COVID-19 Financial Assistance

Yes, this is Roger Ghai with Law Offices of Roger Ghai. I wanted to speak today during this COVID-19 crisis about some of the financial programs that are available to small business owners, and independent contractors, and self employed individuals.
One of the first programs is the Economic Disaster Injury Relief application that you can do. That application can be done at the www.sba.gov. If you go to that website, there’s in the upper right portion of the website, you can file an application for what is termed to be a forgivable loan or a grant. There’re not a lot of requirements on there. The top dollar amount that you can possibly get from one of those forgivable loans, in which can turn into a grant, it’s actually a grant, is up to $10,000. My understanding is of the producing of this video this morning is that that amount of that grant will be determined by how many employees you had. If you had, for example, one employee, you’re probably going to get like $1,000. The good part of that is that the $1,000 does not have to be repaid.
Now, some of you folks out there are small business owners, and so $1,000 is not going to be sufficient to be able to pay your payroll and everything. Congress has also enacted the Payroll Protection Program. And so, under that program, you can collect up to 2.5 times whatever your payroll is. Let’s say, for example, your monthly payroll is a $10,000. You could actually file an application for a loan, under that program, for $25,000. The beautiful part of that program is that, if you file the application and then you can show that you used at least 75% of that money on actual payroll, and you’re allowed to use it for other expenses, but so long as you can show that you use 75% of the $25,000 to pay your employees, including maybe yourself, then you can go ahead and take the proof that you actually did that, that you paid the payroll for two months, the program is limited to payroll of two months, back to your bank, and then the loan will be deemed forgivable, which is a great thing.
There are some difficulties sometimes with some of these banks processing these loans, in that some of the banks are limited to the amount that they can loan out. The other problem really has been is that the applications, some of the larger banks, such as Wells Fargo and Bank of America, at least initially, they were only accepting applications from their customers who had previous loans with them. And so, if that happens to you, what you’ll want to do is to go to another bank, maybe a small community bank, and then go ahead and do an application there. If I were in your shoes and you are a small business owner, you want to do this right away because the money appears to be running out very quickly. It’s unclear, right now, as to whether Congress is going to approve an additional $250 billion, which President Trump has requested from Congress. If you have any questions about the Payroll Protection Loan Program, or whether you find yourself in a position of needing to file bankruptcy because of this virus, please call my office at (770) 792-1000.