Ensuring Seamless Hiring: How Understanding Auto Loan Agreements Can Benefit IT Contractors

If there’s one thing that Bench Direct, the source of this article, emphasizes more than anything else, it’s the need for clear and simple information. Their target demographic is people who need help picking out appropriate IT contractors to generate business, and their goal is not to give you 25 pages of legal documents to wade through each weekend – they want you to click through a few simple pages and find the right contractor to serve your unique need.

By the same token, Bench Direct doesn’t think that their readers are stupid. They assume that you have a basic idea of what the legal jargon means, and that it’ll help you make an informed decision that will keep the contract between you and your hired worker intact. That’s the kind of emphasis on clarity that good businesses do to keep their clientele coming back. This post is just such an effort; we’ve taken a sample auto loan agreement, analyzed it, and posted that analysis below this introduction so that you, a prospective IT contract worker, can be just as informed in your decision making as cutthroat businessmen and women are in theirs.

A sample auto loan agreement will outline several things that both the borrower and lender need to agree upon, and it will do so in no uncertain terms. For instance: Again, this is just a sample, but it should give you a general idea of what items are typically included in an automotive loan agreement: terms of payment (a lot of loans going further than the typical two or three years), exactly what the borrower is agreeing to pay for, and the consequences if any of the above aren’t adhered to.

It doesn’t matter what sort of contract we’re talking about in your line of work, IT contracting is all about knowing how to read a complex document and finding out where the loopholes are, if any. Ideally, there shouldn’t be any loopholes in a legitimate contract, meaning that when you take a loan that you don’t know how to pay back, you’re the borrower at fault. If you’ve carefully gone through the loan without needing a third party to tell you what it means, then you’ve not only saved yourself a headache later on, but you’ve generated revenue for the lender who will almost assuredly be your next subcontractor.

We’ve already touched on how a loan agreement has much of the same verbiage that you’ll find in hiring contracts. The only real difference between the two is that a contractor is more likely than a borrower to go over the contract with a fine-toothed comb. As the contractor in question, you shouldn’t be waiting until the potential employer has already told you what’s in the contract before offering your services. Find out for yourself what you’re up against and calculate your odds of getting the job.

However, if you’re still not convinced, you’ll want to take a closer look at the first line of this article. When you know how to analyze a legal document like a loan agreement, it becomes a lot easier to sift through the terms of a contract and find the loopholes that can save you time and money in the long run.

Again, we want to reiterate the fact that there isn’t anything different about an IT contract and an automotive loan contract. They’re both legally binding documents that should be given an equal amount of attention. If you find that you’re too swamped with work to ensure that you’re being paid what you’re worth, you may already be in over your head. An experienced contractor goes over every page of his or her potential contract. This will allow you to efficiently perform your work, as you’ll know exactly what you’re getting into from day one.

Both parties in this kind of an agreement have to be aware of what they’re going to lose before they’ll agree to the terms of the contract. In the automotive loan example, it’s the borrower who could wind up losing his or her car. In your case, it’ll depend on the nature of your work. Either way, it’s your responsibility as the contractor to not only read the entire contract, but to understand every little nuance of the verbiage contained therein as well.

We can’t ask you enough to go over the terms of each contract that you agree to. Otherwise, you’ll have a host of problems on your hands, not just with your contract agreement but in your whole life. Ultimately, it isn’t worth the risk of losing out on money or time that you could’ve more judiciously saved. If you have to divulge information in confidence, then be prepared for the consequences of that information leaking out at a later date.

For more information on understanding contracts, you can visit Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.