Saturday, August 22, 2009

CC 3 Interest

Of all our credit cards, this card is the most frustrating to me. You would think that the one with the highest balance would be my nemesis....and yeah, it is. But this card was originally designed to help us get out of debt and it just didn't work that way.

We opened this card to transfer debt. It had a fixed rate of 7.99% for purchases at that time, and something like an intro rate of 0% for 12 months on transfers. So we "maxxed" it out with a transfer. Paid on it awhile. Then tried to raise the limit so we could transfer more debt.
They wouldn't raise the limit to where we wanted, but they did raise it some. And we transferred more debt. I think we transferred debt at least 2 or 3 times onto this card. Each time, it had something like a 4.99% rate for the life of the balance transfer. Sounded great. Yes, we are on our way now!!

Nope. We had one late payment (of a day!!) and the 4.99% rate was gone. It reverted to the 7.99%. Still better than the rates on our other cards. And then the economy nose-dived. They changed the rate to 9.24%....ok, still better than the others. And then they changed it again, to 14.24%!!!

14.24% is now between the rates of the other cards (19.24% and 11.99%). This is not helping at all now. We don't use this card, and it was nice to see the balance drop (even a little) each month. This month, it went up from the interest!!!!

Darn interest.

New debate now is do I re-transfer the balance. The transfer rate is 8.99% with a 3% transaction fee. So it is roughly $200 just to transfer the balance, and then that makes the other card over 70% "full." Not sure what they would do to the ole FICO score.

I will talk to the Financial Advisor at our meeting on Tuesday.

2 comments:

  1. You've probably already figured this out by now, but in case it's still sitting there you might check other offers and ask for one with no transfer fees. I don't know what your fico score is, but if it's high enough those offers are out there.

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  2. I know what you mean about being frustrated by balance transfers. I have ended up with four credit card by doing it. now I wish I'd never started.

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