Money Blue Book

If you run a small home business on the side like I do, it’s not always easy to project a professional image without breaking the bank. If your business is new, it’s unlikely you have the financial means or even the budget to afford a commercial office space, a secretary, a furnished meeting room, or any of the usual business amenities. However, depending on your budget and needs, there are affordable options out there.

Rent A Shared Office For Meeting Room Or Virtual Office Needs

More established small businesses might be able to look into renting a shared or serviced office space through a workplace solution company like Regus. These business office rental locations are usually fully furnished with desks, meeting rooms, functional kitchens, and business amenities like secretarial service and a professional front desk to handle clients, mail delivery, and customized call answering. They provide a professional working environment without the long term commitment. I would know - I’m currently working a contract project at such a location.

Rental offices are a good alternative for small but growing businesses looking to expand but don’t want to deal with the hassle of property ownership or long term commercial leases. However, many small business owners run things from their own homes. For them, there are virtual office solutions available:

1) Telephone Service

Sharing business phone calls with your personal home line isn’t a good idea, especially if you get a lot of incoming business calls. Dialing out is fine, but for incoming business calls how does one line handle voicemail greetings for both personal and business calls? You can always get another landline or cellphone number, but that can get awfully expensive, especially if it is underused.

Since I don’t have a separate landline at home, I currently use my cell phone plan in conjunction with eBay’s GrandCentral free phone service to re-route business phone calls to my personal cell phone number. The service provides customers a free separate number that can be given out as a business line, and have calls automatically forwarded to your personal line.

Since exceeding monthly cell phone plan minutes may be a problem, another solution is to sign up for an established Voice Over IP (VoIP) phone service like Skype. For $3 a month, along with an extra charge for a personal SkypeIn phone number to handle business calls, you can receive unlimited incoming calls from a cell or a landline. SkypeIn calls are handled through the online Skype interface and calls can be picked up anywhere you have internet access.

2) Fax Service

Although it’s ancient technology, it is still widely used, surprisingly. If you fax frequently, I’d recommend just going ahead and buying a cheap fax machine. But if you only need to receive faxes on occasion and rarely send them, you can try going with eFax Free, which will give you a free non-local fax number to accept incoming faxes through e-mail.

If you want to send faxes for free and don’t mind having cover page ads automatically attached to your outgoing fax messages, then you can always go with FaxZero. However, you will only be allowed to fax 2 document sets per day, with a maximum of 3 pages each.

3) Mailboxes That Offer A Professional Mailing Address

Personally I use my home as my business address, but if you want some privacy or if you expect to receive a lot of packages, you may want to get a larger standalone postal box. The U.S. Postal Service and most major private postal carriers like UPS and Fedex offer free pickup and the option to conveniently pay and print your postal stamp labels at home.

You can get a separate standalone P.O. Box through the U.S. Postal Service, but your mailing address will contain the “PO BOX” tag followed by your personal box number. If you want to get a more professional sounding mailing address that contains an actual street address, you may want to go with a private mailbox at a place like the UPS Store. Prices vary but private UPS box prices are usually about $200 a year (compared to less than $100 for a standard PO Box). However, unlike a standard PO Box, a private mailbox through UPS is 24 hour accessible.

4) Business E-Mail Addresses

Free e-mail addresses are simple to find - just check out Yahoo, Hotmail, or Gmail. However, if you want to sound professional and want to be taken seriously, you probably will need to get an e-mail address that contains your business name. There are plenty of email hosting options out there depending on your needs. For example, with DreamHost, you can get unlimited e-mail addresses and email forwarding for a pretty good $5.95 a month.

We’re in the new millennium people! The internet age is already in full swing and I think it’s time for everyone to start embracing the advantages of new technology. For important document archiving and preservation purposes, it’s time to migrate from dinosaur paper technology and move into an all digital and electronic format.

