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If you are moving to another country to live, work and play, it can be both an exciting and nerve-wracking experience. On one hand, you will be able to open yourself up to various opportunities and experiences, all of which you can use to improve yourself. And on the converse side of the coin, you have to deal with a variety of things which may not be totally familiar to you.

Whether you are moving by yourself or with your spouse and/or whole family, you will have a lot of items to tick off your to-do list, including personal banking. Banks in most countries are at par with international standards, following major reforms enforced since the nineties.

The banking system in the country can be characterised as modern and liberal, with several key players including local and foreign banks.

If you are looking for the best credit card, you will be glad to know that your search will not be a difficult one as there are numerous bank branches strategically located in various towns and cities in the countries. And although providing cash remains as the most preferred mode of payment, establishments accept credit and debit card payments.

Internet banking is also offered by local and foreign banks, giving customers greater ease in viewing and managing their bank accounts. Consumers can choose among three basic types of bank accounts: current, savings and deposit accounts. Some banks may offer services which are aligned with the Islamic Sharia.

If you are keen on opening a bank account in the country you are moving in, there are two ways to proceed. First, you can open a bank account upon your arrival in the country. You will need to prepare and present official documentation which will include your passport, residence certificate and visa. It would also be beneficial if you bring with you copies of recent bank statements from your previous bank as well as a recommendation letter.

Alternatively, you can open a bank account before you leave for your new home. Most expats open an international bank account before heading out for the country. This gives them numerous benefits including more banking and payment options to choose from. Before making the final choice of bank to open an account with, it is important to be aware of the bank charges for the services and financial products you might use. This will vary from one bank to another. Click here for more tips.

There are many sources who offer business funding today. Knowing the different sources will help you find the best funding options for your business.

Remember, most of these funding sources you can access right through your funding suite with us. So reach out to me to receive more information about the specific funding that will work for you and your business.

In the meantime take a look at some of the many sources of funding that are available today.

Business Charge and Credit Cards are a fast and easy way to access cash for business. You can use the money for any purpose, and you can be approved for business credit with no personal guaranty or credit check. Many merchants will approve you for individual credit cards of $10,000 or higher.

Angel investors have been responsible for funding over 30,000 small businesses each and every year. With over 250,000 active angels in the country you may want to consider an angel investor network to simplify your search. These investors are a great source of funding when banks won’t approve you, and perfect for projects where you need a lot of money.

Asset Based Funding is perfect if your company has collateral such as accounts receivable, inventory, equipment, purchase orders, or real estate. These assets can be used to secure the financing you need, and you can secure asset based funding even if your credit isn’t very good.

Bank Loans are still available, although they have become harder to get approved for. Many large banks tend to be much more conservative in lending so you may want to consider a community bank or credit union for a small business loan.
Equipment Leasing helps when you want to lease expensive equipment, and some equipment leasing and financing also works for you to borrower against existing equipment you already own.

Factoring is perfect if you have high amounts of account receivables. You can obtain funding up to 25 million and you can receive your advance within 24-48 hours in most cases. With factoring, you sell your company’s accounts receivables to a company (known as a factor) at a discount, in order to free up your cash. The company that purchases the receivables then assumes the responsibility for collecting them. This is a great option as they absolutely don’t care about your own personal credit.

Grants are a great way to get money for your business, especially government grants. Depending on your business types and intended use of funds, there are many options available for you to receive grant money that doesn’t need to be paid back.

Lines of Credit are perfect sources of working capital. A line of credit works like a revolving credit card but with much lower interest rates and higher available credit limits. You can get credit lines over $150,000 and write checks from the account or use a debit card to withdrawal funds or use for purchases.

Merchant Cash Advances and Merchant Lines of Credit are perfect for businesses who process credit card payments. This type of financing will advance you money against future credit card transactions. You can even get a debit card to use the funds you secure.

