United First Financial Is it Behind the Times?
Lin Ennis
February 08, 2009
Sixty thousand sales agents couldn´t be wrong, could they? That´s approximately the number of people who´ve anted up a fee between $100-$200 to gain the dubious privilege of asking their friends and neighbors for $3500. The fee is usually financed and buys a password to web-based software that prompts users to move money in such a way as to cut tens-to-hundreds of thousands of interest dollars off their mortgages and other debts.
The financial chess game suggests timing for moving dollars from one account to another most often from a home equity line of credit (HELOC) to pay bills, followed by income checks transferred to the HELOC to reduce its balance, albeit temporarily.
If the whole thing sounds like a scam, STOP! The basic principle of cycling money from the buildup of equity in one´s residence to the mortgage still owed on the property has worked efficiently for nearly 30 years , beginning in Australia. The premise is to guide the rank-and-file public in using procedures customarily practiced solely in financial institutions, hence the analogy to chess.
How valuable is moving money over night? More people are learning the Federal Reserve Rate (Fed Rate), commonly presumed to be a government-recommended baseline for charging interest on everything from sofas and cars to houses and yachts, is actually the rate recommended that banks charge one another for moving money overnight. Now homeowners are rushing to get into the game. That is the foundation for the United First Financial´s (UFF´s) "Money Merge Account" (MMA) product.
Unfortunately for UFF, beginning before its software was on the open market and continuing to the present, many other entities and individuals have been promoting the idea of recycling dollars: using a dollar to buy equity in one´s home, pulling it out to pay down principal (thus buying more equity), then possibly after a replenishment of the HELOC draw with a paycheck, pulling from the account once again to pay customary bills. Reduce, reuse, recycle—a mantra destined to guide the world for decades to come and finally addressing the finances of homebuyers in all English-speaking countries.
Commerce runs on the premise of supply and demand. The rarer a thing is, the higher the price it commands. The 60,000 agents of UFF have almost shot themselves in the foot. The more they spread the word about "early mortgage payoff," and "recycling equity," the greater the number of searches on the Internet for "early mortgage payoff," and "equity cycling." Many of those searches are destined to lead to websites unrelated to United First Financial. As knowledge of the methodology increases, the price has to drop below $3500.
One reason all searches don´t lead to the UFF giant is that it engages independent sales representatives. Thus searching the Internet for UFF or MMA doesn´t yield double listings for a massive company of over 60,000 strong, but a stream of links to the United Faculty of Florida and a Norwegian expression meaning something akin to "drats," accompanied by a helter-skelter dribble ofGoogle ads paid for by the few independent reps who can afford them.
Worse yet is the acronym by which most prospects describe the program, "MMA." The initials MMA have been sewed up online by the Mixed Martial Arts association. After that comes various Middle Management Associations, Massachusetts Motorcycle Association, Marine Military Academy and Mennonite Mutual Aid. I can´t claim United First Financial´s Money Merge Account is "behind the times" simply because their acronyms don´t work. But perhaps that´s indicative that the company and its founders have been more interested in their own profits than in helping the masses or even in supporting and assisting their 60,000 sales reps.
Meanwhile, other organizations have crawled out of the woodwork and onto the front page offering to help people use the equity cycling process to cut up to half off the projected paybacks on their mortgages. Some of the worst of these cost around $500 and require the user to tell the software what to do rather than the other way around. On the other end of the spectrum are products in the $10,000 range that accomplish little more than a $97 eBook would.
However, the truism with smaller companies is that they are more agile, more capable of changing with the times and perhaps even more attentive to their customers. Certainly a competitor charging under $1500 for similar software, a company more engaged with the personal relationship aspects of helping clients reduce mortgage and other interest charges through equity cycling is worth a second look.
The UFF´s MMA claim to exorbitant pricing is the "rocket scientist" (literally, an aeronautical engineer hired from GE) whose software drives the process. Unfortunately, books like Let Your Mortgage Make You Rich claim a 12-year old can follow written steps; although, clients using software seem to move to debt freedom significantly faster than do those using a list of steps without interactive feedback. And faster saves more money.
