investment in the future of your business – so if you try and think of it like that, it might be easier to handle the loss to your finances.

Should you make the decision to invest in healthcare coverage, this gives birth to many additional decisions you have to make. What type of coverage should you offer? What is important to prioritize in the coverages? What exclusions can you expect?

All important decisions that are worthy of your time, but for the moment, let’s focus on a more macro level. While general healthcare coverage is great, you’re also going to need to think about using business senses to give your employees the best healthcare they need. And that’s ‘business senses’ in a very literal way…

Sight

A general healthcare policy might not cover employee vision and sight health. Why do you need this area covered?

• Poor eyesight can cause headaches and fatigue, meaning your employees won’t be at their best.
• If someone is struggling to see properly, they are less likely to be able to spot errors in fine print – which could cost your business substantially.

So it’s always worthwhile to check out business vision insurance rates if your policy doesn’t cover eye and sight costs as standard.

Hearing

If you have an older workforce, then natural degeneration in hearing is an area you need to focus on. It’s also a priority if you work in an industry that involves employees being exposed to loud noises, such as construction.

• If you don’t provide the correct sound-blocking technology for employees, then you could be vulnerable to a future lawsuit. Doing this and offering proper healthcare to ensure the measures you have taken are effective is a perfect way of covering yourself for the future.
• Older employees have a lot to offer in terms of experience. Don’t allow them to be left behind by not being able to hear in meetings or struggling with phone calls.

Try and find a policy that covers not only regular hearing checks, but anything that offers assistance with the cost of a hearing aid.

Taste

If there is anything you can do to ensure your employees are eating a healthy diet, then it’s a great investment. Not only will they be healthier in general, but it also means fewer claims on your company policy.

• While staff can bring their own if they choose, try and encourage healthy eating habits through avoiding sugary drinks and snacks in any vending machines.
• Offer free fruit and vegetable snacks to the office on a regular basis.

By focus on the above areas, you can be confident of a comprehensive coverage for your employees health – benefiting your business in the long run as well!

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Finances are very crucial to business organizations. They are basically the main reason organizations are in business. Firms invest their resources and through their operations and product offerings, they aim to recoup as much finances as possible. To be able to tell their financial position after all this, businesses have to account for every penny invested into the business as well as funds earned from the products and services rendered. Initially, firms would rely on excel sheets for their accounting processes. Different columns would be created for funds invested into the business and another for funds generated from the business operations. The figures had to be entered manually of course and the firm’s bottom-line generated manually as well. This method was error prone and as a result, it could not be relied upon to give the best financial position of a firm at a given time. Accounting software were invented specifically for this purpose. Using these software, and particularly QuickBooks, businesses are now able to manage their finances in a stress-free manner. This post about QuickBooks explains in detail why every small business needs QuickBooks for its business operations.

1. QuickBooks provides real-time financial insights into a firm.

QuickBooks has an online version known as QuickBooks Online that allows firms to access their financial data and information online and in real-time from their PCs and mobile devices. You, therefore, don’t have to be at the office for you to access your company’s finances. This ensures that you can go about your business remotely and this goes a long way to help you save time. This online visibility gives you secure access to information such as profits and losses, incomes and expenses at a given time. Other activities that have been made possible with this online feature is the management of payrolls as well as sending invoices. Impressive isn’t it?

2. Minimizes accounting errors.

The use of excel spreadsheets for business operations results in a lot of errors. Misplaced figures and data entry errors can put the entire bookkeeping process into disarray and this makes the financial position arrived at using excel sheets false and misleading. QuickBooks feature a level of automation whereby financial information is fed directly from your bank and other financial institutions. QuickBooks is also quick to identify mistakes early in the bookkeeping process and this helps the concerned parties to correct them early in advance.

3. Filing your taxes is easy.

Filing tax returns was a labor-intensive process that small businesses had to go through way back before QuickBooks was invented. Firms had to rifle through its paper records to find receipts and invoices needed for filing the returns. This process has been made easier with QuickBooks whereby you get to update your tax figures in real time every time you upload financial records into the system. This takes place throughout the year and when the time comes to file your returns, you are able to do it in a very short time.

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Property is one of those things that is seemingly always cited as a great opportunity for investment. Housing, after all, is one of those things for which there will always be a demand. The President of the United States demonstrated over the course of his career that with a small loan (of a million dollars no less) that one can become a billionaire. However, scrutiny of these claims suggests that Donald Trump did not use his ingenuity and hard work to build the empire that he ostensibly relinquished control of when he took office earlier this year. The fact is that Trump simply did not have the connections or the capital to finance some of the projects that started his career as a developer. This demonstrates that the market can be tough when you are starting out. As a point in fact, Trump declared bankruptcy four times in 1991 and 1992 alone, with a further two bankruptcies, in 2004, and most recently, in 2009. A lot of people will not have the contacts to start building hotels in Manhattan when they are in their twenties. However, there is nothing wrong with slowly and honestly building a portfolio that modestly begins with a single property. Deciding exactly what property that should be is the difficult part.

