Amateur Minx

Moving is often rated as one of the most stressful events in life. So it’s only natural that you feel a little anxious when the move approaches. Perhaps you or someone you know had a bad experience. Well, don’t worry. Welcome. This guide will help you navigate the process of hiring a moving company!

If you follow these three simple and effective steps, you’ll have a solid, reliable employee coming on your moving day.

Step 2 – Align 3 Direct Citations

Each company has a grade from A+ (highest) to F (lowest). Look for companies that have good ratings and that the information on their website suits your needs and makes sense. (For example, if you are traveling long distances, focus on companies that specialize in long-distance travel). Hiring a mover is not the same as ordering a pizza or a taxi, so unless you’re moving, you shouldn’t just book by phone. You may need to contact several companies to get 3 quotes, as not all companies are willing to visit and provide direct quotes. If one of your businesses doesn’t show up or doesn’t send you a quote after your visit, be prepared for an additional quote.

Step 3: Quotation evaluation

Now that you’ve given three estimates, it’s time to complete the final step. Choose the best company out of these.

A central and most important part of any estimate is an accurate estimate of the amount of furniture. It should appear in cubic feet or pounds (1 cubic foot = 7 pounds) somewhere on the quote.

Everything else you need to plan and price the move (number of movers, number and size of trucks, etc.) comes with it. If moving locally, estimates must provide at least one mover per 400 cubic feet of household, assuming average moving conditions. If the move is difficult to access (many steps, steep driveways, or whatever), this 400 cubic foot per mover ratio should be lower.

If the estimate does not include an estimate of how many households there are (or if the estimate is unusually low*), the resulting estimate of time and cost will be at best out of the box and will almost certainly come out lower. Another quote that accurately calculated this figure. When this happens, brace yourself and resist the lure of being lured by low prices.

After all, you most likely won’t save anything and you’ll risk the move. A firm or “do not exceed” quote is a special treat when offered you must take read more into account.

*A general rule of thumb when moving locally is one cubic foot of furniture for every square foot of living space. A 600-square-foot apartment has 600 square feet of furniture, and a 1200-square-foot house has 1200 square feet of furniture. Moving across the country often results in fewer households, and these rates are generally lower.

Before making any hiring decisions, especially regarding breakage, make sure you are happy and that you can abide by the company’s terms and conditions. Before commencing a move, both parties should make clear what their respective obligations should be in the event of damage (eg partial/total replacement, payment of deductibles, etc.). If it is not included in the quote, politely ask the company to send it to you.

The estimator is the point person for your move and while giving an estimate, it is difficult to park, move out, move on a deadline, or move things like a piano while booking an elevator and loading and unloading.

Building financial models is an art. The only way to improve your craft is to build a variety of financial models across a number of industries. Let’s try a model for an investment that is not beyond the reach of most individuals – an investment property.

Before we jump into building a financial model, we should ask ourselves what drives the business that we are exploring. The answer will have significant implications for how we construct the model.

Who Will Use It?

Who will be using this model and what will they be using it for? A company may have a new product for which they need to calculate an optimal price. Or an investor may want Property Consultant to map out a project to see what kind of investment return he or she can expect.

Depending on these scenarios, the end result of what the model will calculate may be very different. Unless you know exactly what decision the user of your model needs to make, you may find yourself starting over several times until you find an approach that uses the right inputs to find the appropriate outputs.

On to Real Estate

In our scenario, we want to find out what kind of financial return we can expect from an investment property given certain information about the investment. This information would include variables such as the purchase price, rate of appreciation, the price at which we can rent it out, the financing terms available fore the property, etc.

Our return on this investment will be driven by two primary factors: our rental income and the appreciation of the property value. Therefore, we should begin by forecasting rental income and the appreciation of the property in consideration.

Once we have built out that portion of the model, we can use the information we have calculated to figure out how we will finance the purchase of the property and what financial expenses we can expect to incur as a result.

Next we tackle the property management expenses. We will need to use the property value that we forecasted in order to be able to calculate property taxes, so it is important that we build the model in a certain order.

