Home | Finance | Credit | Credit Loans
The first step in doing a 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 consist 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. Minimum Amount Due - this is a smaller fraction of the total amount due. To maintain a good standing with the card company, pay at least this amount, if you cannot afford to pay the total amount due. Finance charge - if the cardholder is not able to pay the total amount due, then he is charged a fee for borrowing money from the company. It is calculated based on the interest rate of the card. Late charges - Paying or not, after the payment due date, is penalized with late charges. Avoid this as much as possible as this is almost 2X the interest rate of the finance charge. Consistently missing payment may lead to cancellation of the card and a bad credit standing. Having understood the information on your monthly bill, here are simple strategies for paying your credit card charges: Always pay the total amount due. Paying only the minimum amount due means being charged for a high interest rate on the unpaid amount. If you cannot pay the total amount due, pay as much as you can above the minimum amount due. This strategy aims to reduce the finance charges that you have to pay for settling partially. Do partial payments as early as possible (as soon as you receive the billing). Finance charges are based on the unsettled amount and the time it remains unsettled, so the shorter it is, the lower it will be for finance charges. Some card companies reward loyal cardholders by accumulating points for their spending. Check if reward points can be credited back as payment. Lastly, pay the total amount due. Just to emphasize the point! There are many avenues to pay your card bill. There's the traditional way of waiting in line, or the faster way of paying electronically through your computer, cash machine or mobile phone. With all these conveniences at hand, it is quite unforgivable to miss your payment due date. Therefore, settle smart: pay the total, pay on time.
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.
