The value of notaries explained
At some point in your life – and, likely, more than once – you will almost certainly need the services of a notary. In many cases, this will be because you have a need to submit a document to a government entity or commercial institution and they require the document to be notarized. In other cases, notarization will be a requirement for conducting and recording certain business or financial transactions, such as purchases and sales of real estate, wills, trusts, powers of attorney and so on. Without this notarization, you will not be able to achieve your desired outcome. This is the notary value proposition.
Think for a minute about the value of notary service. Say you are applying for a travel visa to another country, and the foreign entity which will process your application has a requirement for copies of documents accompanying your application to be notarized. Well, without the required notarization you will be unable to obtain your travel visa and thus be prevented from carrying out your intended overseas trip. That trip might have been for an important family function. When looked at in this context you can you appreciate the stakes involved in achieving a notarization or not.
In the past, when this need for a notary arose, you would probably have gone to your bank, or a notary office, or an office services provider, to find a notary. In some cases you might have been charged $3 or $5, or even nothing if it was done by your bank. After all, it’s just a couple of bucks for a stamp, right? Wrong! Notarization is hugely consequential.
In all states in the U.S., notaries must be licensed, or commissioned to use the correct terminology. While the specific requirements to obtain this commission vary from state to state, in general notaries must be persons of good standing and must meet certain standards of training and education. So when you get something notarized, you are not just getting a “stamp”, you are benefitting from a guarantee from a trained and qualified public official that your signature on a document, or a copy of a document, is genuine. This, in turn, enables you to achieve all manner of important requirements that come up through life, instead of running into a brick wall when that need arises! Pretty important, right?
The post-pandemic new paradigm
When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the United States (and most of the world) in 2020, it caused a serious change in the notary sphere. The banks closed their doors and ceased accepting walk-in customers, so you couldn’t walk in to the bank and get something notarized. Notary offices closed their doors in order to avoid personal contact. Office service providers with a notary offering did the same. The real estate market ground to a halt. All of a sudden you could not get documents notarized. And that’s when the paradigm shift took place.
The COVID-19 pandemic shut down the country in the first quarter of 2020. At the time I was working in the IT department of a non-profit quasi-government organization as a software and web developer. I had previously obtained a notary commission purely for the purpose of helping out immigrant colleagues who needed documents notarized to support their visa applications and such. In March of 2020 my employer ordered all staff to work from home until further notice.
After a couple of months’ working from home, my phone started ringing with notary inquiries. With everything shut down, including notary service providers, I assumed people were having difficulty finding notaries and had resorted to searching for them online. In my state of Pennsylvania, the only places where my name and notary information were publicly available was at the Pennsylvania Department of State (where all PA notaries have to be registered), the Pennsylvania Association of Notaries, and the National Notary Association. I guessed people were finding me in one or more of those three places.
I was willing to help these callers by providing the notary service they needed. However, I definitely did not want them coming to my home (nor did my wife!), and I didn’t have an outside office, so I began offering to go to the callers’ locations, be they homes, offices or what have you. Thus was born my mobile notary service. I retired at the end of 2020 (due to my employer’s downsizing as a result of the pandemic) and decided to offer mobile notary service on a full-time basis.
My mobile notary service is what I considered to be part of what I refer to as the paradigm shift because, until now, mobile notaries pretty much didn’t exist. Yes, a notary might occasionally make an outcall to a customer for exigent reasons, or perhaps for a real estate closing, but not as a normal or regular practice. And certainly not as a one-hundred-percent mobile service.
And therein lay the problem – initially, anyway. Back in the early days, I frequently ran into the problem of people baulking at my (very reasonable) fees. In most states notaries are regulated as to their services and fees. In my state of Pennsylvania, the state prescribes a maximum fee for each item on the list of services notaries are authorized to provide. The highest item on that list is $5. Additionally, notaries can charge “reasonable” fees for administration and travel. Obviously, it would not be viable for me to drive to someone’s location to notarize a document and come away with just the state-prescribed fee of $5, so I had to add a reasonable amount for travel and administration (i.e., time).
This is now into my fifth year of providing mobile notary service, and my fees have evolved into a stable schedule that both I consider fair and my customers have fed back to me holding the same opinion. I think the paradigm shift may be complete!
I guess my point in this blog post is to spread the word that notary service is valuable, mobile notary service is even more valuable, and it is my hope that notary services are recognized for the substantial benefits they provide and not just as a $5 stamp.