Nonetheless, UFF insists that if you´re saving $150,000, a $3500 investment is justified. While logic would agree with that, common sense would also dictate that similar savings, such as at EquityCycling.com, accomplish as much as or more than at about 1/3 the price.
The financial chess game suggests timing for moving dollars from one account to another most often from a home equity line of credit (HELOC) to pay bills, followed by income checks transferred to the HELOC to reduce its balance, albeit temporarily.
If the whole thing sounds like a scam, STOP! The basic principle of cycling money from the buildup of equity in one´s residence to the mortgage still owed on the property has worked efficiently for nearly 30 years , beginning in Australia. The premise is to guide the rank-and-file public in using procedures customarily practiced solely in financial institutions, hence the analogy to chess.
How valuable is moving money over night? More people are learning the Federal Reserve Rate (Fed Rate), commonly presumed to be a government-recommended baseline for charging interest on everything from sofas and cars to houses and yachts, is actually the rate recommended that banks charge one another for moving money overnight. Now homeowners are rushing to get into the game. That is the foundation for the United First Financial´s (UFF´s) "Money Merge Account" (MMA) product.
Unfortunately for UFF, beginning before its software was on the open market and continuing to the present, many other entities and individuals have been promoting the idea of recycling dollars: using a dollar to buy equity in one´s home, pulling it out to pay down principal (thus buying more equity), then possibly after a replenishment of the HELOC draw with a paycheck, pulling from the account once again to pay customary bills. Reduce, reuse, recycle—a mantra destined to guide the world for decades to come and finally addressing the finances of homebuyers in all English-speaking countries.
Commerce runs on the premise of supply and demand. The rarer a thing is, the higher the price it commands. The 60,000 agents of UFF have almost shot themselves in the foot. The more they spread the word about "early mortgage payoff," and "recycling equity," the greater the number of searches on the Internet for "early mortgage payoff," and "equity cycling." Many of those searches are destined to lead to websites unrelated to United First Financial. As knowledge of the methodology increases, the price has to drop below $3500.
One reason all searches don´t lead to the UFF giant is that it engages independent sales representatives. Thus searching the Internet for UFF or MMA doesn´t yield double listings for a massive company of over 60,000 strong, but a stream of links to the United Faculty of Florida and a Norwegian expression meaning something akin to "drats," accompanied by a helter-skelter dribble ofGoogle ads paid for by the few independent reps who can afford them.
Worse yet is the acronym by which most prospects describe the program, "MMA." The initials MMA have been sewed up online by the Mixed Martial Arts association. After that comes various Middle Management Associations, Massachusetts Motorcycle Association, Marine Military Academy and Mennonite Mutual Aid. I can´t claim United First Financial´s Money Merge Account is "behind the times" simply because their acronyms don´t work. But perhaps that´s indicative that the company and its founders have been more interested in their own profits than in helping the masses or even in supporting and assisting their 60,000 sales reps.
Meanwhile, other organizations have crawled out of the woodwork and onto the front page offering to help people use the equity cycling process to cut up to half off the projected paybacks on their mortgages. Some of the worst of these cost around $500 and require the user to tell the software what to do rather than the other way around. On the other end of the spectrum are products in the $10,000 range that accomplish little more than a $97 eBook would.
However, the truism with smaller companies is that they are more agile, more capable of changing with the times and perhaps even more attentive to their customers. Certainly a competitor charging under $1500 for similar software, a company more engaged with the personal relationship aspects of helping clients reduce mortgage and other interest charges through equity cycling is worth a second look.
The UFF´s MMA claim to exorbitant pricing is the "rocket scientist" (literally, an aeronautical engineer hired from GE) whose software drives the process. Unfortunately, books like Let Your Mortgage Make You Rich claim a 12-year old can follow written steps; although, clients using software seem to move to debt freedom significantly faster than do those using a list of steps without interactive feedback. And faster saves more money.
Nonetheless, UFF insists that if you´re saving $150,000, a $3500 investment is justified. While logic would agree with that, common sense would also dictate that similar savings, such as at EquityCycling.com, accomplish as much as or more than at about 1/3 the price.
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