With these projections in place, we can begin to piece together the income statement and the balance sheet. As we put these in place, we may spot items that we haven’t yet calculated and we may have to go back and add them in the appropriate places.

Finally, we can use these financials to project the cash flow to the investor and calculate our return on investment.

Laying Out the Model

We should also think about how we want to lay it out so we keep our workspace clean. In Excel, one of the best ways to organize financial models is to separate certain sections of the model on different worksheets.

We can give each tab a name that describes the information contained in it. This way, other users of the model can better understand where data is calculated in the model and how it flows.

In our investment property model, let’s use four tabs: property, financing, expenses and financials. Property, financing and expenses will be the tabs on which we input assumption and make projections for our model. The financials tab will be our results page where we will display the output of our model in a way that’s easily understood.

Forecasting Revenues

Let’s start with the property tab by renaming the tab “Property” and adding this title in cell A1 of the worksheet. By taking care of some of these formatting issuing on the front end, we’ll have an easier time keeping the model clean.

Next, let’s set up our assumptions box. A few rows below the title, type “Assumptions” and make a vertical list of the following inputs:

Purchase Price
Initial Monthly Rent
Occupancy Rate
Annual Appreciation
Annual Rent Increase
Broker Fee
Investment Period

In the cells to the right of each input label, we’ll set up an input field by adding a realistic placeholder for each value. We will format each of these values to be blue in color. This is a common modeling convention to indicate that these are input values. This formatting will make it easier for us and others to understand how the model flows. Here are some corresponding values to start with:

$250,000.00
$1,550.00
95.00%
3.50%
1.00%
6.00%
4 years

The purchase price will be the price we expect to pay for a particular property. The initial monthly rent will be the price for which we expect to rent out the property. The occupancy rate will measure how well we keep the property rented out (95% occupancy will mean that there will only be about 18 days that the property will go un-rented between tenants each year).

Annual appreciation will determine the rate that the value of our property increases (or decreases) each year. Annual rent increase will determine how much we will increase the rent each year. The broker fee measures what percentage of the sale price of the property we will have to pay a broker when we sell the property.

The investment period is how long we will hold the property for before we sell it. Now that we have a good set of property assumptions down, we can begin to make calculations based on these assumptions.

A Note on Time Periods

There are many ways to begin forecasting out values across time. You could project financials monthly, quarterly, annually or some combination of the three. For most models, you should consider forecasting the financials monthly during the first couple years.

By doing so, you allow users of the model to see some of the cyclicality of the business (if there is any). It also allows you to spot certain problems with the business model that may not show up in annual projections (such as cash balance deficiencies). After the first couple of years, you can then forecast the financials on an annual basis.

For our purposes, annual projections will cut down on the complexity of the model. One side effect of this choice is that when we begin amortizing mortgages later, we will wind up incurring more interest expense than we would if we were making monthly principal payments (which is what happens in reality).

Why Article Writing Is Important for Your Long-Term Business Success

Today we are operating our business in a world of relationship marketing and content marketing. Gone are the days of “push” marketing where big advertising campaigns were an effective way to get the word out about your products and services.

Now it’s all about “pull” marketing where we want to pull our potential clients into our world and allow them the opportunity to get to know, like and trust us before they do business with us.

One of the best ways to develop the benefits of relationship marketing is through blogging. This is nothing new; many marketers have been saying this for a few years now.

So why are so many entrepreneurs and business owners not bothering with blogging?

I encourage every client I work with to blog but only a few actually do. Instead of fully embracing the business benefits of blogging, I get a lot of excuses like:

• I don’t have the time
• I can’t write
• I can’t be bothered; it’s too much work
• I don’t know what to write about
• I don’t know how to blog
• I don’t see the value, my target market doesn’t read blogs
• And so on…

While some of these reasons can be quite legit in their minds, when it comes down to it, the biggest source of resistance is the unwillingness to make a commitment towards this very effective marketing strategy.

What they don’t realize is once that commitment is made, it’s amazing how the HOW appears and suddenly there IS time and knowing what to write about DOES materialize. It happened to me and it can for you too.

