Home | Finance | Personal Finance
Keeping interest payments down is a sign of good money management and credit card tarts have got it down to a fine art. Credit card tarts take advantage of 0% balance transfer deals to make sure they never pay interest on their credit card debt. Credit Card Tarts It works like this. The borrower applies for and gets a credit card that offers 0% on balance transfers for a fixed period. Usually this is six months to a year. The borrower transfers the existing debt on to the credit card and makes repayments as usual. Since no interest is being charged, all repayments are reducing the amount of money owed, which is good news for the borrower's long term financial health. At least six weeks before the 0% deal is due to expire, the borrower applies for another 0% credit card and transfers the remaining balance on to the card. This means the borrower has another period of clearing debt without paying interest. This strategy can be repeated several times, though many credit card companies have got wise to it and are now charging balance transfer fees. Low Cost Loans This is a great strategy for people who are trying to reduce debt, but it turns out that it can also be used for debt-free people who want to get a low cost loan. To do this, borrowers need to find two different types of credit cards. Debt free people with a good credit rating should have little problem with this strategy. First of all, the borrower will need to find a card that offers a low balance transfer rate for the life of the balance. There are several of these to choose from. Many of them also offer other incentives, so it is worth shopping around. Second, the borrower needs to find a card that allows a fee-free balance transfer, as well as credit card cheques with a 0% interest rate. There are a few cards that meet these criteria. Transferring The Balance Third, the borrower needs to do a balance transfer from the low rate card to the 0% card. This means that the 0% card will be in credit. Finally, the borrower can write a credit card cheque from the 0% credit card and pay it into his or her current account. The net effect of this is a loan at a much lower rate than normal bank loans. Even for people that don't need a loan, this can be a good way of making some cash, especially if they are able to stash the cash in a high interest account. What About The Credit Rating? One danger of this strategy is if borrowers make too many credit card applications in a short space of time. This can count against them in a credit file. It is also essential to make at least the minimum payments on the required dates to maintain a good credit history.
Information and Articles: http://www.mastersmba.com
Providing Information on various topics, please browse our other Articles for more informative resources, we house information on every topic imaginable so regardless of your needs you can be assured to find the answer here. If you wish to reprint this on your own website, simply click the "Web Version" in the right menu, and you are presented with a pre-formatted document to use.
A lot of the information is written by the Master Article team, and published exclusively on the MastersMBA.com website, and we do our best to research all information to ensure it's as accurate as possible. However at times we also publish documents given to us by other sources, we do examine these documents to ensure they are as accurate and correct as possible however at times they discuss highly specialized fields making it hard to authenticate the validity of every fact in the document. These are written by specialists in their respective fields, and we do trust their integrity and judgment however it's always a good idea when doing any research to consult a number of sources and form your own conclusion based on a number of view points.
