The Trump effect on borrowing

There’s an awful lot of uncertainty around. Imagine how much money you’d have made at the bookies if, a year ago, you’d said Brexit, Trump and Leicester City were all going to be winners. Now we know that they are, surely we can we expect the uncertainty to settle down a bit, can’t we?

I’m afraid not, but why is that bad? Well, a lot of people assumed Trump and Brexit weren’t going to happen (I don’t know what they thought about the Foxes) and it might mean those same people are now fearful of what the future holds from a financial perspective. Hopefully they will be wrong. On the upside, anyone who’s buying and selling stocks and shares and investing in the markets generally (and of course investing in their own businesses) are having a say in how the economy reacts to these impacts.

All banks can do is pay attention to market conditions and adapt accordingly, because all of the above can affect confidence, which affects the price of things, including money. Having said that, underlying the whole market is a real desire for local bank managers to support their existing and new clients to buy businesses, trading premises, and generally invest to improve profits. But we may as well get used to the fact that we’re going to be living with some uncertainty for a while. No one knows how the Brexit negotiations are going to pan out, not least because of the rise of the anti-EU far right in polls in the Netherlands, France, Germany, Sweden, Austria and Hungary.

Trump latrine, Moscow. Picture by Seth Anderson, Creative Commons

Speaking purely in financial terms, while it might be easy to believe the press coverage and think that borrowing money to buy a dental practice or set up a new one might get harder, the reality is that nothing’s changed, at least in my space (which is borrowing between £50k and £500k). If confidence really is reduced, it hasn’t manifested itself in the products and services I offer. Until this changes our capital will remain available to dentists at favourable rates because, like other banks, we take quite a positive view of the dental sector due to its impressively consistent growth.

To give you an idea of what’s possible, at the time of writing we offer up to 100 per cent finance for mixed practices and up to 90 per cent finance for private practices up to £500k. On unsecured loans we can consider lending up to £500k per dentist for mixed practices and up to £300k per dentist for private practices. And if you’re setting up a new practice we can consider lending up to £200k unsecured.

So, right now, if you want to finance your next practice the funding is certainly available, only we’d recommend you invest properly in due diligence. We’ll spend time building a relationship with you to make this easier — it protects you as well as us — and we appreciate that as a professional clinician you can’t be expected to be fluent in property law too, which is where you might want to get some help from Fine Company’s due diligence service. There’s no need to let uncertainty affect your chances of success, just yet anyway…

The views above are my own and not my employer’s.

Simon

NatWest relationship manager

07826531568

[email protected]

“We take a positive view of the dental sector due to its consistent growth”

Simon Barrand, NatWest relationship manager