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When it comes to getting financing for your small business, you might be surprised to hear that your personal credit score matters–a lot.

The reason is actually pretty simple: business lenders will see your credit score as a reflection of your reliability as a borrower. Your personal credit score measures your repayment history for personal matters, it’s true, but lenders assume that your private financial habits will mirror how you deal with your small business.

A higher credit score means that you’ve been more responsible with auto loans, student loans, mortgages, and so on–and lenders assume that’ll extend to small business loans, too. Better credit means more trust, and the more they trust you, the more likely it is that they’ll loan you that capital you need.

So, want to finance that expansion, afford new equipment, or refinance your old debt? Look to your credit score to figure out what a lender will think of your business’s ability to repay a loan.
Figuring out your own credit score isn’t too tough–just sign up for AnnualCreditReport.com or CreditKarma–but that three-digit number will help a lot more if you can put it in context. Let’s talk about the average credit score range for small business owners, and why it matters for you.

What’s the data show?

The following data comes from Fundera’s customer base–more than 22,000 small business owners–who applied with Fundera from February 2014 to mid-March 2016. It tells the story of the average credit score range for the small business owners that Fundera has helped with business financing.

It’s important to note that this average credit score range only includes our funded customers: small business owners who came to Fundera looking for financing, found the loan products that made sense for their business, and took out those loans.

So here’s the data deal–the middle-of-the-range small business owner who gets a loan through Fundera has a “Good” credit score between 620 and 660, and about 70% of small business owners we help find funding have credit scores of 620 or higher. There’s also a big jump of small business owners who get loans from below to above a 620 credit score, indicating that this seems to be an important number for small business lenders.

Now, that doesn’t mean a lower credit score will necessarily stop you from getting financing or that a higher one will guarantee you a loan: this is just correlation.

But what it does mean is that, if you’re below the average credit score range here, you’ve definitely got some work to do. Every small business needs financing to help take things to the next level, so don’t leave it up to fate or the generosity of a lender–strengthening your credit score is a proven way to up the probability of getting a loan.

Your credit score and APR

A higher credit score is strongly correlated not just with more loan eligibility but also lower APRs.

That’s right: generally speaking, the higher your credit score, the more loan products you can pick from and the lower their APRs will be.

Here’s how your credit score matches up with the kinds of loans you’re likely to qualify for:

And here’s an illustration of the relationship between your credit score and average loan APR:

This data shows how higher credit scores match up with less expensive loans–like an SBA loan with a median APR of about 7%–while the lowest credit scores tend to pair with short-term loans with 40+% APRs.

It also shows a distinct trend: as the average credit score increases, the median APR decreases. While you might have thought your personal credit score would be totally irrelevant to getting financing for your business, it turns out that your score actually has a big impact on the availability and cost of that funding.

All things considered, your credit score seems pretty important now, right? It’ll affect what loans you can get from a lender as well as how much those loans will cost: definitely not something to take lightly!

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Understanding how you measure up to other business owners in terms of credit score will help you predict what kinds of funding you can get for your business–and what it’ll cost you. Take care to improve your credit score in order to get the most flexible and affordable options out there.

This article was originally published on the Fundera Ledger on May 4, 2016

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After months of wondering if he would ever be seen again, a black bear who walks upright was caught on camera roaming through a New Jersey neighborhood. 

Best known as Pedals, the adored animal travels on his hind legs because of wounds sustained to his front paws, according NJ.com. Pedals was last seen in December, but his injuries raised concern that he might not survive the winter.

To the delight of many, Pedals re-emerged on Monday in Oak Ridge, near the Old Woodland trail. Footage shows Pedals sauntering though the grass, or as the Dodo put it, “moseying along just as he had before — up on two legs, like a big furry person.”

The sighting is sure to rejuvenate Pedals’ internet celebrity status. The bear already has over 12,000 fans on a dedicated Facebook page. 

 Just walking along, nothing to see here.

There is no debate. The people of New Jersey love Pedals.

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Most people with a smartphone are constantly tapped into some form of social media. Sharing cute pictures of kids and pets is simply a routine part of life these days. Some people even use social media to vent frustrations or look for advice.

In a divorce case, however, shares on social media can create ample evidence that can be used against one or both parties to affect alimony, child support, child custody, and more.

Email and Text Messages
Email and text messages are admissible in court and can even be subpoenaed. If one party in the marriage reveals something about a new job or an upcoming bonus that hasn’t been revealed in court, this can be used as evidence that the person isn’t being honest in his or her financial declarations.

Someone once claimed in court that he didn’t have a job, yet he posted about his job online (along with the expensive vacations he took with his girlfriend). With this evidence in court, his request for alimony was denied.

Lawyers advise people to keep all written communication free of sensitive information during a divorce. If you wouldn’t want a judge reading it, don’t write it – anywhere.

Finances
Most people don’t list their income on social media, but they find plenty of other ways to brag about their financial prosperity. If someone claims a low income to avoid high alimony or child support payments but posts pictures of expensive vacations or purchases, this can be used against him or her in court.

Even when a spouse is blocked from seeing his estranged wife’s social media, he can still often see what her friends are posting. If she goes on an expensive vacation with a mutual friend and that friend makes a post about the trip, the spouse can use this evidence to prove that his wife isn’t being honest in her finances.

Ben Carrasco, a divorce attorney in Austin, Texas, reports once using a LinkedIn profile to show the existence of a side business (another source of income) that a party had not disclosed in discovery. This information helped his client secure more child support than she would have otherwise received. “It’s amazing the wealth of information now at our fingertips in a divorce case” says Mr. Carrasco. “What would have once taken weeks of research to discover, if at all, can now be found in the click of a mouse”.

