Perils Of Repeated Balance Transfers

The practice of transferring balances from one credit card to another in order to avoid penalty fees or to take advantage of 0% APR promotional periods is very extended. However, what not everybody knows is that without proper care, this practice can lead to severe problems due to certain credit card contract stipulations that may impede to take advantage of this trick more than once.

The Balance Transfer Method used to provide an excellent system for reducing debt by transferring the costs of financing to the credit card companies or credit card issuers. However, since this practice quickly became widespread, certain measures where taken by credit card companies in order to discourage it.

Balance Transfer Debt Reduction System

The procedure is rather simple: By taking advantage of Free Balance Transfer and 0% APR Promotional Periods one can transfer the balance of high interest credit cards to these new cards and use the promotional period to pay as much money as possible towards the balance while it does not generate interests.

Once the promotional period is about to end, the balance is transferred to another credit card and again, the consumer pays as much as possible so as to reduce the balance by taking advantage of the no-interest promotional period. It is just like borrowing money without having to pay interests on it.

New Credit Card Stipulations

In order to discourage this practice, credit card companies have included new clauses that tend to make this procedure ineffective. For instance, some credit cards offer a 0% APR promotional period only for the part of the balance generated by new purchases. This makes transferring balances from one credit card to another highly inefficient unless the new card has a lower interest rate than the previous one.

Another common stipulation is that the 0% interest rate promotional period is only valid if the client makes certain amount of purchases during the month. This generates income for the credit card issuer and may or may not affect your finances depending on whether that purchases where already budgeted or not.

Other cards charge a certain amount for balance transfers during the promotional period. Thus, unless the money you save on interests is more than the fee you are paying for transferring the balance, you would be losing money by implementing the balance transfer debt reduction system.

Further Problems That May Arise

Another serious problem that may affect you by using this procedure can occur if because of too many credit card applications, your credit score drops too much and you can not get approved for a new credit card. After the promotional period these cards tend to charge a high interest rate and do not offer low minimum payments.

So, if you are unable to pay even the minimum payment on your credit card, you will be defaulting and this will ruin your credit because credit card companies always report to the mayor credit bureaus and this delinquency will be recorded into your credit report. Thus, this procedure should be used only once when you feel certain that you will be able to take advantage of the promotional period by repaying the full balance. Otherwise, you should better stick to a low rate credit card.