If you’re heading back to campus this month, you need a credit card with the lowest possible interest rate and minimal fees.
With lots of expenses and not much income, you want to spend as little as possible to get the credit you need.
In a perfect world you’d pay off your balance every month and the interest rate wouldn’t matter all that much.
But a whopping 82% of college students don’t do that, according to a study by Sallie Mae, the big student loan company.
By graduation, college students carry an average balance of $4,100 on their credit cards, up from $2,900 in 2004.
Even with a relatively low 14.99% rate that costs a little more than $50 a month in interest. Boost that to 19.99% and you’ll be paying a little less than $70 a month.
So the interest rate matters. A lot.
You can also save big bucks by looking for a card that charges no monthly or annual fee.
With that in mind, here are our three favorite credit cards for college students:
The State Farm Student Visa Card. There’s no annual fee and a very low 11.99% APR interest rate.
The Discover Student Card. No annual fee, a 0% introductory rate for the first six months and a reasonable 14.99% interest rate after that.
The Citi Forward Visa Card. No annual fee, a 0% introductory rate for the first six months and 16.24% after that. But, each time you stay under your credit line and pay on time three months in a row, the rate is cut by 0.25% up to a total reduction of 2%.
Take a few minutes to compare those deals with all of the student credit cards in our database of credit card deals and find the one that’s right for you.
(3 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)
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