Stop Paying Credit Card Interest: An Introduction to the Art of Balance Transfers

I was discussing finances with an employee recently, and I was horrified to hear about the amount of money she was throwing away every month on credit card interest fees. There is absolutely no reason to pay credit card interest anymore, and the answer is sitting right in your mail pile.

Anyone who already has a credit card receives offers to take out other cards regularly. Most credit card companies will try to rope you into opening an account with their company by offering various enticements- one of the most popular is the 0% interest balance transfer offers.

Most people realize that these offers to relieve them of the interest they are paying on the balances that they transfer from other credit cards are just carrots that are dangled in front of them. The credit card companies are looking to get the debts transferred over to their accounts so that they can hit you with inflated interest rates on those balances as soon as the 0% interest offers expire, and the new companies' rates kick in.

With a little attention to detail, you can stop paying credit card interest today, by using the credit card companies' offers to your own benefit. By maintaining a little diligence, and employing some simple organization, you can save yourself a lot of money each month by eliminating credit card interest altogether.

The first thing to do is to organize your debt. Look at the balances of all your credit cards and determine what amount of debt you are carrying that cannot be paid off within the next month. This is your balance transfer.

Go through your credit card offers and select the offers with the longest 0% interest balance terms. This is more important than the interest you will be responsible for once the terms expire, because you are not going to ever pay that interest. Next, check the maximum allowable balance transfer amount. If one card will offer allow you to transfer all your debt, then keeping your debt in one account is your best option, for simplicity's sake. Depending on the amount of debt you carry, you may need to open more than one new account to get all your debt into 0% interest balance accounts.