Microfinance Loans are less difficult and time intensive to qualify for with loan amounts ranging from $500 to $35k. Many businesses use several micro loans to get money for their business versus applying for one larger loan due to the easier qualifying criteria.

SBA backed Loans are still one of the most popular financing options available today. SBA backs, or insures about 80% of the loan while the lender lending the money takes on about 20% or so of the risk. Due to the lower risk to the bank, many major banks are more apt to lend money using SBA backed loans than regular loans.

Venture capital is neither easy nor fast to be able to tap into but can be a viable source of funding. This is a great source when you need higher loan amounts, and don’t mind giving up a potential stake in your company. Plus you don’t have some of the headaches that come with conventional funding.

Receivables financing or “invoice factoring” is a great way to get money for your business.

Accounts receivable financing is not a loan; it’s an advance against your client invoices.

You are selling your outstanding invoices to a factoring company who then gives you back up to 95% of the invoice value in the form of a loan against those invoices.

Receivable Financing is mainly used to generate immediate cash flow for the business selling the accounts receivable.

These are a great funding option as they provide an immediate advance of cash to you leveraging your outstanding invoices.

This means as your business grows so does the amount of funding you will qualify for so you can meet increasing demand.

Most major companies including most major Fortune 500 companies utilize some form of Accounts Receivable Financing.

One of the best benefits of receivable financing is giving your business an increase in working capital without needing to borrow money or tie up your business or personal assets.

This boost to your cash flow positively impacts your profitability.

You can receive money quickly, typically within 24 hours from approval. This is much faster than if you were trying to collect on the invoices on your own and wait for that money.

Prior to purchasing your invoices, a factor conducts a credit analysis on the client you are invoicing to determine their risk or repaying the invoice.

You are entitled to the resulting analysis which is a huge benefit as it can assist you in your future business dealings with that client.

Another big benefit of Receivable Financing is that you are not obtaining a loan. The cash advanced is based on your client’s credit status, not yours making it easier to qualify for.

You may qualify for factoring even if you are a new company without an established track record, have a tax lien, or even declared bankruptcy.

This is not considered a loan since you are literally selling your own receivables. And you can be approved for as much as 25 million dollars in financing.

Accounts Receivable Financing really boosts your cash flow by providing an immediate advance of cash into your business against the value of your outstanding invoices.

SBA 7(a) Loans – Small Business 7(a) loans are well known and loved in the business community.

If you are awarded a 7(a) loan, the loan proceeds may be used to establish a new business or to assist in the acquisition, operation, or expansion of an existing business.

Directly from the SBA, here are some of the uses for loan proceeds:

• The purchase land or buildings, to cover new construction as well as expansion or conversion of existing facilities
• The purchase of equipment, machinery, furniture, fixtures, supplies, or materials
• Long-term working capital, including the payment of accounts payable and/or the purchase of inventory
• Short-term working capital needs, including seasonal financing, contract performance, construction financing and export production
• Financing against existing inventory and receivables
• The refinancing of existing business indebtedness that is not already structured with reasonable terms and conditions
• To purchase an existing business

Over the past few years, SEO has evolved faster than the previous decade. And this has made it harder for users to keep up with most recent updates. The launch of Penguin and Panda changed the way things worked in the past. In short, the way Google used to rank website has changed a lot. But if you want to reach your objectives, make sure you avoid some common SEO mistakes.

1. Avoiding RELEVANT CONTENT

In the start, Google said that it would rank websites that have the most relevant content on its first page. This statement is still valid. What has happened is that the search engine has become a lot better at achieving the objectives. In other words, now, Google is in better position to know what is relevant and what is not.

So, what you need to do is offer content that is relevant and avoid content is not relevant to your niche. Of course, the content should be informative and unique.

2. Following Tricks

People have been using many illegal ways of cheating the search engine algorithms for traffic, exposure and backlinks. Some of these tactics can still give you a temporary edge, but they are bad for your blog or website for the long-term.

