Bank Loans (TFM 7)

Let's jump into bank loans real quick. Let's talk about a couple different types of bank loans, okay? Different – because I think it's a great transition from collateral loans because we talked about going to a friend or family member with collateral. But if you actually own something, right, there's a chance you might be able to go down to a bank and use it as collateral to be able to get a collateral loan. And if you have a reasonable credit, there's a chance you might even be able to just get a personal loan from the bank.

And, Arthur, I know you've had some experience with this and helped people raise money in the past. So if you wouldn't mind coming out, you know, just kind of sharing some info on collateralized loans and personalized loans from the bank and, you know, what are some ways to be able to get those. Sure. Well, since we're talking about collateral loans, there's tons of companies that are very specific in the type of collateral loans that they offer. So, like, you know, there's, like, title loans for your car.

So you can actually, like, go on Google in your local area. You can search for, you know, collateralized loans. You can search for collateral loans or title loans for a vehicle. And then, you know, as far as, like, you know, personal loans or business loans. So, like, if you already operate a business, then there's a very good chance that you'll qualify for something called factoring.

I'm not going to actually get into too much detail on that one. It's a little bit more of a complicated one. But, you know, there's tons of personal loan and business loan companies out there. And I'll name a couple of them. I'll name a few that I know of that have worked really well for me in the past for people that I have referred to them.

You have Springlea Financial, which used to be American General. So some of you might be familiar with American General. Some of you might not be familiar with American General. American General was an unsecured personal loan company. And they changed their name to Springlea Financial.

And they're very popular. They work really, really well. And the interest rate is really dependent on your credit. So it's kind of like a credit-based personal loan type place. But if you don't have good credit, the thing I like about Springlea is they'll point you in the right direction.

So if you don't have good credit, they might not be the ones that will fund you, but they'll actually give you resources where you could find someone that will fund you. Another one would be Cash Call. Those are, like, smaller-sized personal loans, but they still work for the business, like Empower Network. So CashCall.com is a good one. There's another one called American One Unsecured that I've used before, not personally, but I have people that have used them, and they work really well.

And, Chris, another one, you know, and this is not something we really talked about, but peer-to-peer lending. There's sites out there, and they're kind of interesting. And it's not where you go to a bank or you're dealing with a financial institution, but you're actually dealing with people. So just like we were just talking about going to friends and family, you're basically going on a site. And let me just point one site out.

There's a site called Prosper.com. And what you're doing is you're basically pleading your case. So you're not going on there and saying you need the money and you're desperate because you have this opportunity in front of you and you're doing a small business opportunity and, you know, you're basically just throwing off a bunch of information and you're not going to get anywhere doing that. You're basically, you know, going on there and you're pleading your case of what you're raising the money for, you know, what kind of track record you have, what you might be willing to. You know, to do or to give up in the business, you know, whether that's maybe some sort of equity or partnership opportunity or even collateral that you might be putting up, but it's peer-to-peer lending, meaning you're borrowing money from other people.

And what I like about Prosper is that you could be asking for a $5,000 loan and that $5,000 loan won't come from all in one person. It will come from, you know, a group of people. So it might be a lower level of entry. And, you know, they're... Their projects, as far as, like, posting a project, it could go for, like, you know, a week or two weeks based on what you indicate.

And it's a way to get funded. I think Prosper.com is a good one because it's peer-to-peer. It's, you know, the risk levels or at least the, you know, the chances of getting funded might be a little bit higher than, you know, going to, like, a bank, you know, going down and sitting down with your local bank. But those are just some of the collateral, and personal loan places that are out there. But, you know, there's also the possibility that if you have a really good relationship with your bank or if you have decent credit, you can go to a bank and you can, you know, apply for a personal loan or a business loan if you own a business or you can apply for a credit card with your bank.

So those are some things that come to mind for just off the top of my head. Sure, yeah. So, okay, we talked about a few things there. We really talked at first there about independent finance companies. You know, you got the cash calls.

You got the benefits. You got the financials, the America General, all that stuff. So to do a follow-up on that, if you're listening right now, what you should do is you should – we're going to provide you with some resources, but, you know, the Internet has a million resources. So there's a lot of independent finance companies out there, okay, and there's a lot of them, and usually their rates are pretty stiff. So the deal is that they're going to take a little bit more risk than the average company will on you, and usually the independent finance companies will be credit-based.

But the good news is that – but they do fund, you know. I remember when me and Vanessa, my wife, when we were struggling with one of our businesses, we actually – early on. So we went down to – what? It was American General, which is now Spring Lake. We went down to American General, or actually we might have gone to Household Finance Corporation.

I'm not sure, but we went down to one of those places. We just went in and tried to get a loan. Now, I applied under my credit, and she applied under her credit. And at the time, I got turned down. My credit got turned down, and it also kind of got turned down because I didn't have a job.

I was an entrepreneur. I didn't actually have any sort of W-2 job or anything, and for whatever reason, I got turned down. But she got accepted because she had two jobs. She had a job working for an insurance company and a job working at a restaurant. So she had two jobs, and her credit wasn't great.

I think she only had like a 620 or something like that. I don't know what it was, but she ended up getting a loan. We got a loan for – they actually gave us a loan for $4,000. So here's the downside. The downside is the high interest rates.

Those places gouge you. I mean, if you can avoid it, it would be better to not have to go to a place like that. But think of it this way. So I kind of look at it like, what if I would have let that little financial obstacle stop me? Money is just an idea.

So really, it's about being willing to try almost anything. Now, it wouldn't be my first choice to go pay those high interest rates, right? Right. Right. When I mean high, I mean some of these places are up to like 30% interest.

It's crazy. But with an opportunity like we have and with an opportunity like you might have sitting in front of you with your own business, you know, it might be worth it. Again, it might be worth it. It's all about ROI. It's all about what you want to do.

So I feel like, you know, if you don't have other solutions, there's really not much harm in applying for a few of these places and just at least seeing if they would accept you and what amount of money that they would give you, okay? You could start there. You could try. Now, that being said, I also want to put out a big, huge disclaimer of something to watch out for. There's a lot, because of the power of the Internet, there's a lot of sites online.

When you start researching this stuff, there's a lot of sites that are going to tell you that they will lend to you regardless of your credit score, regardless of anything, blah, blah, blah. And here's one of the things is some of them are good, some of them are really bad, okay? Some of them are scams, okay? So you've got to be a little bit careful here. One of the biggest scam detectives, one of the biggest things that you can detect a scam or not is if they require upfront money.

If they're requiring you to pay them money of any kind for some sort of fee or something out of your pocket up front before getting the loan, then I would avoid it. That would be my personal advice. I would avoid something like that. Chances are, most likely, that it's some sort of a scam, okay? What they'll do is they'll know that.

Now, if it's something incredibly small, like if they're saying, hey, it's, you know, we'll run your, application, but it's a $20 fee to run your application, you know, look, worst case, you know, you could probably live without 20 bucks. It might be worth it, okay? So paying for, like, a credit check or paying for something like that, those small fees, yeah, that really doesn't hurt that much. But if somebody's asking you for, like, hundreds of dollars or even over $1,000 to be able to, you know, and they're telling you, oh, you're guaranteed to qualify and all this and that, I'm just going to tell you straight up, you better be ready to lose that $1,000 straight up, okay? Because chances are they're just preying on people that don't know any better and they're going to take you.

So be careful, but decent companies exist.