Why You Should Never Use Your Personal Credit Card for Business
Never use your personal credit card when making business purchases. One advantage is that many business credit card issues don’t report to the personal credit bureaus so this can actually keep your credit score intact.
For example, there may be times when you’ll need to max out your credit card to purchase inventory or equipment, or ramp up your advertising during your peak season. If you do this on your personal credit card, the card issuer will report this to the major credit bureaus. This will tank your credit score because of your high credit utilization.
However, if you make the same purchase on a business credit card that doesn’t report to the personal credit bureaus, you’ll keep your credit score safe.
According to Credit Karma, here are issuer policies for each bank that issues business credit cards in regards to reporting to the personal credit bureaus. Please note this can change at any time so check with the issuer periodically.
- American Express: Reports if your account isn’t in good standing.
- Bank of America: Reports if the account is delinquent.
- Barclays: May choose to report, depending on the situation.
- Capital One: Reports account activity.
- Chase: Reports if the account is more than 60 days delinquent.
- Citi: May not report account activity.
- Discover: Reports account activity.
- S. Bank: May not report account activity.
- Wells Fargo: May not report account activity.
I have business cards with American Express, Bank of America, Chase and Citi, and none of them show up on my personal credit report.
Capital One and Discover definitely report so keep that in mind if you are considering applying for one of their business cards.
If you’d like to get prequalified for 0% APR business credit cards, please fill out the following form. There is no impact to your credit score to get prequalified.