The first and most important step to investing in property though is the initial financing that you need to source to get your start. If your father is not an immensely wealthy real estate developer, you will probably need to look to banks or other lenders to help you out. Trying to get a mortgage for an investment is different to seeking one so that you can buy the house in which you intend to live. The checks that will be carried out will be more precise, and you will need to provide detailed business plans before you can expect to be met with approval. You also need to worry about the fundamentals. If your credit rating is not as good as it could be, you may want to think about waiting a while before trying to start a portfolio. There are lots of ways to improve your credit rating like paying off your existing debts and demonstrating an ability to effectively and quickly paying off your future ones. However, until this is done, a new venture may be unnecessarily risky. Something as simple as registering on the electoral roll in your area could increase the chances of being accepted for a loan. The fact remains that when you take on a loan, you become personally liable for paying that money back with interest. If your investment fails or does not give you as great a return as you’d hoped, you could be in a particularly difficult financial situation. It is, therefore, crucial that you carefully consider each investment on its merits before taking on such a massive responsibility. You would not be the first person to bankrupt themselves as a result of ambition.

However, if you are pretty sure that you have enough money to make a move in the markets, and you will have enough left over in case it fails, you need to start looking for different types of property in which to invest. One option, and perhaps the most common, is buying residential properties to sell or rent. One particularly lucrative option is student property investment. Students often get loans to support them while they are at college and not able to work full time. They will, therefore, have the money to pay for accommodation, which, after all, is a necessity. It is a good idea to think about investing in student properties because there will always be a constant supply of new students. Each year, a group will graduate, but a new group will join to replace them. However, it is not just students that represent a good target demographic for rental properties. Millennials are now being described as Generation Rent. A lot of young people grew up or left college during the economic downturn that started in 2008. They have struggled to find jobs that pay well enough for them to be able to start thinking about a mortgage. In fact, a study conducted last year found that the share of 18 to 34-year-olds who own their own homes has fallen to a thirty year low. These people have no other recourse but to rent. If you own rental properties, you could claim your stake of a massive and expanding market. If you invest money in affordable, safe, amenable housing, you could attract lots of potential tenants who are still striving to start their careers and develop some sort of financial certainty and independence. The reality is that a lot of buy to rent properties are not that expensive and with such demand, getting a loan should not be too hard since you can prove the viability of your plan.

The issue of gentrification is one of which you should be aware of though. In the United States, perhaps the most obvious recent example is the change that has taken place in Brooklyn. Whereas areas like Greenpoint were once home to mostly immigrant communities, Brooklyn now has rents that are comparable to Manhattan because so-called ‘hipsters’ started to move to these areas. They become fashionable, and the rent went up as a result. It is a simple economic model. If a landlord realizes that their property suddenly has more value, they will charge more for it to take advantage. This sort of social change has been harshly criticized in the past because many areas lose the identity that they once had. The small, independent stores and businesses that allowed the local people to survive are replaced by chains and major corporations, therefore outsourcing the profits too. However, if you buy lots of property in an area that you anticipate will become gentrified, you could make immense amounts of money. The only problem is that it is quite difficult to anticipate where people will want to live next. Knowing that is the secret to making good investments.

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If you run a company, you probably want it to grow as quickly as possible. But that’s not always as easy to do as it sounds. Any kind of business growth should be celebrated. If it’s not happening quickly enough, don’t rush into anything rash because you could end up making the situation worse rather than better.

However, there are some positive steps you can take to help your business grow in a way that’s both sustainable and fast. Read on now to find out what these tips are and how they can have an impact on the growth of your company.

Establish Your Revenue Sources

You need to have a clear plan for where your money is going to come from when you run a business. You can’t expect things to just fall into place if your revenue sources are not properly nailed down. That just won’t happen. So, give some thought to what you should do to secure your revenue sources. Solidify your plans and make it clear how you want your business to cope with the challenges that stand in your way of exploiting those sources of revenue. It’s essential to get this right if you want your business to grow.

Hire Good People

The people that power your business are its employees. These people need to be the right individuals doing the right jobs if you want to do well. No business grows fast without the right people onboard. Business is all about people and personalities. They’ll be working away behind the scenes even if customers and clients don’t see much of them. So, you need to hire good people with the right talents and proficiencies if you want to get ahead and do well. The better your employees are, the easier it will be to grow your small business.

Seek Professional Support

Sometimes, you need to get help from the best if you want to grow and expand. There is nothing wrong with seeking this kind of help, and it doesn’t suggest that you don’t know what you’re doing either. Instead, it’s about getting help from people with more experience and tips to share with you. You could take a course like Learn Build Earn to learn tips from people who know what they’re talking about. It’s something that you should definitely start to look into if you want to get better and expand your horizons.

Be Careful with Risks

There are some risks that you simply can’t afford to take in the world of business. But on the other hand, running a business is all about taking risks. There is no way forward without risk-taking. It’s all about getting that balance right, and making sure that the risks you take are always measured and calculated. Failing to do that will just lead to disaster for your business, and I’m sure that’s not something that you will want to deal with. You will experience far fewer setbacks in business if you don’t take risks that simply aren’t necessary.

Learn How to Adapt to New Challenges

You’re going to have to be able to adapt if you want to succeed as a small business owner. This is always the way it has been, and nothing has changed. This might be frustrating for you because no one really likes changes. But if you learn to be more adaptable in each way you conduct business, you will move in the right direction and become better able to deal with the ups and downs of running a company. Don’t be so restrained and uptight when it comes to running your business. Be more open to new opportunities that take you in new and interesting directions.

Stay a Step Ahead

Staying a step ahead of the game is really important for business owners. When you are on top of things and able to see what’s coming round the corner next, your business will be in far better shape. You won’t be taken by surprise, and you won’t be able to be tripped up quite so easily when you are a step ahead of your rivals and the trends in the market. You have to be ahead when you are trying to maintain your market share and expand it at a rapid rate. The more you know, the better you will be at finding success.

If you use these tips and put them into practice when managing your business and guiding it towards success, you will be able to make sure that you grow your business faster.

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