If you pay attention at all to reports on the economy, concerns about small businesses foundering, and all the talk about President Obama’s stimulus, you’ll know that small businesses have had a hard time getting financing as the economy has fallen, and that the stimulus bill was meant to make small business loans easier to get.

But is it working?

Well, it may be too early to say yet, according to many of the articles I’ve seen online, because there is still a lot of talk about whether the stimulus is going to help, etc. etc.  Just the usual act of analyzing something to death before it even starts to have an impact.

Unfortunately, what I have seen is an indication that the stimulus is benefitting a group of people we didn’t intend to at all: scammers!  The stimulus has created an opening for small business loan scams that take advantage of uninformed small business owners.  Although the stimulus does NOT give money directly to small businesses, some scammers are pretending it does to business owners who don’t know any better.  Will this have the effect of making small business owners a little gun shy about trying to get loans?

So is the stimulus actually helping small business owners?  Hard to say just yet.  And for entrepreneurs who need loans NOW, they may not have the time to wait around and find out.  Luckily I have seen some alternative ways for small businesses to get financing.  For instance, this company offers a merchant cash advance loan program to retailers who use them for online payment processing.  Paying the loan back is easy, too — a certain percentage of your credit card payments is simply withheld as payment until the loan is paid back.

Will the stimulus help small businesses and revive the economy?  Only time will tell, but in the meantime there are still plenty of us who need to take matters into our own hands.  We can’t afford to wait around and see what happens!

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