Business credit cards are an important tool for companies to meet short-term financial obligations, better manage cash flow or simply to act as a guarantee and build a better credit score. They can also help businesses to manage and better organise expenses and monitor employee spending. But, rather than being used purely to finance debt, companies are increasingly using them to earn rewards and travel and accommodation perks are a key reason for this.
It is a competitive marketplace, but finding that right card to suit individual needs means companies can get much, much more out of its business expenses by using a credit card. Rewards like hotel stays, cash back, and valuable discounts are among the most popular benefits.
A look at almost 370 business credit cards on the market by credit card comparison service and marketplace, CreditCards.com, has highlighted how importantly rewards are now ranked among the small business community. Its Feb-2020 Small-Business Credit Card Poll of 500 small business owners and senior decision makers found more than two thirds (70%) use business credit cards.
Among them, almost half (46%) said their favourite feature is earning rewards (28% on cash back and 18% on travel). This is ahead of one in five (20%) putting convenience at the top of the list. Interestingly, a mere 7% cited a low interest rate, and just 5% referenced the ability to finance purchases over time.
Those travel rewards come from the fact that travel is the largest spending category for these small businesses with more than one on five (22%) placing it top of their expenditure ranking. It is seven percentage points ahead of internet/phone/cable services (15%), which in turn is ahead of office supplies (13%), equipment/other supplies (11%) advertising (10%), shipping expenses (6%) and restaurants and food expenses (4%)
For the almost a third of respondents that didn’t have a business credit card, 34% said it was because their business was described as being too small to justify one, 19% said they were worried about debt with 11% saying they didn’t think they would qualify.
With rewards as an enticing offer, Ted Rossman, industry analyst at CreditCards.com, says “there’s no such thing as too small,” a business to gain from a business credit card. “You can even qualify as a sole proprietor, freelancer or side hustler using your Social Security number. The sign-up bonus and rewards are well worth it, and it’s a convenient way to separate work and personal expenses,” he explains.
But, when it comes to selecting the right card and cutting through all the noise of cash-back, rewards, booking bonuses among the hundreds of options, Mr Rossman explains the best way for businesses to maximise usage rewards is to “sign up for credit cards that emphasise the areas where your business spends the most money”.
HOW TO REPAIR YOUR CREDIT AFTER DIVORCE. Did your credit get hosed by your ex-lover? Have you gone through a divorce or are you starting over?
Here is what to do and what not to do with your credit after divorce so you can continue to move forward with you life. No more train wrecks!
Here are several practical tips that have helped us, that you can implement to see a major shift in your business.
At Wholesale Tradelines, they legally add positive history to your credit report with seasoned authorized user tradelines. They do this by adding you as an authorized user to an existing credit card account that has a long history of perfect payments, with little or no balance. This can recalculate your credit score with drastic results.
The definition of “bad credit” varies depending on which credit scoring system you are talking about. Since FICO 8 is the scoring model most widely used by lenders, we will focus on FICO when discussing the question of what is considered bad credit.
The FICO 8 credit scoring system assigns consumers a number to represent their creditworthiness, with the lowest credit score possible being 300 and the high end of the scale being 850.
A high credit score shows that lenders can be fairly confident that someone will repay debts because they have demonstrated responsible behavior when it comes to credit in the past.
A low credit score, on the other hand, means that someone represents a higher risk to lenders because they are thought to have a higher probability of defaulting on a loan.
According to Credit Karma, a FICO score between 300 to 579 is considered a poor credit score, while a fair credit score is between 580 and 669. In contrast, an excellent credit score is between 800 and 850.
Credit scores between 300 and 579 are considered poor credit.
What Gives You Bad Credit?
As we mentioned, a bad credit score means lenders perceive you as a high-risk borrower. Therefore, what causes bad credit is poor management of credit and risky behaviors that indicate you may have a higher probability of default.
For example, being late on payments or missing payments altogether can really hurt your credit because payment history is the most important factor of a credit score.
High credit card utilization can lead to bad credit. Photo by Natloans
What causes bad credit specifically? Here are some examples:
Late or missed payments
Defaulting on a loan
Charge-offs
Collections
Judgments
Settlements
Bankruptcy
Foreclosures or repossessions
Maxed out or high-utilization credit cards
Too many inquiries at one time
Too much new credit
Sometimes people have bad credit because of things they can’t control, like having a medical emergency that leads to huge hospital bills that they can’t afford to pay. In fact, the majority of consumer debt in collections is medical debt, according to Magnify Money.
Bad Credit Loans
If you have bad credit, you’re likely going to have a hard time getting loans with favorable terms or getting approved for a loan at all. Since a bad credit score represents a high risk for the lender, loans for people with poor credit typically have higher interest rates and may require collateral or a down payment—if the lender is willing to approve the loan at all.
Personal Loans for Bad Credit
Payday loans can come with interest rates of up to 400%. Photo by Aliman Senai.
Personal loans for bad credit are few and far between. Usually, at least fair credit is needed to be considered for a loan. Bad credit loan lenders may charge very high interest rates since they are taking on a lot of risk by lending money to someone with poor credit. These higher interest rates may translate into thousands of dollars of additional interest payments over the term of a loan.
Very bad credit loans such as payday loans often have astronomical interest rates of up to 400%, which makes it nearly impossible for many consumers to get out of debt.
