Using a Zero Percent Credit Card Offer to Your Benefit
We all get them, all the time. Especially if we have good or halfway decent credit. Those zero percent introductory credit card offers, checks, and special credit card offers that will give us either no interest for a specified period of time, or a dramatically slashed interest rate or APR for a designated time on either balance transfers or plain old purchases. But how can you use these great offers to your benefit without getting caught up in the credit card game where you are actually losing more than you are gaining by accepting one of these seemingly interesting deals?
Well, for one, the obvious answer to that is to make sure you pay off the purchases or balance transfer well before the introductory period of a lower or zero percent interest rate is up. This way, you’ve potentially transferred a higher, less beneficial debt to a lower interest rate while you get your money together, and you actually make out in the end by saving all that extra interest you would have paid if you had not accepted the offer.
But many credit card companies are relying on the simple statistic that most people will not pay off the entire balance before the introductory period has expired, and they, in the end, will end up paying the credit card lender a percentage of interest on that money that they have essentially lended to the cardholder at the end of the intro period. Not such a great deal if that’s the case, huh?
Well, I’ve actually done this one before, and while I regret saying I did not get the balance paid off in time to beat the intro period for the low apr credit card, I did pay it off a few months after that. Since the credit card offer I had accepted happened to be a balance transfer zero apr one for an intro period of six months, I saved on the higher interest I was paying on the credit accounts I had transferred over rather than paying that higher interest for a period of six months. Believe it or not, even though I didn’t get it totally paid off in that intro period, I still benefitted because of the way I planned it. So, many times, if you plan carefully, it can still be a win/win situation!
