The Benefits of Having a Business Credit Card

Whether you have a home business that you work alone or you have a larger company with several employees, a business credit card can be a valuable asset. It’s a way to keep your business and personal expenses separate - vital for bookkeeping and taxes! But there are more benefits as well.

You probably have a credit score of your own. Your business needs one too. Having a credit card for your business allows it to build up a score.

A business credit card greatly simplifies how you spend for your business. You won’t have to rely on writing out checks in advance for everything, and you can authorize trusted employees to make necessary purchases on the business credit card. While these obviously need to be well tracked, it saves you the hassle of coping with checks.

The benefit to your bookkeeping is quite clear. When you receive your statement, all purchases are there to be verified. Many credit cards offer special reporting for businesses, so that you can keep better track of your spending. Having the credit card record gives your accountant one more tool to work with.

You can also benefit from the rewards your business credit card may offer. You can earn travel, points and so forth, just as with other credit cards. While these may not be worthwhile if you carry a balance, if you pay off every month you have a definite benefit. Just make sure that you know the balance between what you would be paying in interest with and without rewards.

Company credit cards are not just for big companies. Big companies use them because they are convenient and make bookkeeping and spending easier, so that less time is wasted. Credit card companies do not require that your company be huge.

You will want to know that for a small business, your personal credit and your business credit can become intertwined. If your business has no credit history, all the company can do is look at your personal credit history to decide if your business is deserving of credit. Through the years this link may or may not become more important. If you’re a one-person business, how else are they going to be guaranteed repayment, if not by you personally?

Do not let your concerns about using a business credit card keep you from investigating them. While there is a bit of extra work in keeping up with the payments, the time you save in tracking your business spending should more than make up for this.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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How Credit Scores Affect Mortgage Applications

With a good credit score an applicant will receive prompt response from many lenders, all of them offering low interest rates and low down payment options. The loan amount offered also may be high. On the contrary a low credit score would result in a lot of rejection from various mortgage financers. Because creditors wouldn’t come forward easily to give credit to individuals that have a history of difficulty in repaying existing loans. After all, creditors take risk when they finance mortgages against the credit history of a debtor. Naturally, they will wish to remain on the safe side and pick up less risky ones that have good credit histories. A good credit score means less chance of missing on payments and therefore less risky.

But there are some real risk takers that will come forward to finance mortgages for individuals with bad credit scores. They would charge high down payments and always high interest rates though. They may also fix additional charges for every little paper work and may charge high closing rates. The loan amount offered will also be considerably less. The individual with poor credit scores will not have much choice but to accept the terms and conditions as there are no other alternatives. This is a tight situation and to avoid this you must have a good credit score.

People with bad credit may fall in to the trap of ’secured loans’. Secured loans are the ones where the loan applicant offers an asset as collateral security. The lender becomes secure about the repayment of the loan and not the borrower. Securing a loan with bad credit score becomes easy only when the applicant is willing to offer some asset as collateral security. This again is a very dangerous situation where an individual runs the risk of losing his entire collateral asset in case of failing to pay the loan installments in time. An individual should always avoid such type of a loan.

Resort properties normally require large amounts of finance which a person with bad credit may find it difficult to obtain. So it is always advisable to keep your credit score high. Incase the credit score becomes low due to unavoidable financial reasons it can be improved upon. There is no need to lose hope simply because a person has a low credit score. If the property that he intends to buy has good equity he should go out and try to obtain finances for it. There are many sub prime lenders willing to offer their services.

For a review of your credit report as it relates to a mortgage loan and a consultation on the best loans available to you, give us a confidential, no obligation and no cost call.