Over the past few months I've become aware of Fund & Grow as a financing option (I heard about it on the Clayton Morris podcast), and I was really intrigued by it.
Their promise: You give us $3K up front, we'll give you access to up to $250K of unsecured business credit at 0% that doesn't impact your personal credit in any way. You can even get cash off these credit lines to use to pay a down payment on a house (effectively giving you 100% financing on a deal).
Sounds too good to be true, right?
I figured I could turn to these forums to debunk these myths, but while there were a number of posts of people asking questions about them, I didn't find a whole lot of really concrete answers. A few folks had gone through with it, but either 1) they didn't have great credit to start with, so they spent a lot of time repairing their credit first, or 2) they found other hard money financing methods along the way and didn't finish out the year's worth of work to get the full amount.
I was very inspired by some case studies about Morris Invest (thank you Tyler Jahnke et. all) to just go ahead and go through with this, and then write regular updates for you all so we can learn, together, once and for all, whether this method works!
My background/why I'm interested in this product: I'm a newbie investor looking to augment my nest egg so as to be able to either put in all-cash offers on properties, or be able to BRRR with 100% financing so as to repeat more often.
My stats:
- 800 credit score
- 110K in available personal credit lines already
- ~1% of existing credit line utilization
The timeline:
Early January 2018: After hearing about Fund & Grow on Clayton Morris' podcast, I decided to give them an initial call. I ask them questions about how well I'd fare under their program, why their credit wouldn't show up on my personal statement, etc. I spoke to Cathy in their sales department; she was very helpful and assured me that I'd do very well, and was looking at receiving in the "upper end" of their $50K-$250K of promised credit in the first year. Interestingly, she also said that if at the end of the first year I chose to re-up with them and give them another $3K, they could get me another year of 0% financing. I asked about being able to cash out the cards to make a down payment on a house; she assured me they had a strategy to do that without a fee! I was intrigued, but didn't make a decision right away.
January 26: After attending a real estate meetup in my area where someone who was very successful told me to get as much credit as I could while I didn't "need it" and use it to buy houses, I decided to call them again and ask some final questions. I again spoke to Cathy; I asked her how I could possibly get business credit when I didn't yet have a business, and that business wouldn't have any income for quite some time even once I created it. Without giving away their strategy on this forum, she basically told me they had a method to "backdate" a business entity. I asked her about whether a lender would be concerned when I went to do a cash-out refinancing that I had all this credit card debt; she responded that this debt wouldn't appear on my personal credit report because it was business credit. I finally asked her about their money-back guarantee in case all of this didn't pan out; she told me I could get my money back for any reason (I believe) within 60 days.
I decided to pull the trigger. I decided to pay half now, half in 30 days so I could get a quick sense of how things were going. It was $3500 with a $500 discount from Clayton Morris's ad, so this was ~$1875 with taxes per payment.
The first step was filling out paperwork so they could run my credit. Then I booked an appointment with a credit specialist for this coming Thursday, Feb 1, to officially kick off the process!
I'll update everyone again after my meeting on Thursday, and I'll post regular updates here as credit comes in and as I try to get cash off the cards!
