For more than one-third of small U.S. business owners, keeping their ventures alive during the coronavirus pandemic is coming at a high personal cost, Bloomberg News reported. Seven in 10 small business owners say they’ve used some form of support for their business since March, according to a new CreditCards.com survey. The most common option was PPP loans, with 30 percent of respondents saying that they received one, followed by 24 percent saying they turned to personal credit cards and business savings accounts. In total, 35 percent of owners used either personal credit cards or savings accounts, with 10 percent using both, to support their business. Now, small business owners are looking to customers to help them out: Some 32 percent of respondents said they need sales to increase for them to stay afloat this year. About one-in-five said they would need government assistance — a $669 billion federal relief program has doled out funds, and more money is being considered. More than half of respondents say they won’t survive long past the new year without additional support. Read more.
In related news, U.S. states hit hardest by COVID-19 had some of the biggest jumps in small business loan defaults since the onset of the pandemic, and some of the highest rates of default overall, according to data provided to Reuters on Friday by PayNet, a division of credit tracking company Equifax Inc. From February, before the scourge, to June, the most recent data available, defaults among small businesses rose fastest in New York, where the disease has killed more people than in any other state. Louisiana, the state with the highest per-capita case count as of the end of July, had the fourth-highest default rate among small businesses, the PayNet data shows. Florida, with the fourth-highest per-capita COVID-19 case count, had the highest default rate of any state, at 4.29 percent. Read more.
