In a tight credit market, businesses sometimes take funding wherever they can find it. But money that seems easy now may prove extremely difficult later. That’s especially true with a fast-growing and risky new product for businesses, the merchant cash advance, or MCA.
Managing Your Debt
Only a short time after husband-and-wife entrepreneurs Karen Cooley and Eric Favier bought a friend’s restaurant in 1991, they had their first taste of success. Sales at their Tallahassee, Florida, restaurant, Chez Pierre, had more than doubled in response to savvy marketing and expanded kitchen hours. But after five successful years at the location, the federal government acquired the restaurant’s property to expand a nearby courthouse. “We were given one of those ‘When life gives you lemons, make lemonade’ kind of scenarios, and we had to move our business,” says Cooley, 48…
5 Smart Strategies for Managing Your Debt
Americans are working hard to reduce individual debt burdens. In some cases, unfortunately, we are simply swapping one liability for another, data from theFederal Reserve show—cutting, say, credit card debt while adding education debt. Still, overall our burden is in decline. Consumers have cut debt by $100 billion in less than a year, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.