A warning to credit card tarts
It was a long time ago on a planet really nearby… Secretly, in the shadows, there has been a battle going on, a battle between the lone wolf ‘card tarts’ and the armies of the credit card companies. A card tart (also occasionally referred to as a rates tart) in case you didn’t know is a person who applies for a credit card and works up a healthy balance. Then realising that the repayments are getting a bit steep makes a credit card balance transfer onto a card offering a 0% transfer free period, now averaging around 10 months. The problem is that after the period ends they want to transfer again and again and again. Ad infinitum! In other words they wielded their 0% cards in front of them, like a light-sabre, keeping the forces of interest oppression at bay.
If you aren’t a card tart, but have tarting tendencies, then you need to know that the addiction develops along these lines. You have a card with a balance that has gotten a little out of hand. You are making your monthly repayments but are paying so much interest that you are hardly reducing the amount you owe at all. So what do you do? You jump to a card offering a 0% credit card balance transfer period. The length of this period varies from card to card but is now somewhere in the region of 10 months interest free. During these, say, ten months you pay off the balance as much as you can and then, not wanting to pay more interest, you leap to another card and so on.
The reason is that they have discovered a more direct approach to dealing with the small pockets of resistance: they simply don’t give them a card. When you apply for a credit card the card company checks your credit rating with one of the credit referencing agencies. Your credit rating is a record of your relationship to credit companies and contains information on the cards you’ve applied for, the amount of credit given, how prompt you have been with repayments and so on. If the credit provider notices a tendency of card tarting on a regular basis they will decline your application because you simply don’t make them enough money.
This is all fine and good you say but what on earth is a credit rating, history, or score? Well, they are all the same thing. Rating and score a bit misleading, although in common usage, as they imply a figure i.e. so and so has a credit rating of 6.4, imagining that it is similar to the scoring systems in say ice skating championships. This isn’t the case. History is a better term as it is in fact a vast document detailing all associated credit related action. It includes your name and address, culled from the electoral roll, cards you have applied for, whether you were accepted or declined, credit limits given and so on. It also details repayments you have made and, more importantly to credit companies, missed.
So what’s the deal? Yes you can by all means transfer from card to card in order to take advantage of those lovely 0% credit card balance transfer offers but you must remember that it is recorded on your credit history. In the future this can affect new card applications. Is there a way around this? Well you could possibly make sure that the rest of your rating is as perfect as possible. Or you could throw the odd purchase on the card whilst paying off the balance. You could even keep hold of the card for a while after the 0% period ends just to make all of the credit companies happy. In the end it is entirely up to you – but you have been warned!
Family Finance Planning For Beginners
Tags: Finance