How to Buy Real Estate Using Business Credit Cards with Ari Page

Mike Hambright (00:33)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. Today I’m here with my good buddy Ari Page. We’re gonna be talking about using credit cards and using credit card debt in your business to literally buy houses with a credit card if that’s you want to. Ari’s company has raised over $2 billion for entrepreneurs, mostly real estate entrepreneurs to help fund their business. And there’s a lot of ways to use business credit that you probably haven’t thought about. So Ari, welcome to the show.

Ari Page (00:56)
Thanks for having me, Mike.

Mike Hambright (00:57)
Yeah, good to see you. We were just talking, you know, I’ve said this before. I always spend a few minutes talking to guests that are on ahead of time. And we talked about some pretty cool stuff like that I hadn’t even thought of before about how to use ⁓ debt. And there’s some, you know, a lot of this debt that you’re raising is 0 % interest for a period, which is great for entrepreneurs. I think a lot of real estate investors like the sound of that. So, hey, before we jump into this, ⁓ you know, a couple of things that I’ve thought about is

Forever there’s been a lot of people that are like, you can buy houses with no money. ⁓ And a lot of people use that tagline. And in my head, there’s always an, well, there’s an asterisk next to that. It’s like, you might be able to get a hundred percent funding for a mortgage. You might be able to just assign properties where you don’t need money. But the asterisk in my head as the operator in me is always like, but you need money to fund your business. Like your marketing.

your payroll, your expenses, your rent, like all those things. And I think that a lot of folks don’t realize that there are opportunities to fund that with debt. I know we’re gonna talk about that today. Tell us a little bit about your background before you, ⁓ before, I guess kind of what led you to this point.

Ari Page (02:05)
So in 2006, 2007 timeframe, I was working with my mentor at the time in a mortgage company. And so we were just funding mortgages. then the before the market crash of 2008, we were already seeing the loan to value amounts just drastically dropping. These lenders were pulling back what they were willing to to loan out. And so it was going from like 80 percent to 70 percent to like even lower.

And so we were having to come up with stopgap money to be able to fund this loan to value difference to be able to close on the loans. And that’s where we found that business credit cards are this perfect thing to be able to use for funding the down payment for an escrow account and for a variety of different things. And that kind of led to us creating a program. And since then, I bought the company from my mentor. And at the time, it was called Credit Card Builders.

very specific to what we do, building credit cards, but that name sucks. So after that, I rebranded as Fund and Grow, because that’s really what we’re about is helping businesses grow, getting them up to 250,000 of business credit cards and showing them how to spend it anywhere. But really, it’s about helping that business be able to grow and ⁓ really scale.

Mike Hambright (03:05)
Yeah.

Yeah, that’s great. I’m excited to talk more about this today because I think there’s a lot of, ⁓ just had ⁓ somebody else on the show here recently, Tom Krol, who we both know. And we were talking about, in that show, were talking about the nine rules of marketing. And one of them was that a lot of ⁓ real estate investors are operating at too low of a level. They need to of like level up. And a lot of times it’s a credit issue. It’s a cash issue, right, is to kind of get to the next level.

There’s a lot of benefits for using ⁓ credit. Quite frankly, a lot of entrepreneurs don’t want to use their own money, even if they have it, as long as you can use it wisely. ⁓ Debt can be a fuel in a lot of ways for your business and you need to use it wisely. But let’s talk about the difference between business credit and mortgages. A lot of people here that leverage the name of the game with real estate, a lot of folks actually know that. But they’re typically referring to traditional mortgages and DSCR loans, hard money loans, private money loans, things like that.

How do you explain the difference between kind of business credit, credit to fund your business or other things versus a traditional mortgage?

Ari Page (04:32)
So I think that all of those loans are very useful. They all have a tool. They’re all part of the capital stack. But business credit cards are one of the easiest forms for small businesses to get access to. And they can use it for down payments for a lot of those other loans. They can use it as a loan that’s not tied to a specific property or deal where you’re having to beg the bank for a draw in order to move forward on your rehab. They can use it for marketing.

They can use it for a whole variety of things that a mortgage, DSCR loan, a hard money loan, private money, that it’s not gonna cover. So it’s really a more versatile tool and can be ⁓ used for even things outside of real estate.