So, you should avoid using low-quality, duplicate content, keyword stuffing, questionable redirects or cloaking for traffic. It may be tempting to go for these short-cuts, but they will just hurt your ranking, and may even get you banned for good.

3. Overloading your site

It has been a common perception that photos, videos and other graphics make a website more appealing for the viewers. To some extent, this perception is true; however, there should not be too much of it or your website will take ages to load. Your viewers don’t have all day to wait for your site to load. If your blog takes longer to load than other websites, the viewers will just click away. You will not only lose viewers, you will also lose ranking against other websites.

4. Making navigation difficult

Navigation is one of the most important factors for any website. It’s important for both viewers and search engines. Ideally, your viewers should be able to get the desired information from your website in one or two clicks. This may not be an easy task for you. So, what you can do is put important content on the main page of your site. This the users will be able to get what they want more easily.

5. Misunderstanding THE BACKLINK PROCESS

You may not want to be obsessed with obtaining a lot of backlinks. Although you don’t have to have backlinks from authority websites to establish your credibility, it helps a lot. However, what you need to do is try to get backclinks in a nature fashion. But it’s not a good idea to buy backlinks. This is one of the worst mistakes that you can make.

Quality content is the key to SEO success. Content doesn’t just mean your text contents. Images must be an integral part of your content strategy. At times, single images can be far more effective than your 1000 word blog post. It also helps you improve blog post quality and performance.

Images, Infographics, Videos and all other multimedia contents on your web page will help you in increasing the user engagement on your site and makes the visitors stay on your site for longer duration which helps in reducing the bounce rate.

Not just adding images to your contents, you should also optimize those images for better SEO performance. Optimization of images must be the one important aspect of your on-page SEO process.

If you are using images in your content, there are many aspects to be considered related to SEO.

Relevancy

Using images doesn’t mean that you should fill up your content with loads of pictures. You should use it only when it is required and also you should use images that are more relevant to your content.

Placement of your images is an another important aspect. It should be placed at a relevant location in your content according to your text content.

Use original images

Originality always helps in improving your user experience and your authority. Usage of original images will be helpful in improving your SEO performance. You can create original images with a graphic designer or you can take your own photographs with a quality camera. It is the reason top White hat SEO companies employ talented graphic designers for creating quality images.

If you are not able to employ an in-house graphic designer or if you are running out of time, you can always use high quality images from the web. But the important factor to be considered is it should be copyright free.

There are many tools available for getting copyright free images without any cost. The most popular ones are Unsplash, Flicker, Freeimages.

Image Size

Images are the main source for damping your site’s speed. And site speed is a crucial factor in your SEO performance. So, you should be extra cautious in using images without compromising your page speed.

It should not also affect your image quality, you should have a correct balance between. You can achieve this by reducing the file size by compression. You can use tools like Photoshop for compression.

File name

Search engine crawlers are visually impaired, it can even interrupt a 5000 word text content, but it cannot interrupt a single image and what the image is about. It is the reason using a keyword rich file names for your images is an important aspect in image optimization.

Google bots and other search engine crawlers can read your image’s file name and if it is named with your target keyword, it gives a signal to search engines about the image topic and thus helps your SEO performance.

For example, if your image is related to selling sports shoes, rather than using the file name as “IMG_89868″ you can use it as “Black_Tennis_Shoes”.

Alt text

Similar to the file name, search engines can read Alt text of the images. Alt text is known as “Aleternative Text”, is an HTML attribute used to describe the content of images.

You should use Alt text which is relevant to your images and it should be clear and descriptive. You can use your target keywords in the Alt text but be cautious about Keyword stuffing.

If you are not focusing on Image optimization, you are missing a huge opportunity in improving your SEO performance. You can use above mentioned best practices in your on-page optimization process.

