What can we learn from creditboards about business credit?
There is a tremendous amount of information about business credit at the infamous creditboards, but their goals seem to be different than the typical member of FWF.
The discussion at CB seems to be all about getting business credit without a personal guarantee. Pardon the gross generalization, but I’m assuming this is because many creditboard members have…ummm…less-than-perfect personal credit, so PG-free business credit is the only type of credit available. Also, and again, pardon the generalization, there are many CB members who seem to be hoarding credit for credit’s sake, regardless of profit potential.
In contrast, FWFers (especially the BT investing crowd) are more focused on obtaining credit because it MAKES US MONEY. We typically have excellent personal credit, and we are exploiting it for maximum gain. We are looking to business credit to enhance our arbitrage game and are more than willing to use personal guarantees if necessary.
MikeR397 started an excellent thread extolling the virtues of business credit, but I’d like this thread to be focused on 2 business credit topics: 1) Reporting and 2) Strategies.
Reporting
We all know that business credit is hidden from our personal reports. However, business lines obviously report somewhere. That leads to a lot of questions:
What do we know about the business CRAs?
How do business scores work? (e.g., What’s D&B and how will a paydex score of 80 help me?)
How can we monitor and manage the information our reports contain?
Which lenders pull which report(s) and how do they use these reports to make decisions? Which lenders report lines to which business CRAs?
Strategies
To what extent do which lenders treat personal and business credit as separate buckets?
Can you create multiple business entities to create multiple credit buckets? If so, how can we exploit this? I’ve always assumed everything ties back to your SSN, but perhaps this isn’t the case.
How can we time biz and personal AORs for maximum effectiveness?
I know I’ve asked a bunch of questions without providing many answers. I know a tiny bit about the questions above, and I’ll add in a few things when I get a chance. Regardless, this thread should be a work in progress, and I’m hoping to tap into the collective wisdom of the forum.
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