Bad Credit Car Loans
Bad credit auto loans, also known as subprime auto loans, are often considered “second-chance” loans because they are typically the next option for those who have been rejected for traditional auto loans. Although there is not necessarily an official dividing line between which credit scores are considered prime and subprime when it comes to auto loans, credit scores below 620 tend to be considered subprime.
Bad credit car loans can have triple or more the interest rate as prime auto loans. Photo by QuoteInspector.com.
Car loans for bad credit, similar to personal loans for bad credit, are associated with much higher costs than prime auto loans. Since lenders of second-chance auto loans are taking on additional risk, these loans often have significantly higher interest rates and more fees than auto loans for consumers with good credit. Additionally, car loans for bad credit may come with penalties for paying off the loan early.
According to Investopedia, “While there is no official subprime auto loan rate, it is generally at least triple the prime loan rate, and can even be five times higher.”
Credit Cards for Bad Credit
If you have bad credit, your options for getting a credit card will be limited, and you will most likely not be able to get the perks associated with premium credit cards, like low interest rates, high credit limits, and rewards. Credit cards for poor credit may also have annual or even monthly fees.
Subprime credit cards often require you to make a deposit with the lender as collateral. These cards are known as secured credit cards since they are secured by your deposit, which the lender can keep if you fail to make payments on the card. Sometimes, the lender may be willing to switch you to an unsecured card after a period of on-time payments.
As we’ve seen with loans for bad credit, credit cards for bad credit, both secured and unsecured, will likely have high interest rates, sometimes as high as 30% or more.
How to Fix Bad Credit
Having bad credit is expensive. It makes getting any kind of credit more difficult and more costly, because bad credit lenders tack on high interest rates and fees to compensate for the higher financial risk of poor credit loans.
Bad credit doesn’t just dramatically increase the cost of credit. It can also affect other aspects of your life, such as your insurance premiums, your ability to find housing, and even your job, since many employers now check prospective employees’ credit scores. Therefore, most people with bad credit want to fix it as soon as possible.
Improving bad credit takes time and patience. While credit repair companies may claim to have tactics that can boost your credit fast, the reality is that these tactics are usually limited to removing inaccurate information from your credit report. If you remove everything from your credit report, what are you left with?
Rebuilding credit with positive credit history helps to fix bad credit.
The best way to fix bad credit is to rebuild it with positive credit history over time. In other words, you need to add more positive accounts to your credit profile and keep them in good standing while they age. At certain age levels, these accounts should begin to boost your credit profile with all that positive payment history.
Generally, though, building credit through opening new accounts can take at least two years to see much of a positive effect. The best way we have seen to bypass this period is by piggybacking on the good credit of others.
Otherwise, repairing bad credit requires demonstrating that you can use credit responsibly by building up a positive credit history over time.
We at Coinbase couldn’t be more excited by the explosion of interest in digital currencies. The last few weeks have seen an unprecedented increase in the price of digital currencies. More people are engaging with our platform than ever and that bodes well for the future of the digital currency. At the same time, it does create extreme volatility and stress on our systems. We take this very seriously and wanted to share some important thoughts.
We’re continuing to invest heavily to scale our platform
Over the course of this year, we have invested significant resources to increase trading capacity on our platform and maintain the availability of our service. We have increased the size of our support team by 640% and launched phone support in September. We have also invested heavily in our infrastructure and have increased the number of transactions we are processing during peak hours by over 40x.
There may be downtime which can impact your ability to trade
Despite the sizable and ongoing increases in our technical infrastructure and engineering staff, we wanted to remind customers that access to Coinbase services may become degraded or unavailable during times of significant volatility or volume. This could result in the inability to buy or sell for periods of time. Despite ongoing increases in our support capacity, our customer support response times may be delayed, especially for requests that do not involve immediate risks to customer account security. You can read more in our Coinbase User Agreement.
Be an educated investor
We also wanted to remind customers of some of the risks associated with trading digital currency. Digital currencies are volatile and the prices can go up and down. Due to the rapidly changing price of digital currencies, some customers may not have sell limits that are sufficient relative to the value of the total digital currency they are storing on Coinbase. Sell limits are one of the many measures Coinbase takes to protect client accounts and assets.
As a proactive measure, we encourage customers to check the following items on their accounts:
Ensure your email address is properly receiving all communications and notifications from Coinbase. To learn more about ensuring email delivery, please refer to this support article.
Ensure your two-factor authentication is updated and functional. If you have recently switched mobile devices, your two-factor authentication needs to be properly migrated to the new device. In addition, please migrate from SMS two factor to Google Authenticator to enhance the security on your account, if you have not already done so. To learn more about two-factor authentication, please refer to this FAQ.
Familiarize yourself with your buy and sell limits. They can be found here.
Complete any pending identity verifications. During times of significant volatility, ID verification may become degraded or unavailable. To learn more about identity verification on Coinbase, please refer to this FAQ.
Expect payments to take the maximum number of days indicated when making a deposit or withdrawal.
Stay up to date
We will continue to update customers for our website, our status page, in our apps, via email, on our blog and on Twitter.
We will keep you informed
We are committed to safety, security and transparency. We are working tirelessly to provide the best service and support but we can’t promise perfection during the periods of extraordinary demand. We will continue to do our best to keep our customers informed.