American youth currently face challenging realities along their way to adulthood. With parents working longer hours and the absence of grandparents and other community adults who used to make up support systems, the intergenerational fabric of community has been frayed. Youth development strategies aim to reweave community fabric in a new way – one that takes the supports and opportunities young people should have, and re-institutes them in the context of young people’s realities today. While many of these realities are harsh ones, we know that young people themselves want to be involved in their communities. The importance of building positive youth/adult partnerships in this process cannot be stressed enough.

The mobilization effort is based on influencing three critical elements: information, attitudes, involvement. The transformation of each of these areas, both in the public and private domains, is a necessary condition for change. For example, in the area of information, the country is currently focused on collecting primarily negative youth information, e.g., teenage births, dropouts, and juvenile arrest rate. Inspiring a 180 degree shift, we need to collect information such as: average number of hours youth participate in after-school activities, computer to youth ratio in non-school hours, and the percentage of youth who hold part-time jobs. The three elements are intertwined, for how information is gathered and communicated impacts attitudes as well as how and if people choose to become involved.

Only through broad community commitment, strong public will, and diverse partnerships can youth development take root, go to scale, and be sustained over time. Ultimately, the mobilization must be supported by partnerships among all of the systems in a community that affect young people (i.e., education, corporations, health care, juvenile justice, religious groups, and recreation). To build these relationships and establish youth development infrastructures to improve developmental paths of adolescents will take at least 10 years.

Localities currently spending their resources on efforts to “fix youth” will need to pool, redirect, and increase their financial commitment to youth development. These additional dollars will ensure all youth equal access to supports and opportunities, especially youth living in economically distressed areas.

Our information on the services young people need, and use, is still hit or miss. Communities do not know what they have or what they need. They usually have no way to tell how well services are being used and what services need to be improved.

Good information is important for youth services for exactly the same reasons it is important for everything else. Accurate, accessible standardized information lets people find the services they need and use them effectively. It lets communities manage, evaluate and improve their services and determine the need for changing them, eliminating them, or developing new ones.

Many national efforts to measure outcomes presently use deficit-driven indicators to assess young people’s condition in society, such as teen pregnancy rates, juvenile crime numbers, and percentages of high school dropouts. Although these measures are important, they do not tell the whole story about young people’s experiences. Measures that reflect positive conditions and experiences of young people are also important.

The accelerated trend of the past decade toward empowering our nation’s young people to succeed has fostered a new awareness and commitment to this most valuable resource. Some basic questions are:

- How much do we currently spend?

- How much should we spend?

Some progress has been made through new initiatives in education finance reform and services integration, providing more effective delivery of social, health and educational services for children and youth from the classroom up to the government. This document establishes an initial framework and formula for assessing the financial resources and mechanisms necessary to move American society closer to this ideal. The following were found to be potential root causes of these trends in spending:

- Devaluation of adolescents.

- Lack of consensus on youth development.

- Lack of adequate and protected funding. Funds are not protected and dedicated in the manner necessary to sustain the long-term, comprehensive process that is youth development.

We can support the move toward the ideal by:

- Seeking new types of information.

- Building on the after-school momentum.

- Making a sustainable public investment.

Youth development is an investment that must be made by each sector of the wider community – public and private. Examination of the federal-state matching, local dedicated taxes an incentives for business and philanthropy could lead to models for providing adequate and sustainable funding for youth development. National intermediaries must work to cultivate this leadership at all levels of government, and at the grassroots, by creating constituencies.

Several states are taking the lead from California, Oregon and Illinois by offering state-sponsored retirement plans that encourage or require private sector employers to participate.

The plans are referred to as auto-IRAs because eligible workers are automatically enrolled, generally within 30 days of employment. The default contribution rate is typically 3-5% of a paycheck and the employee can stop, restart or transfer plan assets depending on their needs. Referred to as “public-private partnerships” by the Pew Charitable Trust, there is no cost to the employer. Proceeds are managed by a private financial firm management for a pre-determined fee. The plans are subject to the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) like other sponsored pension and benefit plans.

