Business Loan

When you're ready to start a small business, the best first step you can take is to find funding for that business. One of the biggest reason 95% of businesses fail in the first one to five years is due to lack of funding. So getting funds from somewhere can be critical to your small business success.

Thankfully there are many ways to fund a small business. Due to its very nature, the smallness of a small business makes it much easier to fund. The downside of course, is that many traditional funding sources won't often be interested, because there's no much return on the investment for them. So this article will look at some practical, everyday ways to get small business funding.

1. Credit - If you have a line of personal credit at your local bank, or you have credit cards with enough available funds on them, an easy way to get small business funding is to simply use these. The credit cards are a very expensive way to get funding for your small business though, so many people leave this as a last resort.

2. Family - Many small businesses get their initial funding from friends and family. Whether it's given as a loan, a gift, or as an investment will be up to how you'd like to structure the agreement. When you get small business funding from friends or family, it's just as important to have a written agreement in place with them as it is if you get your funding from other sources. This will lessen the potential for any problems down the road.

3. Clean House - An excellent way may people get their first small business funding is by simply cleaning their house. Instead of throwing things away though, they have a giant yard sale, take everything to a local flea market, or sell it at an online auction site such as Ebay. Sometimes you can make several thousand dollars from a weekend yard sale or flea market visit, and this is often more than enough funding to get a lot of small businesses started.

4. Lifestyle Changes - A more drastic move which works for many people, is to simply change their lifestyle. If for instance, you have several cars you're paying $300 a month for, you can scale down to just one and have an extra $600 a month to use for funding your small business. The same applies for your living quarters. If you're living in a home or apartment which costs $1500 each month, but are willing to scale down to something more along the lines of $900 or $1000 per month, you'll have several hundred dollars more each month to use for funding your business.

Another way to incorporate lifestyle changes without scaling down is to simply get a second job. Whether part time or full time, getting a second job and putting all of those earnings away into savings for one year is often an excellent source of small business funding.