A New Warning for Credit Card Holders
Placed in Credit Card | June 30th, 2009
Announced this week, credit card companies have again stated they are going to be removing the zero percent balance transfer deals in the UK. When the credit crunch started in 2007, the UK began to see a change in the credit card offers. There were less and less of these offers. Last year it was announced that several top credit card companies were slowly removing their zero percent deals, yet we still saw hundreds available online and through mail offers.
This most recent announcement is beginning to see truth. Credit card borrowers have lost quite a bit in interest that they feel they need in order to stay strong through the credit crunch. The consumers are now going to start paying at least 300 pounds a year in interest.
While the deals are beginning to lessen they will not be completely gone. It is just the credit card holders that continue to move the same balance around that will begin to suffer from the lack of available offers, even if they work hard to find new deals on credit card comparison sites. Credit card companies do not want “rate tarts” to continue to reap the rewards they have in the past. Instead they are going to offer zero percent deals only to consumers that have the right credit history and scores. For now there are still 178 balance transfer deals on the market. This is down from the 204 deals offered last year.
To further make the situation worse for individuals having to use their credit cards for monthly expenses is how a declined credit card application will now appear on the credit report. For right now the best deal on the market is Virgin Money with 16 months of zero percent interest. There is still the 2.98 percent fee for the transfer, but not all is lost at least for the deals yet.
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