Balance transfer credit cards or even consolidation loans can be a wonderful, wonderful thing. But they are only truly a wonderful deal if you know, as a consumer, what to avoid and what to look for in the balance transfer deals you get from various financial institutions and credit card companies.

What you really need to do is read the fine print, as painful as that seems and as passed over as it often is in today’s confusing world of paperwork and jumbled legal jargon.

What you are looking for is the following on these offers:

1.) The biggest one is what is the percentage interest rate fee that you are paying to transfer your credit card debt to this lower interest card? If it’s zero – great, that’s a no brainer, it’s a great deal.

However, there may be an interest fee of anywhere from 3-5% on the money being transferred over. This can be a consideration, especially if the card or cards you are transferring balances from is not significantly higher than this amount.

It is even more of a consideration if the creditor also charges a one time fee on top of that interest charge. This means you’re not getting as sweet of a deal as they made it seem like at first.

2.) Look for a one time transfer fee. This is fairly easy to spot and usually is outlined in plain English. It can be a capped, set fee regardless of the amount you are transferring, or it can be related to the amount of money you are transferring.

For example, it could be a set fee of $50 for the first $2,000 you transfer, then 3% of anything after that. Or it could just be a flat percentage of the total amount of money you are transferring to the new card.

This is where you really want to be aware of what they are charging. As you can see, this could easily add up to hundreds in fees if you’re not careful.

3.) Be aware that applying for new credit cards creates a hit on your credit score. This is not always a bad thing, but if creditors see you’ve applied for ten cards in one day, that could be a red flag that you are prone to over extending yourself, and may be used to assess your credit worthiness.

Just be picky about what cards you apply for, and give it a while before you apply for something else. This is a good rule of thumb to not flag your credit too much for new potential thousands to rack up in debt.

We’ve put together a page on the most popular credit cards today as we know them. I’ve written a lot about changing legislation and how it has impacted not only debit cards, but also credit cards and the way these credit card companies have had to switch their business models around a bit.

It’s not necessarily all that great for the consumer either, although some would argue it will have an eventual trickle down effect to the consumer since it helps businesses out that rely heavily on customers using credit cards as a convenient means to pay for their goods.

The most popular credit cards usually offer something to the consumer in return for their use. SO without further ado, check out our new page on popular credit cards and see what is making the cut.

As credit card companies are faced with fewer options for making big profits off of their customers, often at the customer’s expense if they are ignorant of the fees they can be charged, they are exploring new ways to gain profit.

Having a list of customers can be very lucrative, no matter what your business is. Why is this? Well, many companies will pay good money for the privelege of tracking your customer’s buying behavior and then using it to decipher what their likely purchases are.

It is just another method of tracking buying behavior so that companies can more easily laser-target customers who are more likely (pre sold) to buy their products. For instance, if a business credit card often buys ink and toner, then they might be a primary target for companies like Staples of Office Max.

A person or company’s purchase behavior can basically be tracked to figure out what other products might likely like to advertise to them. It is a great method of targeting a niche market or targeting people who are more likely to buy.

However, this is just in preliminary phases right now. Major credit card companies are not 100% on board or ready to start using this information. They may use it themeselves, or they may use it to sell as a third party vendor to other companies who are looking for easy leads for their products.

It is much like the methods used by lots of other companies today.Some companies are able to sell your information to third parties who may then send you emails asking you to opt in to their promotional emails.

It’s a new way of marketing that cna be quite profitable to many types of business. However, there are some consumer advocates who are against this as it seems to infringe on the rights of the customers.

It always seems awfully “big brother” when companies sell consumer information for profit or for advertising targeting. However, there are many ways that you can make sure your exposure to this type of marketing is minimized.

You shouldn’t agree to getting newsletters for things that don’t expressly say that they cannot sell your information or share it with any third parties. If they don’t expressly say this, it’s a red flag that they likely do have agreements with other companies to divulge your email address.

