It pays to read the fine print, and I suspect many people do not. If they did, the solicitation I received from my credit card company today would not have happened.
Here’s how it went down (and I am specific with the credit card company on purpose). Capital One sent me some pre-printed checks with the enticement that I use them to pay off other creditors or upcoming bills. The hook was that anything I used these checks for would have a zero percent interest for twelve months. It did catch my eye.
But then I read the stipulations. In essence, if you bought this scam and used one of the checks to transfer a balance or whatever at zero percent interest, anything else you charged to the card in coming months was subject to a 17.9 percent APR, UNLESS you paid off not only the new charges but also the money you’d transferred. So what is the advantage?
This seems to be a blatant way of forcing people like me, who always pay her credit card off monthly, to pay interest. I already know that those who pay their bills completely every month are called – can you believe it? – “deadbeats” in the credit card world because we don’t generate interest for the credit card company.
At the same time, the credit card company doesn’t acknowledge that our purchases generate revenues each month from the vendors from whom we purchase. So we’re not really deadbeats; we’re just not generating the maximum revenue for the credit card company.
It’s not about helping us; it’s all about them.
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