Finding a Credit Card with Low Interest
Finding a credit card with low interest rate is not an easy task especially if you don’t know how a credit card works and how financial transactions work. It is very important to know the ins and outs and how the general system could affect your money. A general knowledge of how you could go about the financial and economic terms like debt financing or inflation could be an advantage but you don’t necessarily need to know them to be able to have an edge.
Credit Cards
Credit cards are more than just a piece of plastic which has the power to make you buy anything that you want. It contains vital information and unique identifiers that lets a systematic method see how a transaction should go. Unlike debit cards in which you will have to pay right after or before you even have the service or product, in credit cards, you will have to pay a long time afterwards on an approved billing time. However, a high interest credit card is a pain in the ass so who doesn’t want a credit card with low interest?
Two types of credit cards
There are many classifications of credit cards but for our sake, we will tackle first the two main types of credit cards based on payment scheme. Credit cards are classified into two kinds. One would be the regular credit cards wherein you have to normally pay upon arrival of a billing statement. That would allow you to actually pay afterwards upon payment of a series of transactions. The other kind would be the prepaid cards which would carry absolutely no interest in it. However, you would also pay fees prior to the use of that credit card. It’s like having an ATM card and a credit card at the same time wherein you can swipe it and have a deduction on the cash that you have preloaded on your account.
Prepaid or Regular?
The question of whether to choose a prepaid or a regular credit card would then come into the picture. Would you rather have a prepaid credit card or a regular credit card? A startup fee and a reload fee would be included on the prepaid card while a regular credit cards charges with interest afterwards. A prepaid credit card would most likely have no interest at all but you’ll have to pay some fees prior to the usage of the credit card. A regular credit card would have a variable interest charge depending on the companies involved in that credit card. However, some introductory credit cards might sometimes offer a 0% interest rate as an introductory promo. After some time though, they would go back to the regular interest rate that would be charged on a regular basis. This kind of offer could last from 12 months to 24 months depending on how long the company wants the promo to run.
Low fixed interest credit card
Although a prepaid credit card sounds good by having no interest at all, you will still be charged with some fees before you can use it. A regular credit card would still incorporate the disadvantages of a credit card in terms of imposition of interest rates. A solution would lead us back to where we started. We need to find a credit card with low interest. Better yet, we need a low fixed interest credit card because variable interests could hurt our cash savings in the long run.
APR
To help us in finding a good low interest credit card, we need to know an important aspect of a credit card which is APR. APR is an acronym for Annual Percentage Rate. It is used as an expression of the interest rate that a certain borrower should pay with regards to a certain loan. APR is the total cost in which a consumer is credited into. It is the annual percentage of a certain amount wherein a certain amount of credit is granted. It would make it easier to compare loan options and lenders.
Rate of APRs could come in several manners. It could be a 0.7675% effective monthly interest rate. It could be an 8.962% annual interest compounded monthly. It could also be a 9.011% annual rate in advance. To work out a computation you need to take the principal then multiply it by the monthly rate while subtracting the monthly payment.
Choosing the right credit card
For obvious reasons, we should use the APR to be able to compute what we want as an interest rate. The lower the interest rate, the better it is for our wallet. It has come to our attention that low APR credit cards are the way to go and might be the best option. However, we should weigh down our need and what really makes it convenient and easy for us. A low APR credit card might have risks especially if the rate is too good to be true. We should be wise in choosing the best credit card. We don’t want our savings to go to waste.
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