If you don’t know how to access all of your bank and credit card accounts online, now is a good time to start learning how to. There are so many benefits to going fully electronic. Storing and accessing your account information online gives you instant and accurate data at your finger tips without having to wait for them to arrive through snail mail. The information you can get online is always more accurate and precise, as they are frequently updated on the spot as transactions occur.

By going paperless you can also reduce clutter. Before I went electronic, my postal mailbox was always being jammed with bills, statements, and all sorts of financial junk mail. My desk frequently had stacks of papers that just seemed to grow higher and higher. Going digital helped to cut down on the chances of losing something important in the mail or accidentally misplacing it somewhere at home or at the office. However, embracing paperless storage does require a reasonable amount of trust and faith in the reliability of technology.

I Organize My Paperless Financial Accounts Using An Online Aggregation Service

For all of my credit cards, bank statements, utility bills, and miscellaneous payment obligations, I no longer receive any of them through the regular mail service, but instead access all of them exclusively through the internet. Online e-mail based reminders alert me whenever I need to make payments or when there is something that requires my attention. Since I check my personal e-mail fanatically, the e-mail alerts are essentially real time reminders.

I use Yodlee’s Fidelity Full View to consolidate all of my financial information including my bank accounts, credit cards, investment portfolio, and frequent user reward accounts. It’s also an invaluable online way to organize, view, and keep tabs on all of my important transactions.

I Use a Digital Scanner and Digital Camera To Make a Photocopy Of Important Paper Documents

For important paper documents that I’m not able to receive in its original digital form, I like to either use a digital scanner or a digital camera to photo record them into electronic format. Examples of such important paper documents include speeding tickets, identification cards, pay stubs, or sales receipts that I want to retain because I’m currently disputing a transaction for example. Rather than keeping these documents in binders or in huge piles, I keep them all neatly filed away in well labeled directories on my computer hard drive. They are there whenever I need them at a moment’s notice and pulling them up is a piece of cake. As a precaution, I back up the files occasionally onto a separate external hard drive or burn them onto a compact disc for safe keeping.

Other Considerations Like Passwords, Security, and Encryption

By going fully digital, it’s important to have a way to keep track of your important passwords and ensure that your information is always fully secure. I have many passwords, but I organize them all onto one of my secret Yahoo email accounts using the Yahoo Notepad function. I’m sure I might catch some heat from those who feel storing such important information on one’s e-mail account is asking for trouble, but frankly, if my information is not fully secure with a mega company like Yahoo, would it really be any more secure with any other service?

We give out so much password information to various companies out there but at some point we need to trust that they will do their job to protect our confidential information. Most financial institutions fully encrypt their online website accounts so that shouldn’t be an issue either. I have faith that technology will continue to improve and get even better over time. I also take additional precautions by not using one password for all of my accounts. All of my passwords vary greatly from each other.

You never know what life will chuck your way, so you should always be prepared for anything. If you keep your finances and paperwork in order, you’ll be in better shape to handle anything unexpected.

A few nights ago I received a sudden flurry of phone calls and e-mails from family members with sad news. My ailing grandfather, who had been bedridden in the hospital for more than a year due to a stroke, suddenly took a turn for the worse and was nearing his end. As the oldest grandson, I had a familial duty to be there. But since my grandfather lived overseas, getting to him at a moment’s notice wasn’t going to be easy. Things started to get hectic immediately as I began to make plans to fly overseas to join my parents at my grandfather’s side as soon as possible. I wish I had anticipated earlier and made better preparation for the unexpected.

Here is how you can stay ready and avoid the chaos that follows an emergency situation:

Keep Important Documentation Up To Date And At the Ready

If you have family in another country, including Canada and Mexico, make sure your passport is valid and ready for travel at all times.

In my case, I had one major problem. My U.S. passport had only one more month before it expired. Since most countries require that your passport be valid at least 6 months beyond the date of your trip, I would not be able to travel internationally unless I got it renewed as soon as possible.

