Tips on Transferring Credit Card Balance

Reading the fine print on these kinds of deals definitely cannot be over emphasized.

Typical “gotchas” of balance transfer agreements are:

Annual fees.

An annual fee should be seen as nothing more than a higher effective interest rate! If the interest rate seems to good to be true for your level of credit, there’s a good chance you’ll see a big $100 annual fee lurking on the bottom of the page.

Transaction / transfer fees.

Even though they’re trying to get you to switch to them, many times they’ll still charge you to do it right off the bat.

Forgetting about the old card.

Don’t! Until you receive some sort of confirmation that the balance has officially been transferred, assume you will still need to meet the next due date of your old card, otherwise you risk getting slapped with a late fee for something you thought you already took care of.

After reading here I’ve again come to the conclusion that the most important thing you need to know is DO THE MATH!

One particular deal we had a few years ago was to transfer our existing credit card balance to a new credit card.

The offer was no interest on the transferred balance for 12 months, and no interest on new purchases for 6 months. This was very confusing, to say the least! After the no interest deal expired, we would wind up paying 1 percent more than what our current card was charging. After getting plenty of help from our calculator, we decided this would be an excellent deal as long as we kept our payments going at the same rate as we were already doing with our original creditor.

We saved almost 50 percent on our bills for the next year following the transfer to the new card. I would like to point out that we were only able to save a significant amount of money by keeping true to our payments and also cutting out any extra purchases to the new card after about three months of opening the account.

After we finished our get out of dept voyage with the new zero interest rate card, we closed that account. We did very well in keeping our credit rating at a shining level and were able to open yet another account with a different credit card company that offered a terrific interest rate to us based on our past credit performance.

To say it in simple terms, I do recommend the transfer of a debt if you are sure you can commit to the finance terms outlined in their agreement. Also, be aware of how long they are offering the free ride.

Unless the balance to be transferred significant enough to outweigh the transaction costs there is no point in using a credit card balance transfer. Also after transferring the balance to a zero percent introductory rate or whatever percent rate it is always easy to forget to pay on time and incur the high percentage rates thereafter. All it takes is one slip-up. If you transfer to an AT&T Universal Card the introductory zero interest rate will jump to nearly 29% rate for a late payment.

When the balance is transferred form the old card to the new card it is important to keep an eye on using the old card. We tend to use it more and again add up the debts. Then both the cards will have huge balances making it tough to pay or pay late with penalty. This is only to regret later.

With the money you save by transferring to low rate credit cards, it better to save the money that you would have paid on the old credit card. This will accrue over months. Ofcourse you should always remember to pay the debts on both cards in time. But the saved money will come in emergency or make use of it for another business venture.

I’ve been using credit card arbitrage for a while, and have made quite a bit off of the free money credit card companies are issuing these days.

I will usually use this site: http://www.mycreditstrategy.com

They keep up to date with all of the newest 0% Balance Transfer options, and they have some great info on it as well.

Just make sure you don’t miss a payment!