Life Credit Cards

Archive for April, 2008

You have decided that you need a credit card. However, you must remember that not all credit cards are created equally. Your friend’s credit card doesn’t mean that it is also the best for you. Before going to your bank and get its credit card, you must consider several factors that you should take into consideration when deciding which credit card is best for you.

Some of those factors include:

o Interest rate. When you are the type of person that pays off your balance monthly, you would probably disregard the interest rate. Unfortunately, most people sooner or later have problems keeping with their credit card balance. Most people do carry a balance in their credit cards. If you are sometimes late paying and carry a balance, then it would be the best decision to have a credit card with a low interest rate.

Credit cards are an increasingly popular form of purchasing items on “chargeable” or borrowed terms. These days applying for a credit card online is considered normal.

The advantages of having a credit card are:

1. Security, since one does not have to carry a large amount of cash to purchase certain items.
2. Convenience. In case one has to purchase an item that is immediately needed (and is short of cash), these can be purchased using a credit card
3. Cash advances. Purchases that require cash payments may still be accommodated by the credit card through the cash advance feature. This works like a regular ATM transaction (with of course a corresponding interest rate and perhaps fee)

Disadvantages:

The first step in completing a smart credit card payment is to understand your monthly billing. The following are terms you will encounter:

Statement date – The date that the bill was printed.

Payment due date – this is the day that the cardholder must pay any outstanding balance. Payments made after the said date will be credited, but will also be fined a lateness fee.

Total Amount Due – It consists of the unpaid amount from the previous month, as well as purchases, payments and interest charges for the current month. When the cardholder pays this amount on or before the payment due date, no interest charges will be imposed.

Seeing people buying food or shopping for clothes using credit cards is commonplace these days. The phrase “Charge it!” has become a favorite expression of card users, and has been commonly heard in shops, dining places, grocery stores, and just about everyplace else.

After all, who does not want to use these credit cards? Easy to use, these sleekly-designed cards can be used to buy practically everything in commercial establishments regardless of how much (or less) money one carries in his wallet. Short of cash and hungry? No grocery supplies? Going to a party but no money to buy that dress you’ve been drooling for? No problem! Your good ol’ credit can care of that for you. No worries.

Credit Card Major News – Not Free Money:

I have a friend who’s a frequent traveler who’s most of the time always out of the United States. While he’s always traveling, his purchases done in other countries are done with his credit cards. He prefers using his frequent traveler credit card in buying his plane tickets as these allow him to accumulate travel air miles.

Whenever he buys plane tickets, he can always redeem his accumulated travel miles to get discounts on his plane ticket or if he has accumulated a lot of air miles, he can use them in buying his plane tickets. He does have other credit cards that were offered to him from US merchant stores. The only problem he has is as he’s always out in other countries, while he’s able to use these credit cards, he may not be able to always to use his accumulated points from those merchant sponsored credit cards because he seldom goes to those stores.

The average American mailbox gets sales pitches from credit card companies at about one or two a day. With this overload of information, choosing the best product that fits your needs can get pretty overwhelming. The sheer number of brochures and application forms not only make it inconvenient to make an intelligent choice, but also adds to unnecessary clutter.

This is where the advantages of applying online for a credit card comes in. It’s easier to make head-to-head comparisons, because of the relative simplicity you can retrieve the latest information about your prospect credit card product. And once you’ve made your choice, it’s just a matter of pounding at your keyboard and clicking those checkboxes. No manual, long-hand writing each letter of your name in those annoying boxes. What a great, great consumerist world we live in.

Spending is such a hard habit to break, especially when people use their credit cards. Once they get addicted, they continuously endure the agony of spending in spite of imminent problems that tag along behind. With credit cards it is just too easy to buy things that you don’t really need with money that you really don’t have. That’s the American way in the 21st century.

And when things eventually get out of hand, most people will realize that they are already stuck with a mountain load of credit card debts. And morning after morning, they will wake up each day with worries in their head about how they can repay all of those instant splurges.