Financing a Restaurant

Perhaps you enjoy cooking and have always dreamed of opening your own restaurant.  Perhaps you have worked in a restaurant and want to strike out on your own.  Or perhaps you are a graduate of culinary school and ready to step up to the plate.  Whatever the reason for deciding to undertake this great adventure let’s look at what it entails.

First of all opening your own restaurant requires a lot of passion and hard work.  You need to be dedicated to make your idea work.  You need to look carefully at design, fixtures and fittings and of course your menu.  Perhaps the biggest factor in your success will be location.  As in other areas of real estate it all boils down to the 3 most important factors – location, location, location.

But before looking at location, you need to determine what its going to take from a financial point of view to get your restaurant up and running.  When you apply for a loan the lending institution (much like buying a home) will require a down deposit.  You may also consider an angel investor to help with part of the financing – if you can sell them on the idea, and show how they will be repaid.  The small business association may also be able to help you out.

Most people will go the traditional route – seeking financial help from a bank or other type of lending institution.  For this you will need to have a detailed business plan in place showing how you will go about generating income, how you will use the financial loan once you receive it, and, of course, how you will repay the loan.

You should prepare your business plan well in advance of seeking financing.  And its something that you will want to update and fine tune over a period of time.  You should also seek to have your financing in place before you get ready to operate your restaurant.  And have enough money in reserve to carry you over the first few months of operation as you seek to establish your business.

Information provided by mortgage payment calculator helping you with your financial calculations.

Becoming a Loan Officer

If you own a car or a house chances are you have taken out a loan. Going through the loan application process, and waiting anxiously to know whether or not you have been accepted, can be a stressful time. It can be easy to criticize the person on the other side of the desk, especially if you don’t get the news that you wanted. However, being a loan officer is no easy job.

The fact that many loan officer positions don’t require a college degree doesn’t mean that you still don’t need an education. There are many loan officer training programs that educate their students on state and federal regulations as well as being able to translate and read interest rates and credit scores. While each state has different requirements , they all require a minimum number of training hours before students can receive their licenses.

Experience is one of the biggest qualifications that you can have when looking for a job as loan officer. Many gain experience by working in a bank or other financial institution. They generally start as tellers or loan representatives and work their way up.

Working as a loan officer can be a stressful and sometimes difficult job; however once you begin to establish yourself and become better equipped at the job, it can really pay off.

Anti-Money Laundering and the Strive to Prevent Corporate Corruption in the U.S.

Anti-money laundering and anti-corruption organizations have been working on the cases of corruption that are rampant in many of developing nations of the world.  Privatization of the public sector in these nations has served to curb the instances of corruption to a certain degree.  One aspect of this global fight that may be getting overlooked, is the fact that in the United States, corporate corruption does happen frequently, and quite often it is on a grand scale.

And while the corruption in developing countries does affect not only the economic elements of those countries, but the social elements as well, the money that has changed hands in those countries really pales in comparison to the amount that has been filtered through the American corporations such as WorldCom and Enron.  These are scams that total in the billions of dollars, much greater than the amounts of the foreign countries.  Should the dissemination of the correct information, these problems would have been avoided.

With the correct information at hand, and the concept of transparency in place, the shareholders and investors would have noticed right away that something was amiss.  The right information would have led to those who where committing the criminal acts of embezzlement and fraud, to a swift investigation and a removal from the offices in which they held.  However, the mis-leading information provided in the accounting books, and the tax breaks in which these executives took in order to hide their gains.

Furthermore, in receiving assistance from the United States Treasury, these corporations were rewarding their crooked executives with bonuses involving stock options in the companies.  All of these people were paid handsomely for basically committing some of the largest corporate fraud cases in financial history.  This was a case of trying to make this all better in the short term, for has history proves, the long term affects were devastating, not only on the people whom were taken advantage of, the employees of those corporations, but on the reputation of American business ethics overall.