Mike Hambright (05:16)
Yeah, and as an operator, you have lots of other costs. You have marketing costs, have rent, have inevitably as any sort of business owner, you have overhead in your business that isn’t necessarily loans for houses or buying inventory for any other type of business you’re in. Of course you could use, I guess you could use the debt we’re talking about for buying inventory or that gap coverage as well, right? Like a lot of people that use hard money, know, most hard money lenders.

⁓ unless you’re a member of investor fuel, guess, but a lot of hard money lenders don’t fund 100%, they might fund 90%. So there’s always this gap, right?

Ari Page (05:52)
Yeah, yeah, and sometimes there’s just cost overruns where it’s low-balled and something like ⁓ payroll can be one of the largest things on a rehab and on a flip. you know.

Mike Hambright (06:09)
Yep, so let’s talk about kind of operating capital for the business. Just all the areas that you see maybe a lot of entrepreneurs kind of hold back on growth because they don’t have the funds to do those things ⁓ because they’re just relying on their own capital.

Ari Page (06:26)
Yeah, I think that a lot of people out there don’t realize how easy it is to get access to 0 % business credit cards. And just when they hear it, they’re like 0%, how is that? No. And then they’re turned off just by the idea of it, that it just sounds too good to be true. I can get 250,000 of these on average. It’s 0 % for an introductory period of time. It doesn’t show up on my credit report. It just sounds too good to be true.

But I just encourage everyone, go on Google and just type in 0 % business credit card. You will see every single one of the major lenders offer it. Then there’s smaller banks with regional footprints that offer it. We have a massive list of these types of cards. And when we’re applying for clients, we’re taking them strategically in such a way where in three rounds of funding, three credit stacking rounds, we’re getting up to 250,000. So on a first round,

They may get 30, 50, 80,000 depending on their credit score. And so when you are using a personal credit card, as soon as you use the card, it starts to pull your credit score down. But when you’re using a business credit card, the debt doesn’t even appear on the personal report. That way your scores stay high and we’re able to do round two, round three. There is no round two and round three if you’re maxing out your personal credit cards. And a lot of small business owners

They’re in that situation where they use their personal credit cards, they’re carrying a huge amount of debt, and Fund &Grow in those situations has to help them migrate that off of their personal report over where it should be reporting under the EIN.

Mike Hambright (08:03)
Why do credit cards offer 0 % interest for businesses? Let’s talk about that a bit.

Ari Page (08:09)
So they offer it for a variety of different reasons. First off, someone with bad credit is not gonna get access to 0%. So they’re bringing in a high end credit user who they’re then gonna be able to offer insurance and a whole variety of other products too that they literally make billions of dollars off of, including just the usage of credit cards and the transaction fee. And the user doesn’t experience the transaction fee, it’s the merchant.

that then pays for that transaction fee, the banks are making a lot of money. So they may not be making money off the 0 % itself, but they are making money off of the simple usage of the credit card.

Mike Hambright (08:46)
Right.

Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit about some non-traditional usage of credit cards. I’ve heard of people literally closing on houses, like buying houses. I’ve flipped hundreds of houses. I’ve never used a credit card. But conceptually, it sounds interesting. I think a lot of people assume that when you use a credit card, it has to be slid through a card reader. And there’s other ways to kind of use it. So let’s talk about some kind of non-traditional uses that business owners…

might not have thought before that they can use cards.

Ari Page (09:18)
Yeah, so that’s a really great question because if you think about it, how many places don’t accept credit cards? You got a whole variety from contractors to escrow to paying mortgages or paying a key lock. A lot of them, if you take your credit card to, they will not accept a credit card. However, Fund and Grow works together with third party payment services that are approved by Visa, MasterCard, American Express.

And you essentially run your card through the service, like for example, Plastic, ending with a Q, Plastic.com is just one of these services, people can look that up. And you can just put like three, four, five, 10, 15 credit cards in there. And then you upload an invoice of what company you’re attempting to pay that doesn’t accept credit card. And then they facilitate the transaction. They’ll either pay them through a wire, they’ll pay them through ACH, or they’ll pay them through check. So.