You can also minimize the amounts of email lists you sign up for in the first place.

Some people are saying that now, with all the smart phones out there, and the fact that so many people who don’t have them are switching with free upgrades now offered from many phone companies, the credit card may soon be a thing of the past.

There are actually a lot of things the smart phone could eventually eliminate, however, the catch is that the battery cannot be dead when you go to pay for something!

Some are speculating that with the advent of so much new technology being sent over the virtual airwaves, we may eventually not even have to present a credit card to make a payment. We may also not even have to present an insurance identification card if many insurers have their way.

Since so much data can be sent over the internet and through “cloud computing” this really may be the wave of the future that we thought would never happen.

Even now, many credit cards have the technology embedded in them where you don’t even have to swipe them, you just lightly touch the card to the reader, and it picks up all the information in the magnetic strip and sends it.

Some people even go so far as to theorize that we may all one day have embedded chips in our skin or elsewhere on our person that basically gives any information about us that you could want. That’s a bit scary for me to think of, so I think I’ll just hope that if that ever does happen, I won’t be alive to see it.

Basically, the future of credit cards will likely not include any plastic at all. So when did the first credit card made of plastic happen? Well, in 1959, American Express was the first credit card company to offer a credit card that was made of plastic.

Prior to the “plastic” being used, credit cards were not used that often. They were made of paper, and definitely looked pretty archaic according to our modern standards. Then, American Express seemed to set the bar for plastic, and all creditors eventually moved to this.

After that, the magnetic strip was born, and the information was transmitted this way to the crediting bank. When you think about it, that is not all that long ago in the grand scope of things. It’s almost scary when you consider the quantum leaps in technology we’ve made merely in the past few decades.

Oy. I swear, when you do a lot of business with a lot of vendors and individuals online for your business, it tends to be a high risk for getting your credit card hacked and used by fraudsters that could be anywhere inside or outside of the US.

I’ve been compromised – again. My business credit card, which I use for several transactions every month and have set up as the payment method for a lot of my vendors every month, has been hacked.

I only realized it because I went to pay my bill and noticed an Itunes Apple charge that I know darn well I didn’t make. I was too tired to call the credit card company about it and it was too late in the evening when I noticed the first one, so I decided to call them and report the fraudulent charge the next morning first thing.

So I got up the next morning, and lo and behold, the fraudsters had charged my credit card again for another Apple itunes charge. The funny thing is, I caught them pretty quickly, so they haven’t gotten too much enjoyment out of the use of my credit card yet.

I always wonder when stuff like this happens – what kind of people do this to others? I mean, do they not have any decency in them? I shudder to think that I could pass anyone who does this kind of stuff in the grocery store or on the street, and would never be all the wiser.

People really baffle me sometimes. Anyways, I was saying that the Apple Itunes thing was a head scratcher. You know how sometimes you see a charge on your credit card that you cannot remember making for the life of you?

And then you suddenly remember, because maybe the name of the charge shows up as something counterintuitive on the statement, but you really did make the charge? Well I had one of those moments, but I knew that I hadn’t made any charge of the sort, so I called the company.

They were great. They immediately took the charges off and handed it off to their fraud department. The thing that sucks is that now I’m getting a new card overnighted to me, and I have to remember everyone to change it for since many monthly subscriptions come off this card.

Oh well, guess things just happen sometimes that you can’t avoid!

So, after apparently being on some “list” for a while, and my husband, who technically should have worse credit than me, getting all the credit card offers, I’m finally getting them again. Why they took a hiatus I don’t know.

What is especially amusing (I say that sarcastically), is that I used to get credit card offers all the time when I was younger and I let the debt pile up without paying off the balance monthly.

They made a ton of money in interest off of me, I’m guessing that’s why, and I also happened to always pay my bill on time, which I’m sure made me a very attractive target for the credit card companies.

