This episode reveals banking relationship strategies including securing multiple years of 0% APR credit cards through direct banker requests and accessing Chase’s sweep account feature that generates 5% overnight interest on business checking balances while maintaining full next-day liquidity.
Key Takeaways:
- 0% APR Cards Renewable Through Direct Requests After paying off initial 12-month 0% APR period, bankers can extend another year repeatedly for established customers, enabling aggressive cash conversion cycles.
- Sweep Accounts Earn 5% Risk-Free Overnight Business checking funds automatically move into T-bills overnight and return by morning, eliminating cash drag while preserving same-day access for deal execution.
- Regional Banks Not Required for Premium Services Large institutions like Chase offer sophisticated treasury management to high-balance customers, contradicting conventional wisdom favoring regional banks exclusively.
The sweep account feature requires no action from the account holder and carries virtually no risk since funds return each business morning with full liquidity maintained.
(Podcast transcript below)
Hey, welcome to Get Serious. Today’s topic going to be diving into banking relationships a bit more here. So I know who we utilize as a financial institution. You know, a lot of folks will just kind of treat it as transactional as it gets, you know, especially if you’re working with a larger bank, but the
more years that pass by as a business owner, like the more realize, you know, it’s just another relationship to nurture and develop. And, know, the team who is managing your, you know, holding, holding your actual funds, you should probably have a pretty close relationship with them ideally, because, you know, they have full insight into your
Accounts and the more that you you knock on wood grow the more opportunities there will probably be to take advantage of additional services When it comes to managing your business’s finances so My partner and I we use chase and Been using them from the start my partner has a separate business within
single family rentals that, you he had established chase relationship for several years prior to that. So it was an easy route to kind of build this separate business and still utilize a lot of the relationships that had already been started. And, you know, within this industry, a lot of talk goes toward, you know, if you’re looking for cheaper debt financing, especially for possible subdivide projects.
Um, you’ll want to develop a relationship with the regional bank over a period of years. And that certainly can be the case because, you know, chase there, there, there, there, they’re not going to provide financing for development, uh, projects. So that is a, uh, you know, unless you’re like, you know, very, very large, but even then, um, uh, they’re not as routinely underwriting, uh,
you know, even seven or mid eight figure projects. And correct me if I’m wrong from that, but my understanding is that’s not usually the case for some of these larger banks. So then it’s always like, okay, yeah, develop relationship, regional bank, so you can get some of the cheaper financing.
to fund your various deals that you might be bringing with them. So that can certainly be the case there. But because we’re not as often leveraging debt financing, it’s generally equity or we’ll just pull from personal lines of credit as needed, which…
you know, is a pathway that was opened up through Chase in the first place with some pretty intriguing products that we’ve utilized. So there’s a lot more flexibility, the more and more that I dive in and, you know, kind of keep in touch with our business relationship banker. Like I was just getting off a call earlier today because one of our
or our core business checking account. guess Chase Bank has a separate private bank, is usually for, you know, some of their highest tier clients. you need like 10 million within your Chase accounts, usually personally. it’s a, not a lot of people can get that. And somehow when my partners got access,
to that, I mean, it’s based out in New York. And so our business account was under private bank, but the regular Chase services doesn’t have access to that. And so the backend was just getting all messed up because I’m like, well, I want to link my account so that I’m not getting charged some wire fees for some of our other special purpose vehicle accounts. I’m throwing a lot of jargon at you, but just suffice to say, like there were other accounts.
Within my overall chase portal that I’m like, well, I shouldn’t be getting charged wires for this You know because they should all be linked within like the primary services that I have for that core account But because it was set up with a different Branch within chase. It’s like okay. We need to set up a whole nother one. So we were able to get that done And so now that just makes it much more efficient
from both the capital and just the Chase backend perspective of ensuring that we won’t get charged any extra fees throughout our other accounts within Chase. And it also gave us the opportunity to get a new credit card set up for this new account that we just opened up.
So, to me, one of the best perks for credit cards, and there’s only a handful of them that do that, is the 0 % APR for a whole year. Because if we can get a decent credit limit, like all of a sudden you can just run your cash conversions cycle, doesn’t need to be nearly as tight. If you can just settle a ton of business expenses, yeah, with the understanding that you still have to have.
fiscal responsibility to eventually pay it off in a year. But if you don’t have that monthly credit card bill piling up, then all of sudden you can just stack a payment for a full year and potentially run a more aggressive business since your routine cashflow is not quite as important again.