If they don’t accept credit card, you know they accept check. If they don’t accept wire, then you know they’ll accept ACH or check. So there’s literally always a way to pay. And we’re not talking about doing cash advances or doing like some businesses talk about this cash harvesting or getting cash off the credit card. No, no, no, that’s against Visa, MasterCard, American Express ⁓ policies. So what we have to do is use approved third party services.

Now in the usage of those services, you could be charged up to 2.9 % for facilitating that transaction, but 2.9 % is a small price to pay. And the great thing is that most contractors, even some mortgage companies, some Helux and so on and so on, they accept credit card. Many times you can just take the credit card. If you’re doing a rehab, obviously you can take a credit card to Home Depot or Lowe’s.

or to the local plumbing contractor. So in most cases, you can use a credit card directly. But in the rare case that they don’t accept credit card, that’s where our third payment processor services kick in, facilitate the transaction for the client, and then they can be spending their credit card literally anywhere. You can literally fund an escrow account directly using plastic. And we have clients buying houses, obviously depending on where in the country you live.

Mike Hambright (11:39)
Right. Yeah. Back in the early days of mine, I we would regularly buy houses for 10, $20,000. Like those days might be behind us, especially the Dallas Fort Worth market. But yeah, you could basically gap fund. If the deal is cheap enough, you could close on it. You could pay your contractors. There’s a lot. mean, pretty much anybody that would accept a check, you could use this system for, right? Yeah. Yep.

Ari Page (12:00)
Yes. Yeah,

land deals.

Mike Hambright (12:04)
Yeah, right, right. There’s a lot of, yeah, that’s amazing. I mean, think a lot of people as entrepreneurs are hung up on what do they have access to right now. They’re happy to use leverage for deals, but they don’t think about using it in their business. And so there’s a lot of ways you could use it, I guess. Let’s talk about, you know, one of the things that’s kind of come up is using it for asset protection, which when we started talking about, was like, how does that work? But…

Sure enough, mean, if you were to use your card to pay somebody and they didn’t perform, then the credit card protects you,

Ari Page (12:37)
Yeah, yeah, I’ve actually ran into this situation myself where there’s contractors that I paid using a credit card and then the job was red tagged. They were unable to get it to pass. I contacted the contractor over and over again and they were like, we finished the job. And they’re like, no, it didn’t pass inspection. You did not finish the job. And the only way to get them to come back out was to call the number on the back of the credit card and initiate what’s called a charge back.

And so I was able to hold this contractor to account simply because I paid them on a credit card. There would have been no other way. If I paid them by check, forget about it. It would have been going to small claims court. would have been, you know, arguing costly, you know, like having the charge back ability puts the ball at your court where you’re in charge of it. Just call your credit card company and boom, the money’s back in your account.

Mike Hambright (13:21)
Good luck.

Yeah, that’s great. There’s so many complaints of people hiring contractors that didn’t do what they said they would do. So this gives you a little bit of leverage to work against that. I don’t take advantage of that at all. I mean, I’ve definitely, you know, err on the side of like not taking advantage of that. But I did have somebody that I recently paid over five figures to ⁓ that like went out of business the next month and my credit card company was able to do a charge back and get my money back. So that was great. Yeah. Yep. Yep. So let’s talk about

kind of best practices for using credit wisely as a business, right? I mean, you don’t want to like, obviously go get some new jewelry, get a fancy car, any of those things. You want to use it as something that’s a catalyst to grow your business, right?

Ari Page (14:18)
Yeah, definitely recommend don’t go to Walmart and buy flat screen TVs with this unless you own a bar. But yeah, so obviously investing for a return on your investment ⁓ is what small businesses are doing in general, regardless of what type of loan they have access to. So when people think of credit cards, sometimes they immediately think of bad debt. However, no investors getting into this and planning on investing it into

Mike Hambright (14:25)
Yeah.

Ari Page (14:48)
buying a boat or just using it for bad debt. There is a lot of people that have personal credit cards. When you think of credit cards in general, it’s like a lot of people have rang up their credit cards, but that’s only because it’s easy to use. that’s actually the positive side for the investors that business credit cards are easy to use. they’re investing it, we have clients that are investing it in rehabs, in paying for payroll, in paying for marketing costs.