I can only venture to guess that they have slacked off on sending my husband the offers for new credit cards, and picked up on me, because of a few factors that I know have recently changed about our status.

First off, my guess is that they have seen that I have been charging on my business credit card and not paying the monthly balance, carrying a balance over.

This is the first time I’ve allowed myself to do this in years, and it is because I am financing some business improvements this way, as I do not want to go out and get a small loan to do it, and I get my United Airline Miles by charging it to my United business credit card, so at least that is a consolation.

I don’t know how they have access to all of this type of information on such a short notice, since this can change on a dime for most people, but it is the only true correlation I can make.

Also, my husband took on a store credit card in his name, so maybe that put a bit of a damper on his new credit worthiness, and put the spotlight more on me, the second half of the relationship.

We put the store card in my husband’s name because we thought he had the better credit. He has a lower amount of overall debt in his name, which probably makes him a better risk in the eyes of banks.

Although they should be looking at us as one unit, I still think they separate married couples out when it comes to credit scores. This way, one’s bad credit doesn’t totally blow the other’s out of the water.

With the removal of almost all debit card reward programs after Congress enacted a ceiling on the amount per swipe banks can charge merchants for their customer’s use of debit cards, it is starting to make sense to sign up for different rewards CREDIT CARDS.

Just one hitch. You have to make sure you are organized and disciplined enough to pay off the balance every single month so that you can ensure you are not being charged any interest. This may be a challenge after debit card reward programs end, because you’re so used to just spending what you have.

There are some great low interest rate credit cards out there that you can take advantage of as well, so that if you can’t pay off the balance one month, then you aren’t getting totally screwed when it comes to the interest you are charged.

However, the desire is to always pay it off every month, that’s the only way you can stay in the black. I signed up for a personal credit card after my debit card United airline miles rewards were taken away.

I still have til the end up this month before the points stop accruing, but I needed a plan B after that, because I really like to either use a free airline ticket myself once per year, or be able to fly someone in my family in and out to come see me.

What I ended up doing was going in and talking to a bank rep, the bank that holds my mortgage, my personal checking account and business checking account, and asking them what the best credit card deal was for me.

They ended up recommending their airline miles credit card (also through United), since I indicated that I enjoyed using the rewards from my previous United debit card. With this card, I got the $95 fee waived for the first year of using it, but I will have to pay that yearly after this year.

I also get 3 miles, or points, for every dollar I spend on the card, which means that I can accrue airline miles rather quickly. It’s a good thing, because now United requires at least 50,000 miles to get any kind of ticket, whereas before their “super saver” tickets only required 30,0000 points.

Quite a difference! So now I can at least expect to get a free ticket for roughly every fifteen to twenty thousand dollars I spend, and if I use it for every little thing throughout the year, I might be able to get that once a year or once every year and a half, which makes it worth the $95 fee.

My husband and I are on a huge home improvement kick. It used to be that we would dread mowing our acre lot and tending to the multiple flower beds when we first moved in because it was overwhelming to us as first time home owners.

But now that we’ve painted inside and gotten a lot of the indoor stuff done that we wanted to, we really wanted to start concentrating on building up a woodsy look on our lot, and doing overall improvements to our land so that when eventually we do sell, it will look terrific and be desirable.

Not only that, or more than that, I want a home that I find is appealing, private and beautiful, and making your outdoors appealing in the summer is one way I can do that. So, we stopped at a local Lowes home improvement store, and started looking at a few things we’d been thinking of buying.

One was ceiling fans. We needed to install ceiling fans in several rooms. The other was trees, shade trees, pines and fruit trees for our lot to help fill in some of the gaps that were left by the previous owners. We love our privacy, and trees are a great way to add to curb appeal as well as to add a lot more privacy to your home.

When we were in the ceiling fan department, a great saleswoman approached us and asked if we needed help. She was great because she wasn’t pushy, yet really helped us out. She told us about the current 18 months same as cash (no interest) promotion they had if we signed up for a Lowes store credit card. I’m averse to applying for credit cards usually, but this sounded like a great deal.

