Comments on: Another misleading credit card advertisement http://www.squarecirclez.com/blog/another-misleading-credit-card-advertisement/1365 Mathematics, learning, computing, travel - and whatever... Tue, 16 Mar 2010 02:48:59 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=abc hourly 1 By: mathmom http://www.squarecirclez.com/blog/another-misleading-credit-card-advertisement/1365/comment-page-1#comment-42407 mathmom Thu, 11 Sep 2008 04:37:56 +0000 http://www.squarecirclez.com/blog/?p=1365#comment-42407 If you're smart and careful, you can use certain "interest-free" promotions to good effect to get past tight cash-flow situations without digging into savings, or even just to earn some piddling interest on your savings for a while before paying off whatever it was. We do this from time to time, but are careful to make sure there are no hidden fees, and I leave myself multiple electronic reminders to make sure the debt gets paid off on time, of else often the outrageous interest rate gets applied *retroactively*. So far we haven't been burned. One more thing to watch out for -- if you take a 0% promotion on a credit card, you probably have to stop using it for other purchases until it's paid off -- you can't pay off the new purchases in full and just carry the 0% balance; the new purchase will be at 24% or whatever it is, and any payment you make will go toward the 0% balance, not the 24% balance! (We even paid our taxes this way once, but that was a special situation of being at the end of our graduate degrees and knowing that more income would be available shortly!) If you’re smart and careful, you can use certain “interest-free” promotions to good effect to get past tight cash-flow situations without digging into savings, or even just to earn some piddling interest on your savings for a while before paying off whatever it was. We do this from time to time, but are careful to make sure there are no hidden fees, and I leave myself multiple electronic reminders to make sure the debt gets paid off on time, of else often the outrageous interest rate gets applied *retroactively*. So far we haven’t been burned.

One more thing to watch out for — if you take a 0% promotion on a credit card, you probably have to stop using it for other purchases until it’s paid off — you can’t pay off the new purchases in full and just carry the 0% balance; the new purchase will be at 24% or whatever it is, and any payment you make will go toward the 0% balance, not the 24% balance! (We even paid our taxes this way once, but that was a special situation of being at the end of our graduate degrees and knowing that more income would be available shortly!)

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