Fund and Grow could easily spend 50 to 100,000 a month in pay-per-click marketing. And you have to, for anyone in marketing, you know you have to have a credit card. You can’t even put a bank account in there. Google and Facebook won’t even accept that. You have to have a credit card. So there’s companies that are doing 10 million a year, 50 million a year, still gotta have a credit card. And we have clients that have 150,000 just on one credit card alone. And that’s due to the stacking process of merging them together. So at first,

If you have a small credit card, it’s like, what can I really do with this other than go to Walmart? But once you start stacking them and getting larger amounts, you realize that these are a true investment tool that’s used for good debt to be able to leverage and create an ROI for your business.

Mike Hambright (16:02)
Yeah, you wanna make sure you use it for, as you just said, they’re good debt. It’s easy to, they’re too easy to use for some people, but if you use it on things that are gonna help you grow your business, then that’s what it’s about. Yeah, so let’s talk a little about, you I was thinking of this earlier. A lot of people, especially in real estate, there’s a lot of people that form partnerships with people. And it’s pretty common that one of those partners is just like the money partner. Like they’re willing to fund the deal. It’s also pretty common that a lot of partners break up because they don’t see eye to eye.

And so this could be in many ways a replacement for finding a partner that’s a money partner that sometimes is just gonna break up down the road at some point anyway.

Ari Page (16:41)
Yeah, you know, it always shocks me when I watch Shark Tank and I see these amazing companies that are giving up 50 % or more of their equity, the equity in their business and getting 100 or 200,000 in funding. And it’s like, what are you doing? You could easily be getting a quarter million in 0 % business credit cards and you’d stay 100 % in control of your own company.

Why give up equity just to get access to funding when if you have access to funding such as business credit cards, that’s already gonna facilitate and help you with down payment money and to be able to get access to other types of loans. yeah, giving up equity within your business, that’s really not something that you need to do. But for business credit cards, you will need to have good personal credit. If you have good personal credit, then that opens the door. But the credit cards themselves report to the EIN number. They don’t report to the personal credit.

You just need that to get approved for them.

Mike Hambright (17:41)
Yeah, so Ari, if folks, mean, folks can go out, just like you said, they can go do a Google search and find 0 % credit cards. You’re obviously doing more than just that. talk about how Fund &Grow helps people kind of stack credit and manage all that so that the entrepreneur doesn’t have to deal with a bunch of the components, because it’s not as easy as just going online, filling out one form and being done.

Ari Page (18:05)
Exactly. I mean, when you think of what your time is worth, know, just, you know, on 20 hours worth of work, which is going to take a lot more than that to get you up to 250,000. And let’s say your time is worth 100 or $200 an hour. You’re talking 2000, $4000. And what, know, do you really want to be spending your time Googling 0 % credit cards when your time is way more worth doing what you do, whatever it is that you do that’s making these small business owners

way more money. So being able to see the 0 % credit cards online and the offers is completely different than getting approved for them. And not just getting approved, but getting approved for high limits. Again, we have clients that are in the hundreds of thousands in just one card alone. Now that comes from credit stacking. So let me explain that for a second. Let’s say that with Chase Bank, for example, that you have a $25,000 card that

was that is at 0%, but the 0 % is expiring. The 0 % could be anywhere from six months to 12 months to 24 months. So let’s say that it was a 12 month offer, it’s month 11, 0 % is about to expire. So the client got a $25,000 card. So we would take them back to, in the case of Chase, take them back to the same institution, apply for another Chase card. Most banks allow you to apply for multiple credit cards from the same place. So let’s say that they already gave us

or they only give us 10,000 because they already gave us 25,000 11 months earlier. And I’m low balling this on purpose so that people can get a really good experience when they do it. So let’s say they give you 10,000. What we would do is we would have these two cards merged together. Now you have a $35,000 account because the new $10,000 account is at 0%. The 0 % is now over the entire account. And because you’ve just merged them together,

any balance that was on the $25,000 card doesn’t even need to be paid down or paid off. It’s now back to 0%. This is the only way to turn 0 % back on, on an existing card. And now you’re down to just having one card from that institution again. This is what card stacking is all about. Over multiple rounds, we can build it up to very, very large amounts. We have clients that come to us that already have personal credit cards of 30, 40, 50,000. So when we’re taking them,

for business cards, that’s what they’re getting approved for on the first round is four or five cards at 30, 40, 50,000. Then on the second round, doing the same, the merging process, just building each bank ⁓ exposure in terms of what that bank is offering in totality, just building it larger and larger, keeping it at 0%, facilitating and helping them with the transactions to purchase whatever they need to purchase, even if the company doesn’t accept credit cards.