You got the choice between getting 18 months no APR, or getting 5% off your total order. Since we were already getting a percentage off on our fans and our trees, we decided to go with the 18 months same as cash deal, and we signed up as new card holders for the Lowes store credit card.

This is a great deal, because it allows homeowners to buy significant amounts of home improvement material, and make payments on them instead of blowing a wad of cash all at once. It’s a lot easier for us to budget for these improvements when we know if we’re dropping $800 or something to that effect, we don’t have to come up with that cash, but rather, we can budget it over that APR free period.

We’re really happy we applied for this credit card, and ended up signing up for this card, as this allows us the freedom to do some home improvements we’ve been itching to do. We just didn’t have the lump sum cash to do them.

The Lowes credit card usually has 6 months same as cash, but they offer promotional periods where you can get 12 months or 18 months same as cash, depending on what time of the year you come in. We probably got the 18% deal because we signed up over Memorial day weekend.

The “120 days same as cash” or “6 months same as cash” deals and things like that are really a savior when it comes to making large purchases. My husband and I pretty much rely on this for certain large purchases of ours, such as a big television from Best Buy, or some furniture from Lazy Boy.

We both totally shun credit cards for most purchases now, other than our small business credit card purchases. Credit cards are pretty much a necessity, in my opinion, for any small business that hopes to attract and keep customers, as well as to grow and conduct R&D on an ongoing basis.

If you want to conduct business, it is my opinion that you have to be ready to pay interest on some of your debt, and you have to be ready to spend money to make money. But I digress. Back to the same as cash deals. These are really awesome for people who don’t abuse credit cards and like to still have options to make payments on a monthly basis rather than blow a wad of cash.

Some people may have the discipline to save up cash to make major purchases, but let’s face it, most of us don’t. Not only that, but what if an emergency comes up? We really might need that cash, and it’s already been spent on some large purchase.

I think that deals like the same as cash ones that appliance and electronics stores offer also are extremely beneficial to the business, because it opens up a whole new selling option for them. They also may have the opportunity to collect interest from people if they go over their “promotional period” and end up having to pay interest.

Same as cash is a really attractive option if you are one who doesn’t like to use normal credit.

Yeah, you didn’t misread that. You may have thought you did though, since so many people do tend to think (including myself at one time, I must admit) that credit cards are really just a terrible thing to have. Yes, credit cards are a terrible thing to have, if you are the type of person that does not show restraint or common sense, or simply doesn’t understand how they work.

After all, credit card companies are in the business of making a profit. Do they sometimes make a profit off of people who misspend and don’t know their boundaries, or who charge up thousands of dollars without fully understanding that they could take years to pay down the interest alone?

Credit cards serve people who use correctly them very well actually. I didn’t fully get this until I became responsible and started making more money and spending it wisely. If you pay off your balance every month, you can in fact gain a lot of benefits from using a credit card.

The first and most obvious are that you can buy things on credit that you normally could not afford if you were paying it all in cash in a lump sump. Things like televisions, stereos, large electronics and business expenses and startups cannot be purchased many times on cash, and a credit line or credit card is often needed to get one’s foot in the door.

Credit cards are also used to hold things for people, and to get things like hotel rooms and other expenses, so they are really almost like a credit check or insurance against you booking out on a bill in this day and age. They are really a convenience thing in many cases.

Also, credit cards have a security system in place that prevents most people from being charged when someone uses it fraudulently, unlike people with debit cards only. Often times people can find themselves completely cleaned out by identity thieves on their debit cards, and that is really a serious risk that you take when you don’t report these things right away with debit cards.

Also, credit cards are simply something that can really back you up in the case of an emergency. We don’t all have swelling bank accounts where we can fork out large sums of cash in cases of emergency. This is where credit cards really come in handy as well.