The Struggles of Applying for a TSBCI Loan in East Texas

The Struggles of Getting a TSBCI Loan in East Texas

As a new business, we are always looking for a business loan or grant to help our business grow.  The other day I was taking some time to watch Matthew Leslo on YouTube.  He was discussing the numerous grant and loans that are available to small and disadvantage business owners and he was telling me about the Department of Treasury and that is when I came across the TSBCI loans.  Apparently, according to Matthew Leslo the government sets aside approx. 15,000$ to each American every year.  So we wanted to do a little investigation to find out if it is true.    You can visit Matthew Leslo's You Tube channel by clicking here!

So I visited the Department of Treasury website and I emailed the government so that I could find out where the billions of dollars that is being set aside to help business owners progress in East Texas and I was mailed a flyer of a list of banks who are participation is the TSBCI loan program. These are the institutions that were listed on the flyer: (let us go through them one by one)

Southwestern National Bank : 

I placed a call to the Southwestern Nation Bank and the loan officer that I spoke to told me that yes they received money from the Treasury department but that they have no launched the program just yet. So I thought great, a run around. 

Wallis Bank:

I placed a call to the Wallis Bank to inquire about the TSBCI loan program and their officers didn't even know what I was talking about and took my number to call me back.  I went to their website to inquire about the TSBCI business loan there and their website routed me to the SBA.gov website.  This is a little fishy to me.

BC of Texas:

I gave the BC of Texas a call to inquire about TSBCI loan program and I spoke to a manager with the company and he told me to apply on his website at by submitting a simple inquiry to his loan officers, so I did that and now I am just waiting on the reply back.

Capital Impact Partners

I placed a call to the Capital Impact Partners organization to inquire again about the TSBCI loan and I received a recording and I will probably never receive a call back from them, but I went ahead and emailed the company in hopes that I would receive a call back. I did email the directing loan officer over that organization to inquire  about the TSBCI loan program.

CDC Small Business Loaning Program

I was able to apply at the CDC Small Business Loan Program directly from their website, however, this doesn't mean that my application will go anywhere. I will update this blog as soon as I can to notify the citizens of East Texas about the outcomes.

Dream Spring

I visited the website for Dream Spring at www.dreamspring.org and I was able to find a Apply Now option on their front page rather easily.  They asked for a 25$ fee to apply for the loan.  I am not even sure that this is legal to do.  I will be looking into this further for our investigations. So we sent them an email to inquire about the 25$ fee that they are charging business's to tap into the Treasury Departments loan programs. We will post more information about their response as we receive them.

Lendistry

This company has a link to a loan application right away on their website. So we applied.  Unfortunate we did not apply for their loans. This is the message we received after we applied directly on their websites. 

We will be investigating as to exactly why our business didn't get approved.  We will be updated this blog as needed.

We received an email from Lendstry right after we received the above disqualification response to our application.  This is what Lenistry said:

This update doesn't stop us from investigation Lendistry further. We will be in close correspondence to Lendstry to find out some of our top questions: how much does Lendistry receive from the Texas Treasury department to award to small businesses ran by Texans?  How much has Lendistry awarded to small businesses in East Texas? How much will Lendistry be awarding to future small businesses in East Texas? We want to investigate all of their financial records as well to insure that they are complying with their organizations policies.  If you go to Lendistry.com you can see that they claim to have awarded 10 billion to small businesses in the United States fas of today.  Lendistry claims to support 639,000 small businesses in America.  We want to know how many businesses that Lendistry has helped in the East Texas area so we emailed them.  Their website says "Lendistry works with its non-profit organization, The Center by Lendistry, to connect its small business customers with technical assistance, business courses, business advisors, and access to other programs and services." 

We will have to see about this.  Check back for more information into the investigation about Lendistry.

LiftFund

We were able to apply online from the website for LiftFund.  We are still waiting for the response of the company to know if we are approved or not. We will update this blog as information becomes available. Update: We received a email back from Lift fund informing us that our application has been denied. You can see a screenshot of the email below 👇 

We will be investigating further about this lending company to find out just how much money is going towards East Texas businesses in our area.

PeopleFund

There was no "Apply Now" link on their website but we did send an email to inquire about the TSBCI loans.  We will update this blog whenever we get a response from that organization.

TruFund

We didn't find a application link on their website so we sent an email to the organization.  We will update this blog to the replies.

Out of the 10 lenders listed on this list provided by the TSB initiative I was only able to apply for maybe two at the most out of 10.  This is wrong because there are a lot of hopeful new business owners in East Texas that rely on loans like these to be easily available to the public.  Are these companies actually using the money to lend to small businesses? If so, how much of that money is going to the small businesses pockets and how much are these organizations keeping for their selves? We will continue to research about the financials of these companies and continue to expose any type of fraud or waist and report back to The Legal Eagle of East Texas.  Our service continue to improve the citizens of East Texas! 

If you would like to volunteer your time to our cause, please email us at thelegaleagleofetx@gmail.com! If you are interested in making a donation to keep our non profit organizations services free you may also email us to make that donation!

We appreciate the time that you took into reading our blog article.  Please share this with all of your friends so that we can continue to make East Texas a better place to live and to make sure that our local officals and institutions that service our area function as they are supposed to.

Thank you,

 Tabitha Charanza, Director

The Legal Eagle of East Texas