Then waiting 60-90 days sometimes to pay us our nominal fee.
Those are the companies that I stay away from unless I’m REALLY desperate.
The “someone else” you’re referring to is not your lowballing competition; it’s the hiring agency. Honestly, I’m not comfortable with $70 or $100. Listen, even the six-figure guru touts a $150 minimum to operate a sustainable loan signer service.
I’m with Joe on this.
Ok…I am following along here…this is an oft debated issue. Let’s begin to talk real numbers…what are you counting as “costs,” and what are you considering to be too many pages for an offer that then is too low? I promise I am not trying to be difficult. I will start by saying I weigh the distance (wear and tear on my vehicle for the job), the number of pages I need to print (cost of ink/paper per page), the number of pages I will apply my seal to, and, consequently my expertise, how my utilites are affected by the job, and what I know my worth to be. Honestly, if it all adds up, and my per hour rate is less than $25-30, I may not take a job.
Let me give you an example. I took a job the other day for $30…why, because the job was less than a mile away and only 14 pages. UPS was on the drive back. I actually had to pass it to get back to my desk. The cost of printing was $1.12. The wear/tear using the IRS rate of .70 was $1.68, and if i had had to make a separate trip to UPS, it would have been $0.35 more. It took less than 1 minute to print the docs, less than a minute to confirm the appointment and less than a minute to confirm to the signing company, send scan backs and close the order. I made a little more than $25 on a job that was close by. To me, that was worth it. It was $25 I didn’t have before the assignment and $25 I wouldn’t have had if I had turned it down.
Now, before you decide to blast me, that is not the case every day and every job. I do counter, I do say no when the math simply doesn’t make sense. What I am asking is what everyone is calculating when thinking taking a low offer is harming other notaries. If you have to factor in rent for office space, it is something else to consider. I do 90 percent of this work from my phone wherever I am. The amount of square footage for my desk/printer/shredder is extremely small.
The other thing to keep in mind is, you chose this profession, and you chose to provide a public service. There are moments when the reward is awesome (e.g., I did a job that was 1 page, no notarization at all, a scan back and $125, which, I already got paid for from 2 weeks ago - roughly $52 in costs. I made roughly $73 for a less than 90 minute job, making it a profitable job). Yes, there are moments, too, where the signing service is using the “as the crow flies” to calculate mileage that we know is not realistic, and we have to factor the actual driving mileage and time to make sure a job really is worth taking.
There are times when signing companies list the location and make typos with zip codes that, unless we politely point it out, make a job seem closer or much further away; or phone numbers are wrong, or the documents have something wrong that we discover. To me, and strictly to me, it isn’t worth complaining about. I will contact the signing service when there are issues, and always point out that the signer, the lender, the signing service and the notary need to do the best job possible in cooperation. Everybody involved wants this to go through. If the signing service or the mortgage company is mad and doesn’t want to work with me. Ok then. I did what was right, ethical and my due diligence. There will be another service, another lender who wants that dutiful cooperation.
One notary’s low ball offer is another notary’s treasure.
You got it right. Except IRS rate is $0.725. When the math makes $ense, do it!
thanks for the update to the irs rate.
$150 to the signing service or $150 to the notary? BIG difference.
Signing Services Steve, the vast majority of the LSA’s are just part-timers.