Dairy Farmer Cork
When I took over the farm from my father 10 years ago I increased cow numbers and invested a lot of money to develop the farm. Everything was going well when out of the blue 35 acres of our grazing platform that we had been renting on a long-term basis came up for sale. The timing couldn’t have been worse as we had taken on significant debt to fund farm expansion and build a new house. When we inquired about a loan to buy the 35 acres the bank said the farm could not handle any more debt. My accountant put me in touch with Tom in Farm Finance Solutions and he produced a detailed proposal for the bank which highlighted my track record in developing the farm. His report showed that profits were better than they looked at first sight when the one-off costs of expanding the farm were taken into consideration. The bank accepted this analysis changed their mind and approved the loan.
Dairy Farmer Tipperary
We have been developing our farm at a steady pace for the last 15 years and borrowed significant amounts of money to buy land and for new buildings. Our bank was foreign owned and decided to leave Ireland after the crash in 2007. They had all our land as security but were not interested in lending new money for farm development. This lead us into the trap of financing too much development from cashflow and we got into trouble with the foreign owned bank and the merchant bills started to run up. Tom negotiated a settlement with the foreign bank and a refinance of all our debt with another bank. Our cashflow problems are now behind us and we have been able to expand further since we left our old bank.
Tillage Farmer South East
Like many specialist tillage farmers, we have found the going tough over the last few years. Managing cashflow has been a real challenge and our bank was getting slower and slower to provide the working capital we needed. Tom visited our farm and did up a detailed report which suggested a number of changes to the way we operate and finance our business. With input from my accountant Tom completed detailed cashflows and we reorganised our bank and machinery finance. We are now in a much better position to ride out the ongoing cycle of low prices and the bank are being more supportive.
Part time farmer Waterford
2009 was one of those years where everything that could go wrong for us did go wrong. The weather was bad and milk and cattle prices were poor. We had a disease problem and lost a number of cows. On the personal side, our outgoings were high as two of our children were in College and we had nursing home bills for my mother. We got into difficulty with a number of banks and we seemed to have difficulty explaining to them how things had got so bad. Tom did up a report which explained to the banks how our problems had come about and which showed that we could repay all our debts if our loans were restructured. When the banks properly understood our situation, they agreed to restructure our loans to make the repayments more manageable. One bank had started legal proceedings against us and when the restructure was completed they agreed to refund legal charges that they had added on to our mortgage.