Mike Hambright (20:53)
Yeah, that’s great. So Ari, if folks want to learn more about how you can help them get ⁓ debt, get some credit card ⁓ access for their business, where do they go?

Ari Page (21:04)
So you can go to fundandgrow.com and that’s Fund and Grow spelled out, Fund and Grow, not with the ampersand sign. But something I wanted to touch on real quick, is credit card points. And the credit card points are really important. Now I know Dave Ramsey is out there saying, why would I wanna spend $100,000 in order to make $3,000? That’s crazy.

Because as we know credit cards will pay you up to 3 % So think about this when I get a mortgage are they ever gonna send me a check? No, you’re paying them when I get an auto loan. They’re never gonna send you a check. There’s literally no loan that will ever pay you Except for credit cards. They’ll pay you up to 3 % of what you’re spending the banks are making so much on these 0 % cards through the merchant

Mike Hambright (21:42)
you

Ari Page (22:01)
that they literally will cut that, split that difference with you and pay you part of that. So they will pay you up to 3 % of what you’re charging through the card. And so again, if you are spending 50,000 a month on payroll, if you run it through your credit card, you’re gonna get 3 % of that back. If you’re spending $100,000 on a flip, run it through the credit card, you’re gonna get 3 % of that back. And in the case where,

a client needs to use the payment services that I mentioned earlier, which could cost up to 3%. It’s really, you’re not paying for that. You’re gonna just do credit card points alone and the cash back. It’s a wash. It’s actually not costing you anything. In some cases, if you just do the check option, pay by check instead of pay by wire, then it’s only gonna be 1.5 % to pay by check. And so that way you’re still making 1.5%. So we’re not encouraging anyone to go out and

spend a hundred thousand to get three thousand. We’re talking about spending that small businesses are doing anyway. They’re forced to do it. They’re running their facilities. They’re paying their payroll. They’re doing all the normal things. Why not put it on a credit card? Why not have the ability for asset protection as well as for cash back? So that’s a huge aspect of it. But anyway, so you asked where people could get to know us. So that’s at fundinggrow.com. They could also call our business development team.

Mike Hambright (23:17)
Yeah, that’s awesome.

Ari Page (23:26)
at 800-996-0270. And we actually walk people through it. We can give them a prequalification of what they qualify for before they get started. We don’t want anyone to get started with us unless there’s perfect alignment, unless their credit is there. If they don’t have good enough credit, then we will recommend what to do to get their credit into a good standing. But yeah, the business development managers are expert at that. And we use a tool.

our tool is a soft pull. So we’re not leaving any hard inquiry when Fund &Grow looks at your credit to determine your credit worthiness. When we move forward and apply for the business credit cards, there’s gonna be inquiries from that, but not when Fund &Grow looks at your credit report. That way we can determine, is this gonna be a good match? Will this work for you? ⁓ And if somebody wants to add a business partner, they can add a business partner at no additional charge.

to their Fund and Grow membership, which kind of, in many cases, and unlocks, ⁓ you know, double the funding if you bring a business partner to the table.

Mike Hambright (24:30)
Yeah, great. Awesome. Well, we’re going to add a link down below for folks to reach out to you guys. We’ll have the phone number down below as well. So thanks for joining today.

Ari Page (24:37)
Awesome. Thank you so much for having me on, Mike.

Mike Hambright (24:39)
Yeah, great to see you buddy. So if you guys are looking for a way to take your business to another level, a lot of times having access to credit to fund that is exactly what you need. Make sure you use it wisely. Make sure you work with somebody that they’re talking about like Ari and his team at Fund and Grow. So appreciate you guys. Check the links down below and we’ll see you on the next show.