Luckily the U.S. Department of State, which processes all passport renewal applications, has a special expedited process for such emergency life and death matters. Normally the renewal process can take more than 10 weeks, but by paying an extra fee and providing documentation of the emergency, I could shorten the application process to just a few days. Potentially big problem solved.

Make Sure Your Bank Account Is Prepared To Handle Emergency Expenditures

It’s important to make sure you have emergency funds in case something unexpected happens, whether it involves losing your job or a family situation. Always make sure you have access to back up money.

Because I wasn’t prepared for the family emergency and was caught completely off guard, I did not have an adequate balance sitting in my checking or savings account to handle major emergency spending. I had big expenditures coming, including almost $200 for expedited passport processing and $1200 for a last minute international plane ticket.

Fortunately, I could access my investment brokerage and shuffle some needed cash back into my bank accounts.

Automate Your Monthly Expenses And Have Less Things To Worry About

During emergency situations, it’s hard to deal with the urgent situation while still balancing your monthly bill obligations. I find it much easier to set up automatic billing and debit payment for all of my regular recurring expenses such as electricity, gas, and credit card bills. When something unexpected happens, those are just a few less things to have to worry about. Since the vast majority of my bills are viewable online and registered for online or automatic payments, I can still conveniently make bill payments even if I’m not physically in the country.

Yodlee is a terrific online account consolidator and aggregator tool. But whenever I try to explain to some people the many benefits of using a service like Yodlee to aggregate their bank, credit card, and reward account information into one easy to access source, I encounter the skeptics. The skeptics are quite the interesting techno-phobic bunch. They generally fear losing control of their accounts and fear putting all of their account login and password information into one basket. The skeptics fear account aggregation technology because they worry that it will somehow make their lives more complicated and they worry that it will allow hackers and identity thieves easier access to their private accounts. Well I’m here to put those worries to rest. Account aggregation tools like Yodlee will make your life much easier and will help to make your other accounts more secure.

How Does Yodlee Keep My Account Information Secure?

Yodlee has indicated that their service operates under a very secure network infrastructure that combines sophisticated intrusion detection methods with firewall and physical protections. Yodlee has partnered with many large and established companies such as Citibank, Fidelity, Bank of America, and Wachovia. I think we can be assured that Yodlee has passed the initial basic credibility test of ensuring customer privacy and confidential information.

However, although Yodlee will do its part to ensure that your account login and password information is completely secure, it is your own duty to make certain that you keep your master Yodlee login and password information in a secure location and hacker safe.

I know many people have a habit of using one common login and password combination for all of their financial accounts. If you do that, then I highly recommend, in fact I insist, that you make a vastly unique login and password sequence for your Yodlee or Yodlee powered account. Because your Yodlee account saves and consolidates all of your other financial account password information into one source, it is essential that you be certain that your Yodlee password is the most secure and unique of all.

From One Source It Is Easier To Keep Track Of All Balances and Transactions

By aggregating and consolidating your accounts into one viewable source, it makes it easier for you to detect fraudulent or unauthorized activity involving any of them. I personally have several credit cards that I almost never use, but I still keep them around. Since identity theft is a growing problem these days, it’s important to keep track of what goes on in all of your accounts, even dormant ones. Consolidation allows this to happen with relative ease.

What If Hackers Manage to Get a Hold Of My Yodlee Password Information?

Of course, many people are rightfully afraid that this leads to one point of access for potential thieves. If somehow Yodlee is hacked, they get all your information instead of just one bank or credit card account. This is true, but I see persistent monitoring as the solution to preventing identity theft and account break ins. I monitor my Yodlee powered account through Fidelity Full View at least once a day. If there’s something fishy, I can pick up on it before the danger escalates.

Don’t live in fear of placing your confidential information in the hands of technology. The system is not 100% foolproof but it works quite well. Regular and active monitoring of your aggregated accounts will help you organize your finances better and teach you to be more savvy about tracking your financial activity.