The new promotion from the Discover Business Card has some nice features… First, you can earn a $100 Cashback Bonus when you make $1000 in purchases within 3 months after your account is opened. You can get 5% back on office supplies, 2% on gas, up to 1% on all other purchases.
On top of that, it has 0% APR for 12 months for both purchases and balance transfers for 12 months. Since the purchases are also at 0%, there is no hurry to pay that initial $1,000 off. For balance transfers, there is 3% fee for each balance transfer, with a minimum of $5 and a maximum of $75. This is not bad in the current credit card environment. Even if you do not have a higher interest balance to transfer here, this might be worth making some free money off of, especially since the $100 incentive basically negates the balance transfer fee and then some.
Another interesting feature is the advertised “Fee-free Purchasechecks that earn Cashback Bonus®. to pay merchants who don’t accept credit cards”. I was excited by the prospect of earning rewards by simply writing a check, but then I saw this in the fine print: “APR for PurchaseCheck Purchases: 13.99%”. Ouch.
As with all these business cards, individuals can apply as sole proprietors by simply using their name as the business name. You just need to put your Social Security number as requested, and leave the Federal Tax ID blank for this application (it will use your SSN). More $100 bonuses listed here.
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Thanks for the post Jonathan.
Let me get this straight — even if you don’t have a business, you can apply for the card as sole proprietor by providing my SSN as I would to apply for a personal credit card? Is there a catch here?
Pam, that what I did. Then reallocated exess credit limit from my personal card to the business card and used the 0% intro apr to put money in the bank for 12 months.
I don’t know if I can spend enough in the first 3 months to get the $100 bonus, but still doesn’t seem like a bad card to do a balance transfer with anyway. If I manage to get the bonus, that’d wipe out the balance transfer fee.
Has anyone had any luck with a balance transfer to Chase? I currently have a very small balance on one of my cards, but I wonder what kind of hassle it is to get the money after that.
I would only use this card for the 0% stuff and the $100 bonus if you normally spend $1,000 in 3 months. Other than that, the American Express Simply Cash business card gives you 5% on Office Supplies, Gas and Wireless Bills, 1% everything else which makes it a better card for spending in general.
It says you get fee-free purchase checks. So that would be a better option than the balance transfer.
What I hate is that Chase and others like to put a 3-4% of balance transfer fee in there at rates like 13.9%, so is it really 0%? Not really. So, when doing your calculations, don’t forget to figure that in.
I know, read the details…
Although my husband and I both have business names registered, I decided to just put in his name as the business when applying for the card today, per Johnathan’s instructions. It didn’t approve immediately, and Discover called to verify all the info within minutes. We have perfect credit and our house is paid off.
We had to give them the business name to get the card approved, or they gave us that impression. We didn’t have to have an employer number, but they seemed to require a business name.
Other than that, thanks for the tip, Johnathan. I try to read your posts daily, just for this reason! I’m always looking for great cash back deals!
So let me get this straight, you get $100 back for 1K spent (essentially 10% cashback) in 3 months, plus on top of that you get additional 2% cashback for gas and 1% for all other purchases, PLUS 0% APR on BT and purchase with capped BT fee….thats a heck of a deal to me!
So perhaps a good strategy would be to charge everything on this card for 3 months (to get the $100 back), pay off the balance, then do a BT for 12 months.
if you buy something and then return it, do you still get to keep the cashback bonus? (theoretically you could return it on a different card, then they’ll never know but last time i checked stores ask to put money back on the same card you used for the purchase)