If you had a $100 windfall, what would you do with it?
Get The Best Credit Card Deal
And if your credit card is no longer giving you the best terms that are generally available then switch card issuers. Don’t accept a higher rate of interest or bigger penalties than necessary. There will be better deals on offer.
Don’t let your inactivity cost you unnecessary money, or make other people rich. Use the free market, that’s what it’s there for. If you continue to use a certain card issuer as a matter of habit, regardless of the conditions offered, or worse still because you can’t be bothered to change, do you honestly expect to get the best conditions or the lowest interest rates?
And more to the point, do you expect to get out of debt!
Of course not! The more ‘inertia customers’ that a card issuer has, the larger and easier to acquire their profits are. They don’t have to try as hard, which means that the terms they offer won’t be as good.
Let me give you an example. If you owe an average of $3000 at a fairly typical standard rate of 18.9% APR you’ll pay $567 interest over one year. On the other hand, if your card has a standard rate of 9.9% APR then the interest over a year would come to $297. So you could save $270 per year in interest payments just by having a different credit card. It’s possible to save even more if you choose a card that has a special low rate deal for a set period, but I’ll say more on that at another time.
As a rough guide the best deals are often to be found on credit cards that have just been launched. In fact this neatly highlights the point that I have just made about existing lenders taking advantage of customers who are too lazy to shop around for a better deal. When a new credit card is brought to the market it will have no customers, and the only way to entice people to use it is to offer them something really special, such as an ultra low interest rate. That will force some people to take notice, break out of their reluctance to change and try a new credit card.
So why don’t you take advantage of this situation. Remember, whenever there is a need to recruit new customers, there is money to be saved!
Del.icio.us
Digg
Newsvine
Reddit