New Hampshire Main Street Relief and the PPP Loans Update

I hope that you're all staying safe. We're encouraged to see many small businesses getting back to business.

In our office, we continue to evaluate ways we can make our office as clean as possible for our employees and clients.

We wanted to give you an update on 2 things, New Hampshire Main Street Relief and the PPP Loans

Main Street Relief Fund

• You must have already submitted a prequalification application as we suggested to you in our last email. You should have an email from the state with a case number assigned.
• This is an unrestricted grant for use in covering operational costs and operations.
• You must have employees who are not owners of the business.
• You must have been in business for at least a year prior to May 29, 2020.
• You must anticipate a loss of Gross revenue in 2020 versus 2019 due to Covid-19 (this will be verified later)
• The anticipated loss amount is reduced by 50% of any PPP money you received, and 100% of any other federal funds received that are grants or loans that are Covid-19 related, such as EIDL loans.
• You must apply by June 12.
• For more information go to https://www.goferr.nh.gov/covid-expenditures/main-street-relief-fund

PPP Changes

• Congress and the president have just made more change to the PPP program:
• Borrowers can now extend the 8 week covered period to 24 weeks
• Borrowers now have up to 5 years to repay any remaining balances. (previously 2 years) The interest rate remains at 1%.
• Businesses who take the PPP loan can now delay the payment of their payroll taxes. This deferral is in the original CARES act but now permits PPP recipients to use. Appletree strongly discourages anyone from doing this.
• The payroll threshold portion has been lowered to 60% (previously 75%).
• PPP loans can be forgiven even if the number of full-time employees decreases, as long as the employer can prove: it attempted to rehire the same number of employees, but its former employees were unavailable; similarly qualified employees were unavailable; or its business is unable to return to the same level of activity it had before Feb. 15, 2020.
• More clarification is needed for proper planning. Does this mean that the maximum payment for an employee goes from $15,385 to $46,154 ($100,000 / 52 * 24 weeks )

We expect to get clarification on these issues.

We had been working with many of you to determine if you wanted to issue bonuses and use the additional payroll cost to reduce any potential loan repayment. You can still consider bonuses to reward those who have helped your business during this difficult time but for now it appears those bonuses will not be needed to maximize PPP forgiveness.

As always, please reach out to Paul, Karen or me if you have any questions.

Sincerely,

Steve Feinberg