This article provides an overview of the states that currently offer savings programs, as well as those that plan to do so in the future.

OregonSaves

Oregon was one of the first states to implement a savings program for employees of small businesses who are not otherwise eligible for a workplace sponsored pension plan. Titled OregonSaves, it is a state retirement program that is available to an employer or an individual planning for the future.

OregonSaves had almost $57 million in assets as of mid-2020. Employee contributions averaged $127 to $135 per month as of that time.

Enrollment is automatic for employees, with contributions being made through payroll deductions. Each employee account is portable and can be moved from one job to another.

All Oregon employers, regardless of employee size, must facilitate the State’s program for their employees if they do not offer an employer-sponsored retirement plan. The plan is working with small employers to make the process as simple as possible.

CalSavers

CalSavers is available to California workers whose employers do not offer a workplace retirement plan, self-employed individuals, and others who want to increase their savings. Plan participants contribute to an Individual Retirement Account (IRA) that belongs to them.

California employers with more than 50 employees must register with CalSavers by June 30, 2021 if they do not already sponsor a retirement plan. Registration is available to all California employers with at least five employees.

The CalSavers program opened statewide in July 2019 and had $4.3 million in assets as of mid-2020. On average, participating employees contribute $105 to $120 monthly. Like the Oregon plan, the default savings rate is 5% of the employee’s pay and employees are automatically enrolled after 30 days of employment. They can stop, restart or transfer plan participation at any time if they change employers.

CalSavers Retirement Savings Program is designed to simplify employer participation with no employer fees, no fiduciary responsibility, and minimal ongoing responsibilities. Employers that fail to offer participation in the plan as required are subject to fines.

In May 2021, a federal appeals court in San Francisco dismissed a legal challenge to the CalSavers plan.

Illinois Secure Choice Retirement Savings Program

Illinois launched its Secure Choice Retirement Savings Program in 2018. It is a state-facilitated retirement program that is open to employees who work for an eligible employer as well as other employees who want to enroll independent of their employer. Approximately 32,000 Illinois employees saved $8.5 million in the first year of the Illinois Secure Choice program, according to state reports.

The Illinois Secure Choice account is a Roth IRA for the employee. The default savings rate is 5% of gross pay. Employees are automatically enrolled through payroll contributions after 30 days of employment. An employee can opt out at any time. Plan participants are charged a fee of 0.75% of assets per year ($0.75 for every $100 saved), which pays for program administration and operating expenses.

The Illinois Secure Choice had 5,544 registered employers as of May 2020. There are no fees for employers to facilitate the program and employers cannot make contributions to their employee accounts. Employers serve a limited role as a facilitator. As of November, 2019, employers with 25 or more employees that have been in business for two years or more are required to participate in the program. Employers that already offer an employer-sponsored retirement plan are exempt from this legislation.

New Jersey Secure Choice Savings

The “New Jersey Secure Choice Savings Act,” was signed into law in March 2019, with a two-year time frame scheduled to take effect in March 2021.

The Act requires employers that have been in business for two years and have 25 or more employees to participate in a retirement savings program administered through automatic payroll deductions. Private sector employees of businesses of any size are able to participate in the retirement savings program. Smaller or newer employers could join voluntarily. Failure to comply will result in fines to the employer.

Employees will be automatically enrolled at the leve of a 3% paycheck contribution. The annual contribution maximum is $6,000 for those under 50 years old, and $7,000 for those 50 or older.

Connecticut Secure Choice Savings Plan

Connecticut employers with five or more employees must offer a retirement plan to employees, and private employers with four or fewer employees may choose to do so. Employees are auto-enrolled within 120 days of employment, and employees must be notified of their rights within 30 days. Employers are not permitted to make contributions to the program.

The Connecticut Retirement Security Authority, a quasi-public agency, was formed in 2016 to oversee the program. The state estimates that as many as 600,000 employees may benefit from the plan.