As a business owner, your cashflow may not be well balanced: some days/weeks/months it’s all go, but the next day/week/month cashflow stagnates. The business is there, you have clients, but perhaps your client-base is seasonal in nature. Certainly, in ours summer and winter vacation times are SLOW periods.

Restaurants, like many businesses, have such a seasonal nature. So, as a boss, how do you finance some of the things that happen such as, renovation, buying out a partner, getting a license to sell alcohol, or even opening a new location?

If you don’t have the capital, companies can and do provide short term, working capital loans for small to medium-sized restaurants, Restaurant Loans are available that you can apply for.

This provides a number of advantages for the small business owner, not least, you don’t have to find additional cash perhaps at a time when business is slow. In addition, because it’s a loan, you can actually deduct the loan costs from your business’s tax bill. Lastly, though, if the loan is for expansion, the additional revenue from the expansion should increase your profits, thereby increasing your ROI by a healthy amount and your business’s value.

Naturally, such loans will have contracts the fine print of which you MUST understand before you jump in.

Sponsored by Advance Restaurant Finance.

I purchased my first car at the age of 39! Now for most people that is quite ‘elderly’ to be the first time to purchase a car, but where we live has mostly excellent transportation via MRT, bus, taxi, etc. so we managed to get by without a car for quite a while. However, owning a car is a real education, as I suggested elsewhere.

Nowhere more so than getting good car insurance. We purchased our first car insurance from the company that sold us the car, which eased our transition into car ownership as there were enough new problems to deal with at the time. However, in retrospect, this may not have been a good choice.

We renewed the insurance in 2006 with some misgivings, but in 2007, when our insurance went up by more than 20%, and our coverage for the car went down, we actually decided it was time to do something about. So we went over the actual insurance form in detail, and discovered an almost arbitrary charging system over the previous two years. So, we took a red pen, and ruled out most of the expensive charges. I guess that was vengeance on the Insurance company involved.

Little did we know that we could compare car insurance just by visiting a website and getting the quotes. Geez! If we had known that, we would have been a lot more careful! Anyway, they offer a variety of insurance companies that can provide you with quotes. In addition, Insure121 also offers similar help on home insurance.

When purchasing any product for insurance, investment, banking, credit card, or whatever, be wise: read the small print, understand what the policy actually covers, NOT what you would like it to provide. If you are in doubt, talk it over with someone in the know. Make sure that there are NO unexpected surprises.

Having traveled thousands of miles on flights between Asia and Europe, I was stupid not to realize the virtue of air miles. Over the years, I have foregone so many thousands of miles, it’s enough to make me cry all over my credit card statements! Such frequent flyer programs provide regular and long distance flyers with ample bonuses.

Even better, nowadays flyers can get airmiles credit cards like, for example, the Discover card that offers a number of benefits:

• No Annual Fee
• Earn 12,000 Bonus Miles
• 0% APR on Balance Transfers and Purchases for up to 12 Months
• Earn 1 Mile for Each Dollar You Spend
• Air Travel Rewards have No Blackout Dates
• Flexible Rewards to Fit Your Plans

In other words, you get bonus miles, plus 1 mile per dollar. You can get Travel Rewards without worrying about so-called Blackout Dates (ie. you don’t have to avoid flying on certain dates when you are using your miles). However this card allows you to purchase tickets on most airlines AND use your airmiles. Now that’s quite neat.

Naturally, there are a wealth of other cards available for the ambitious investorblogger-on-the-go. So, before you sign the application form, you need to consider your pattern of use carefully. And, since they are credit cards, you need to be aware of the FULL costs of using a particular credit card, including fees (annual, penalties, transfers, etc..), interest rates (you don’t want to be paying 30% pa interest!), and the billing cycle period. You DO want to read the small print!

This is a sponsored post by CreditCardAssist.