Every single day, I hear misconceptions about how business credit works. Some I hear more often than others, but the one aspect of business credit I hear the most misconceptions about is how people can (or cannot) use their business credit cards.

Unfortunately, those misconceptions lead to business owners either failing to obtain, or failing to utilize credit effectively, which limits their ability to scale their businesses. While that may not seem like a big deal on the surface, it often means tremendous missed opportunities, both in the short term, and for generations to come.

Think about it like this—how different might your life be today if your grandfather had built a company and scaled it to become a titan of that industry? Think of the additional opportunities, the financial literacy and freedom, and the generational wealth your family would have achieved as a result of that.

If you’re anything like most people, that’s exactly what you want to provide for your family, and doing that requires capital, so in this article, I’m going to share three surprising ways you can use your business credit cards. This will help you scale your business more effectively, and get greater impact from your money, so you can change the financial trajectory of your family for generations to come.

Pull cash out without a cash-advance fee

Have you ever needed cash for a transaction that couldn’t be processed on a credit card, but didn’t want to pay the exorbitant cash advance fees charged by nearly all credit card companies today?

I certainly had in the past, and I know countless others who have as well.

It wasn’t until I switched careers and began to understand how the business credit industry works that I realized there absolutely are ways to pull cash off your credit cards while avoiding cash advance fees.

In a nutshell, there are companies that essentially act as pass-through entities to charge an amount on your business credit cards, take a small processing fee, and pass the balance on to you. Now it’s important to note here that while logistically, there are a few ways to do this directly through your own credit card processor account, I highly recommend against it because that is a violation of the TOS of every credit card company I’ve ever seen, and it’s likely a violation of your processor’s TOS as well.

The stakes are incredibly high here if executed incorrectly, and can lead to significant fine and even prison time, so make sure you work with a reputable and experienced company for this.

Leveraging credit cards for day-to-day expenses

This is the easiest strategy to implement, and once you set it up, there’s not much more for you to do.

You’ll start shifting the payments for your daily expenses, like software, membership dues, and travel, off of your debit cards and onto your business credit cards. You won't spend any more than you already do, but you will rack up points that can be used for travel, gifts, and other rewards. As long as you don’t start making unnecessary purchases just to earn points, this will essentially be free money.

It’s important to update your autopay settings and monitor your bill closely to make sure you never fall behind—especially during the first few months when you’ll be using a higher percentage of your available credit than you have in the past.

And before implementing this strategy, it’s important to identify which types of purchases will earn you the most points. For example, some cards may maximize points for gas purchases, while others may prioritize air travel. The categories available are virtually unlimited and could be contingent on the card itself, or depending on the card, you may be able to select the type of purchases you want your points based on. In other words, do your homework before diving in because you need to maximize your points to get the most out of your efforts.

Purchasing real estate and other tangible assets

I recently had a conversation with a client who had a substantial amount of business credit, but had been holding off on a real estate investment because he hadn’t been able to secure a mortgage in his business’s name to purchase the property. This was about a year ago, when the bidding wars were near their peak, and he almost lost the perfect opportunity because of that.

Once he found out that he could use his existing business credit—which was mostly credit cards, he was elated because it meant he could now purchase the larger building he needed to scale his business.

The key was knowing how to execute on this strategy, because you can’t exactly hand a credit card to your Realtor for them to swipe.

Using the process I outlined earlier on taking cash off your business credit card, you can amass a pool of capital that enables you to purchase even assets like real estate. This is a game changer for most business owners because it opens up an entirely untapped source of funding, and the property typically leads to additional opportunities, such as increased productivity, tax incentives, and even appreciation of the asset.

This is where the leverage that credit provides can be deceptively powerful. When you can purchase an asset with someone else’s money, and then profit financially in more than one way on the deal—as is often the case with real estate, your financial trajectory can change dramatically and quickly.

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Amanda Webster is the COO of Fund&Grow, which helps entrepreneurs get the business credit they need to run and scale their companies. She is recognized as one of the leading experts in the industry, and is regularly asked to speak on the topic on stage and in the media.