With that in mind, here are 10 reasons why blogging should be at the top of your marketing to-do list:

1. More SEO Traffic

Keywords pertinent to your industry will bring qualified traffic back to website who are looking for solutions in those areas. This is what search engine optimization is all about – getting picked up in the search engines so people who are looking for your type of product or service actually find you.

You want to ensure you use pertinent keywords and phrases that your potential clients are using when typing in their search query. So putting yourself in your prospect’s mind is necessary when creating topics, categories and keywords for each article you write.

2. Higher Search Engine Standings

In order for people to find you in the search engines, your blog post needs to be seen as high up in the search results as possible. If you’re showing up on page 5, then the odds are very slim anyone will find you.

The goods news is that fresh content tells the search engines your website is still alive and well and you will be rewarded as such. So the more often you blog the more likely the search engines will boost you higher up in the results.

Aside from frequency, popular content also tells the search engines your website is worthy of higher positioning. The more people that get engaged in your blog posts, the more you benefit from this popularity.

Another search engine benefit to blogging is the ability to create inbound links within the content of your post. These links can click to other pages within your website that you want the readers to reference.

Inbound links signal to search engines that other pages on your website must be popular since they are being linked to; therefore, your website will be rewarded with higher standings.

3. Gain Credibility

Each time you write a blog post that shares your knowledge and expertise, you are positioning yourself as a thought leader in your industry and gaining more credibility as someone that can be trusted by your readers.

It also provides you with an opportunity to share your ideas, personality, values and beliefs – all of which help build your credibility through the eyes of your ideal target market.

4. Build community

The more you write about topics that relate to your target market, the more they will feel like they are a part of your community… your inner circle, where you have a prime opportunity to develop the “know, like and trust” factor with them.

The more this happens, the more they will trust you to do business with. So when writing, you want to share stories that people relate to and feel like you understand them to keep building that trust.

5. Create Sharable Social Media Content

With every post you write, you can share it to your social media channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ etc. This can be done automatically if you use WordPress but I don’t recommend that. Instead, ensure you have the social sharing plugin installed and manually share your articles. This way you can add in a personal note and intentionally share the post at an optimal time.

And of course, your readers can also share your blog posts to THEIR followers, which expands your brand reach considerably. So go ahead and use the controls on the left and share this post to your social media peeps, it would be greatly appreciated!

6. Provides Newsletter Content

As mentioned earlier, your blogging efforts are closely intertwined with your newsletter. When I send out our weekly newsletters, they include a “feature article” which, you guessed it, is the blog article I wrote that week!

So all you need to do is write your blog article and then in your newsletter, write a quick introduction and then a brief teaser to the article so that your subscribers will then click on the “Read more” link and are sent back to your blog to read the whole article.

7. Build Better Customer Relationships

By writing on a consistent basis and sending those articles to your list of existing clients and customers, they will feel like you didn’t abandon them.

Your articles will help them feel you continue to support them and their needs, that you continue to be a source of information for them to turn to and receive guidance from. All of which builds a stronger and ongoing relationship with them.

Lastly, writing articles allows your customers to get to know you on a more personal level. Don’t be afraid to share past struggles and how you overcame them or current stories that relate to a teaching lesson. These all help solidify the feeling that you are all in it together.

8. Generate Leads and List Building Opportunities

Never write an article that has no purpose.

Before writing and aside from wanting to share your knowledge, think about the purpose of your article. What do you want people to do after reading it?

If they continually enjoy what you are writing in your blog posts, it will be a natural progression for them to want to get notified by email via your newsletter each time you write and add a new post to your blog.

9. Repurpose to Article Directories

Once an article is written for your blog, that doesn’t mean that’s the only place you can post it! There are several websites that are literally a directory of articles. These article repositories take submissions from anyone and if approved, will display your article in their site.

Some example directory sites include many great directories. You can also repost your article in LinkedIn Pulse and Medium for more exposure.

10. Opens New Doors for Opportunities and Global Networking

Lastly, because of the above factors, your brand visibility increases a huge amount when you blog on a consistent basis.

This means more people will get to know of you, which opens up a lot of potential opportunity to create JV partnerships with those that complement your business, being a guest author on other blogs, being invited to expert interviews and more.