Be very careful in terms of knowing, don’t get too over-leveraged to where you’re not going to be able to pay off your credit card in any year and then face sky high interest rates. So that should go without saying, but when you look at how many people are in credit card debt in this country, it bears worth reminding. So we had already used up that full year.
with the previous version of credit card that we had, because we just opened up this new account, it’s like, okay, yeah. And it wasn’t necessarily offered. It’s just, you you just got to get used to asking for things. Like I really have no shame, no guilt about just say, hey, what perks can you give me here? Like, you know, can we get this credit card opened up? You know, been a customer a long time. We have a lot of liquidity within Chase. You know, can you hook me up with another year’s worth of zero?
And so we were able to get that set up. No questions asked from that side. And in fact, an even better avenue, which I didn’t even know to ask for, because I thought, okay, once one of these cards runs out, you’re not going to get that perk anymore. through my landpricer account, which as I talked about before, just threw a whole bunch of initial business expenses onto a 0 % APR credit card.
with the expectation of running up revenue at some point in the future. And obviously things got delayed, but you I haven’t had to pay off that, that credit card balance up until, well, I still have like two and a half months before I have to pay the main one and chase. But my banker was also like, yeah, as soon as you pay that one off and that year goes up, like just email me and I will,
update that credit card again to just give you another year of 0 % APR. So it might even be something like every time that passes now, I’ll just ask, you know, Hey, can we get another year here? So then you can just roll, you know, basically make a balloon payment at the end if you’re an established customer and like, yeah, why not? They have the power to offer some of these services. And again, this is a large bank offering this so
To me, that’s just such a huge advantage because then it’s just, less of a cash crunch. Again, really being mindful. Don’t put yourself in a spot where you can’t pay things off in a year. Like have a slush fund or some investments that can cover that owed debt, regardless of what happens. So, you know, that has to be your key decision-making.
but that was an excellent service to throw on there. That’s only going to help us. And then I hadn’t heard of this before, but there’s a sweep account and I guess this isn’t like routinely offered, you know, the higher tier customers, all that type of stuff, but probably only takes a phone call. And I’m telling you guys here this now. but yeah, this sweep account, which, you know, for accounts that you still want to maintain a lot of liquidity like us, I mean, we’re funders, right? I want to be able to pull my cash.
you know, any given day, if I want to do like a quick transactional deal, drop of a dime, here we go. What they can do within these sweep accounts is that after business hours, Chase will basically rehypothecate the cash within your account into some interest bearing account overnight that pays you roughly 5 % interest.
and very low risk investments, T-bills, et cetera. And then by the time the next business day starts, you have your full liquidity back. So to me, there’s like literally no downside. So as long as you believe in some of those low risk investment avenues, which is about as safe as it gets, it’s like, yeah, why wouldn’t you want your…
liquidity earning an extra 5 % overnight can make a decent difference or at least try to keep up with inflation over the year. I wish I would have known about this years ago, but better late than never about this. But it always comes down to like the cash drag situation because ideally we have as much of our cash.
out of our account and into actual deals, which theoretically are earning more on an exit perspective than the equity preference we have built within our LLC agreement, which is higher than 5%. So, but it still earns us more than what we would be getting otherwise.
So really cool feature, if you don’t already have that set up, I would ask your banker about that because there’s very rarely like no-brainer type solutions like that, like real shortcuts to manage your funds a little bit better. I didn’t even have to think twice about, okay, yes, this is solid, let’s get this set up here.
and, know, we’re going to have a final meeting for it. I don’t believe there’s any catch to it. I’ll be sure to ask those various questions. I’ll ask AI about it. but, it seems like, okay, here’s another way that we can just, you know, ease the, the damage of cash drag a bit more. and, you know, may as well take advantage of any possible avenue, especially in a more uncertain macro environment. so those are a couple of other learnings here and,
You know, again, just, you know, I know banking relationships, get tossed aside very often or, you know, it’s usually last thing on your plate. Um, but you know, the bankers compliment, he’s like, Hey, you know, I appreciate how on top of things you are, know, emails back and forth. Mike, I mean, you get, guys, you you manage a lot of our, our, our, money. Like I want to ensure that we’re, um, you know, being efficient and smart about this. So, uh, you know, it is, you know, even operating with a huge bank like
chase, it’s still possible to develop more of a personal relationship with them. Even more than you would think. So just want to share some more experience there. Hopefully that’s helpful to you all. If you’re for funding, serious land capital, I’ve got to jump into some reviews right after this land daily diligence, Facebook group for zero cost review of your land deals and landpricer.ai for the most reliable land pricing tool on the market. Subscribe and share. Take care everybody. Bye.
