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A Credit Card for the Hard-Core Super Bowl Fan

February 3, 2012 By

You’re at the big game and you whip out your official Giants or Patriots credit card to pay for a hotdog. Pretty cool, huh? Okay, more likely you’re in your family room watching the game. But if you love your football team, you’ll even enjoy using the NFL ExtraPoints Rewards credit card from Barclays Bank long after the Super Bowl is over.

With the NFL Extra Points credit card, you can get the logo of your favorite team on your credit card.  This is a good option for the fan who wants to earn 1 percent cash back on all purchases and save 20% when shopping at NFL.com.

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After you use your card for the first time, you get 10,000 NFL Extra Points. Cardholders even get access to season ticket financing. Note that your points expire 48 months from the day you earned them.

The Patriot’s card is Visa Signature and offers a variable APR of 13.74, 17.74, or 22.74 percent. There’s a 15-month 0 percent APR balance transfer offer. The balance transfer fee is 4 percent. The Giants card is a World Mastercard with the same APRs and balance transfer offer.

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Negotiate Your Credit Card’s Interest Rate

February 3, 2012 By

You may have heard that you might be able to call your credit card lender and ask them to renegotiate your account’s interest rates. But should you believe it?

The short answer to that question is, “Yes.” But it’s not just anyone who can call up a credit card company and ask for this type of an accommodation. Lenders won’t necessarily lower a borrower’s interest rate just because they ask.

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To maximize your chances of being granted a lower interest rate on your credit card account, you’re going to have to do your homework. The first step is to order a copy of your credit report and your credit score. If it’s anything less than top-notch, you’ll have a challenge getting the lender to budge. But that’s where your credit report comes in; oftentimes, these documents will contain at least one entry placed on your account erroneously that may be lowering your rating. Successfully disputing these mistakes can boost your score.

You’ll also need to know what other interest rates your lender is offering to consumers with credit standings similar to yours. Do some research online and see what you would be able to qualify for if you were opening a new account, and perhaps even check with some major competitors. Having a general idea of the average interest rate given to people in your situation might help you get yours cut.

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Another thing you might want to do is be mindful that, even if the customer service representative is willing to give you a lower rate, it might not be as low as the one you’re looking for. And in these cases, you might want to consider asking to speak with their supervisor, who will have greater authority to make changes to your account in an effort to keep you as a customer.

Of course, when you’re calling, you also need to be able to threaten to pull your account from your current lender and go to a competitor, and mean it. Knowing competitors’ introductory offers and ongoing account details is key here as well. If they really think they’re about to lose your business, they may be more willing to make changes.

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In 2013: A More Secure Credit Card?

February 1, 2012 By

The world of debit and credit cards is changing rapidly, and it’s beginning to look as though Americans will have to start adapting to new types of payment technology when making a purchase in the near future.

MasterCard recently unveiled what it calls its “roadmap” toward issuing EMV—or chip and pin—credit and debit cards en masse here in the U.S. Cards using the EMV (which stands for Europay MasterCard Visa, after the companies that pioneered the technology) system are used ubiquitously in most countries around the world, and the U.S. is currently the only major nation in the world that still uses the type of cards that store users’ payment information with a magnetic strip on the back.

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The plan, which comes quickly on the heels of a similar announcement from Visa, the world’s largest payment processor and MasterCard’s primary competitor, will help to swap out the cards currently filling American wallets for new ones that store data not on magnetic strips, but rather on small microchips embedded in the cards themselves. While some banks currently offer these types of cards to consumers, most do not, and consumers who use them may encounter some difficulties in finding a merchant who accepts them in the U.S. For the most part, EMV cards issued by American lenders bear both magnetic strips and are granted to consumers who travel abroad regularly.

MasterCard says it is working with companies to ensure that the infrastructure for an EMV acceptance system is in place by April 2013, saying it wants to have these systems ready to be installed for ATMs, point-of-sale acceptance and both online and mobile commerce. Already, the payment processor has helped to roll out and develop EMV systems in more than 130 countries, and more than half of the 1.2 billion EMV cards in circulation worldwide at the end of the second quarter of 2011 bear either the MasterCard brand or its affiliated brand, Maestro.

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EMV cards work by having a consumer wave the plastic over a point-of-sale terminal that reads the microchip embedded in it, and then enter a PIN code to confirm the purchase—hence “chip and pin.” For this reason, they are considered far more secure than the current magnetic strip technology.

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The Benefits of a No Annual Fee Credit Card

February 1, 2012 By

If you’re in the market for a new credit card, you’re probably thinking about the various perks different cards offer and seeing what the best value is.

In some cases, you might want to consider a rewards credit card, and in others, perhaps you want a card with a zero percent introductory rate so that you can pay off more of your debt. But these days, lots of companies are charging sizeable annual fees just for maintaining your account, and therefore, you might also want to find a card that comes with no annual fee at all.

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However, a no annual fee credit card isn’t necessarily for everyone. If you’re the kind of person who uses your credit card a lot to make smaller, everyday purchases, the benefit you’ll find from this type of card is probably outweighed by those provided with a rewards card. That’s because you’ll probably end up earning more than you save with a no annual fee card.

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But if you have a credit card habit that’s more conservative—for example, if you only use it in the event of an emergency or to make larger purchases—a no annual fee card may be perfect for you. Instead of paying $40 or $50 annually for a card you might only use a few times a year, you’ll be able to keep the card tucked away and not worry about being hit with any added charges.

Of course, there are different types of no annual fee cards. Some will provide this benefit for life, while others may only waive the fee for the first year the account is open. Obviously, based on your needs, it will be important to differentiate between these two types of accounts.

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However, some cards will also waive your annual fee only because they charge interest rates that are considerably higher than average, and therefore, you might want to consider the actual cost of the card if you’re the type of borrower who regularly carries a debt from one month to the next.

Whenever you open a new credit card account, you should find out what the card will end up costing you in total based on previous borrowing habits and your current financial standing.

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How to Build Your Credit Responsibly

January 31, 2012 By

If you have a new credit card, one reason you might have gotten it is so that you can use it to finance purchases you might otherwise have had a hard time making. You may also have secured the card to help you rebuild your credit standing.

If that’s the case, there are a few things you should know about how to manage that account to boost your score as quickly as possible. Perhaps the most important thing is to only use your card for payments that you don’t make every day. Putting lunch or a cup of coffee on your credit card might get you into bad spending habits and cause you to put more debt onto the card than you can reasonably afford. In fact, you might want to consider only spending as much on the card as you can pay back every month to keep yourself headed in the right direction.

[Article: 7 Reasons to Hate & Love Your Credit Card]

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Along those same lines, if you do end up racking up more debt than you can pay back in a single month, it’s important that you at least pay back more than the minimum. Again, this is to ensure that you don’t get into bad habits, because only paying the minimum every month will keep you in debt much longer than you’d probably like.

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As a general rule of thumb, you should try to keep your debt to 10 percent or less of your card’s total credit limit. That’s because 30 percent of your credit rating is based on just the amount of credit you use at any given time, and the less you utilize, the better. There is a myth that lenders want you to have at least some debt outstanding all the time, but it’s not true; the closer your balance is to zero, the better off you’ll be both financially and in terms of a maintaining a strong credit rating.

Of course, when you’re opening a new credit card account, you should take a look at all the ways in which it might affect your finances. Consider things like whether you’re able to make all the payments you need to—on time and in full—as well as if it might affect your ability to pay other bills.

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