Dating Sites
Creating a profile on an online dating site before a divorce is finalized is foolish. Not only does it show evidence of potential cheating, but most people present themselves differently in an online profile than they do in person. If someone is caught saying something different on a dating site than is said in court, it can lead to problems in the divorce case.

Child Custody
Social media reveals what people are doing, where they’re doing it, and when it’s happening. If a mother is working through a child custody case, but posts pictures that show she was drunk when she should have been watching the children, a judge may rule that the children will not be properly cared for by her.

If one party is supposed to be searching for a job, but posts pictures and status updates that reveal he’s playing video games all day, the judge may rule harshly on alimony and child support decisions.

How to Prevent Negative Effects From Social Media
The best thing to do to avoid social media ruining any portion of a divorce case is to simply stop using it. Many people may be tempted to actually delete their accounts and scrub their online lives. However, once litigation has begun, social media becomes evidence. Deleting accounts is actually a destruction of evidence and can cause a lawyer to be sanctioned.

One thing is for sure. If you’re going through a divorce, you can be certain your spouse and lawyer are combing through your online life. Protect yourself by staying away from all of your social media related accounts until the divorce is finalized.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

On Wednesday, my hometown of Cleveland hosted a once-in-a-lifetime celebration for our beloved Cavaliers who, led by native son LeBron James, had just stunned the sports world and won the NBA championship. I was there in spirit. But I no longer live in Cleveland and the realities of everyday life precluded witnessing it in person with 1.5 million fellow fans.

By now the narrative is familiar. James, the prodigal son, returned home and willed his underdog team to the title. Clevelanders, who had not celebrated a major professional sports championship in 52 years, rejoiced in the streets, in bars and restaurants, on the internet, and everywhere else, having finally experienced victory after so many years of heartbreaking defeats.

As the clock struck zero on the Cavaliers historic win and my wife and I finished hugging and generally losing our minds, my phone initially received and produced a feverish rush of text messages. In this day and age where phone calls are no longer a baseline form of communication but signal something more personal, I then chose to call my cousin. We grew up together in Cleveland and had shared a lifetime of sports heartbreak. As I was doing this, my parents and my aunt (my cousin’s mother) also called me. Eventually, I spoke with all of them and we shared our disbelief and unbridled joy at this miraculous outcome that was a lifetime in the making. I went to bed that night and woke up the next morning happier than I’d ever been because of any sporting event.

The next morning, the news was filled with scenes of celebration in Cleveland. People hugged, they cried, they smiled, they took pictures. As I watched this and as I continued to feel overjoyed by the Cavaliers victory, I realized that Cleveland sports had given me something extraordinarily unique. It had me feel that me and my family were truly American in a way that nothing else ever had.

When my parents came to Cleveland from India in the early 70s, the Indian- and South Asian-American community in the United States was relatively small. In a mid-size city like Cleveland, where nearly everyone was either Caucasian or African-American, it felt tiny. My parents’ entire social life was centered around that community and there was never any doubt that all of us were outsiders.

Cleveland is a sports-crazed town and growing up there my Indian-American peers and I, like all the other kids in Cleveland, learned to live and die with our sports teams. For me, talking about sports was about the only time my sense of otherness dissipated. I could talk about the Browns or the Cavaliers and, in that moment, I was just an average American kid, no different than anyone else.

Over time, as we the kids grew to follow Cleveland sports, our parents did as well. When your children and everyone else around you shows so much interest in something, you’re bound to eventually get pulled in as well. We ritualistically watched the Cleveland teams on television, we explained the finer details of the rules and strategy to our parents, they took us to games every so often, and they bought us Cleveland sports teams’ merchandise for our birthdays. And if the game was important enough, we’d gather together at someone’s house and watch as a small community. The fathers would yell at the referees and the mothers would bring out gameday foods to snack on. Sure, the yelling was in Hindi or maybe accented English and often mixed terminology from different sports (“penalty” instead of “foul” or vice-versa). And the gameday foods were pakoras or samosas rather than hamburgers, hot dogs, or french fries. But in those moments, we did what all other Clevelanders did and Cleveland sports became one of our traditions.

As decades have passed, Indian-Americans and our culture have become an unmistakable part of the cultural tapestry in many large cities. Other Americans eat our food regularly, they travel to India for pleasure, they’ve danced Banghra at weddings. Given the sense of otherness and alienation I frequently felt growing up, I marvel at how well accepted we and our traditions are now in certain places, including where I live. I think of how nice it might have been for my father not to have always had to repeat himself even though he was speaking English because people were not used to hearing an Indian accent. Or for my mother not to have been stared at while wearing a sari for an event because people had not seen that style of clothing before. Or for me not to be asked time and time again why my mother wears that red dot on her head.

Because our culture was so foreign and our community relatively small, my parents and their peers, and to a lesser extent me and my peers, effectively had no choice but to try and become a part of the culture that surrounded us. In Cleveland, that meant religiously following sports teams. Had we lived somewhere else or in a different time, we might not have needed to do that. My parents might not have learned the rules of unfamiliar sports like football and baseball that they never wanted their children to play. They might not have known about Bernie Kosar or Brad Daugherty or now LeBron James in attempting to connect with the non-Indian-Americans around us.

But had they not, we all would have missed a truly special moment on Sunday night after the Cavaliers victory. Clevelanders everywhere, present and past, called their parents or children or uncles or nieces basking in the excitement of our long-awaited championship. My family and I were no different. Had we grown up somewhere else and my parents or I never been forced to immerse ourselves into the dominant sports culture, we never would have had that moment. We never would have shared a singular joy that left us feeling as American as every other person from our city.

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Amazon just racked up two more fines—amounting to a total of $130,000—from the FAA for improperly shipping dangerous chemicals. Turns out putting acid and flammable gas into a box and putting it on an airplane is not okay.

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