Do you carry good debt or bad debt

Everyone carries debt these days, be it a car loan, credit card debt or a mortgage. Good debt typically provides a greater return on investment than the interest being charged and tends to fit well within your bigger financial picture. #Mortgage #HomeLoan #GoodDebt #BadDebt

Home Mortgage is meant to be a good debt, because it allows you to leverage a home of greater worth than you can hope to save for and buy.

Similarly, a mortgage could be considered good debt because it benefits your family while a car loan may be necessary to provide transportation to and from work. A mortgage is considered a long term asset. A car loan must be carefully analysed to balance your needs and wants. You might want a sports car but realistically a family SUV might be more practical and economical.

You could also argue that a student loan is good debt because higher education is an investment in your earning power.

But there is a catch. When payments on good debt become unmanageable, they start to feel like bad debt — and it could rapidly become an ugly situation for you. For instance, student loan payments on a degree that didn’t boost your income, or mortgage or car payments that eat up too much of your take home salary, can rapidly lead you to rely on credit or loans to cover day-to-day expenses. Credit card debt tend to spiral out of control because of the higher interest rates.

The bottom line: Good debt only stays that way if it is part of a well-thought-out financial plan. Otherwise, you may be turning something that’s meant to be good into something that ends up being bad for your budget.

Call Madhu on 0425 341 086 to discuss your ideas and views.

You know that the greatest asset to any business are the clients.

So how do you keep your customers away from your rivals and meet their high bar for speed? Here are our tips: #CustomerRetention #BusinessRivals

1. Make sure you have the right number of people on your team dedicated to customer support. Look at the data about how many customer service messages you receive and what time of day they come in. How long, on average, does it take your team to respond to a message once they open it? Run the math and figure out how many support members you need to be able to respond to your average number of incoming messages per hour.

2. If you don’t have the resources to respond to most of your customer service messages in an hour, then set the expectations clearly with your users. Next to your email on your website, tell them what time frame they will hear from you.

3. Set up your workflows so you have easy tools to speed up the response process. We recommend a tool for assigning emails to different members of your team, and an integration that lets you see the context on a customer’s order history without having to log into a different service.

4. Pick an email and social media management product that’s fast enough. You want one with keyboard shortcuts and no page load. If your customer service team is using it 8 hours a day make it easy for them to maximize efficiency.

5. Consider speed over perfection. It might be a nice touch to add emojis or personalization, but if you have to choose between that and a rapid response, go with the latter.

How many of these do you use or what else do you do to retain or acquire clients? Discuss it with me at loans@financeandmortgage.com.au.