Source: Reuters
WASHINGTON, Sept 13 (Reuters) – U.S. small-business confidence improved in August as worries about inflation subsided and demand for workers remained strong despite the uncertainty shrouding the economy, a survey showed on Tuesday.
The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) said its Small Business Optimism Index increased 1.9 points to 91.8 this month, reversing some of the deterioration suffered in the first half of the year.
Read the full article: https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-small-business-sentiment-rises-august-nfib-2022-09-13/
September 21, 2022 | admin
Source: New York Times
“I feel like it’s 50-50,” said the owner of a Brooklyn coffee shop who is finding it hard to rebound from the pandemic.
Kymme Williams-Davis opened a coffee shop in Brooklyn called Bushwick Grind in 2015. She spent $200,000 renovating the space she rented and added a kitchen. She specialized in coffee brewed from locally roasted fair-trade beans.
Bushwick Grind did well until the pandemic hit and the shop had to close for nine months.
But as my colleague Lydia DePillis wrote, running a small business hasn’t gotten any easier since Bushwick Grind reopened. Foot traffic has yet to rebound. Williams-Davis’s expenses for coffee and other ingredients have skyrocketed, in part because farmers from upstate New York she used to depend on are saving on gas by driving to the city less often.
Read the full article: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/29/nyregion/small-business-owners-are-still-struggling-in-new-york.html
July 30, 2022 | admin
Source: Lendio
Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans are designed to help small businesses—and nonprofits—keep employees on the payroll, but what exactly does that mean? While the loans are intended largely for payroll-related costs like salaries and health insurance premiums, you can actually use a PPP loan to cover a wide range of pandemic-related operating costs.
Allowed Uses for a PPP Loan
While you will need to spend 60% of the loan funds on payroll costs, you can spend the other 40% of your loan on a variety of other pandemic-related costs, all of which are considered “allowed uses” for the loan.
Click here to read the full article
February 26, 2021 | admin
Source: Entrepreneur.com
Like the CARES Act, the newest stimulus bill has brought significant changes not only to entrepreneurs but individuals, too. While some relief is immediate, some updates last through 2022. As with any new tax opportunity, it’s crucial to examine each and determine how you can maximize them. Here’s how the new bill will affect you.
Changes for entrepreneurs
The bill provided many changes to the Paycheck Protection Program. One of the biggest is that PPP expenses are now tax-deductible, and the forgiven loan is still not taxable income. However, small business owners need to do the due diligence to confirm if their state plans to follow suit. Not all states conform to Federal Tax Law, so it’s likely that states that need tax dollars (like California or New York) won’t conform. Business owners in those states should plan on higher state taxes this year.
Click here to read the full article
January 22, 2021 | admin
Source: CNBC
Often hailed for higher-than-average rates of entrepreneurialism and new business formation, the Latino community has been struck particularly hard by the Covid-19 crisis.
The Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative reported in May that 86% of Latino business owners had felt immediate negative impacts from Covid, a rate higher than other ethnic groups. Help was also harder to come by for Latino business owners, who had less cash on hand when requesting Covid assistance in the form of PPP loans, and were only half as likely as their White counterparts to receive the federal loans.
Still, the pandemic tells only half the tale of where Hispanic businesses stand today, because prior to the crisis, Latino entrepreneurs were making great strides — increasing their funding, improving their credit, and their revenue growth. That means that there is underlying strength in the Latino business community that can help in their emergence from the ravages of Covid-19.
Click here to read the full article
December 12, 2020 | admin
Source: NBC News
Last Friday, as Americans waited to learn who their next president would be, Debbe Andrews-Lewis of Lincoln, Nebraska, knew her life was about to change either way. At the end of the day, she would lose her boutique, The Funky Sister.
She had built it from scratch to honor her late husband’s memory — they had always wanted to run a store together in retirement. She found quick success selling antiques and oddball items, which allowed her to expand the business and hire her daughter, who took her young son to work every day.
But then the Covid-19 pandemic hit, shuttering the store for two months last spring. When Andrews-Lewis reopened, a loan from the Paycheck Protection Program — part of the emergency relief bill passed by Congress in March and signed into law by President Donald Trump — covered only a brief stretch of her daughter’s salary.
Click here to read the full article
November 13, 2020 | admin
Source: Lendio
As the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic continues to spread, the federal government has allocated resources to support small businesses through economic hardship and hopefully restore some of the jobs lost (now at 9.6 million people according to the latest jobs reports) as a result of mass stay-at-home orders and business closures.
Given how quickly the rollout has come—and how many changes have happened along the way—many small business owners have been left scratching their heads, saying, “Wait a second, how do these SBA coronavirus loans work, and will my business even qualify?”
Great question. Let us answer it.
Click here to read the full article
April 5, 2020 | admin
