ultrarunner

Until a collection agency sends you a letter for it

Aviator

If you pay 1c short of the balance due, you get dinged interest on the full amount, back to the day you bought the goods and for everything you buy from then on I believe.

Aviator

Or several thousand off the price - Which is often a way better deal then low ore 0% financing,

Alan2005

No, you pay a few cents short of the entire balance, not what's due. I did this for 2 years and I never paid any interest.

iaink

Most cards if you dont pay the balance in full they ding you for the interest on the full balance to the point you paid most of it.

Card user agreements were unilaterally changed to this maybe 5 years ago now...

iaink

Negotiate the price, THEN discuss how you are going to pay.

Many car companies make more money on the finance than the profit on the car nowadays (GM finance for example), often they would rather you financed, so wont offer large discounts for cash.

Alan2005

I didn't know that - bastards. But, honestly, I never got charged any interest for doing so and I regularly had balances of around $2k. Nice guys at HSBC I guess.

Alan2005

Many places offer you discounts for finance.

Shard

Yes I accept that easy credit has caused this financial crisis, but I'm not one for throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Credit should not be as easy as it was (and thankfully it no longer is) but it should still be available to individuals who want to buy now and pay later. Call it (non-easy) credit. If someone prefers to save and thereby avoid paying interest, that's fine, but there's no moral high ground to be had in a 1950's mentality of not using debt.

In any case, the consumer credit industry is able to absorb losses on unsecured lending because they take a massive margin on the business they do. The sub prime crisis is not particularly relevant in this regard as there was a high degree of application fraud and the loans were artifically leveraged. I don't see Visa or MasterCard requiring any bailouts soon.

JonboyE

It might be worth getting your credit report from Equifax. There may be a mistake on it.

ultrarunner

They hardly make a mistake Oh, you can also use Transunion as well

ultrarunner

Interesting, hopefully the govt does the right thing if this ever happens again

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/repor...rticle5097436/

bats

Could be. I might look into that.

Deficient

No authority whatsoever in a Canadian context, and only based on personal experience in a UK context. So not very much authority at all, I grant you.

I'll try to explain my thought process and if the reality differs then please correct me, because 1. I don't want to spread misinformation, and 2. it will help me as well to have a correct understanding of things.

My thinking was that the payment protection insurance premium is only applied to a credit card when one has a balance at the statement date. That has been my experience in the UK. In other words, when I have a balance at the statement date, the PPI premium is applied. If I have no balance at the statement date, then no PPI premium is applied. That has been the case even if I had spending in a given month that I repaid before the statement date.

My hunch is that if one pays off their credit card spending before the statement date each month (i.e. leaving no balance at the statement date), then they never incur the PPI premium. I also felt that there would surely be no value in having PPI because there would be no balance each month at the statement date to insure... but I'll correct myself on that shortly in a couple of ways.

I only have close-to-hand experience of the actual claim process in the UK too, which I realise doesn't account for much here in Canada, but my father was diagnosed with cancer while carrying a pretty substantial balance on his credit card and was signed off from work. While he was allowed to carry on using the card, on the condition that minimum payments from him would continue in addition to the coverage resulting from the insurance claim, the balance on the card as at the date of the insurance claim was the balance that was covered and therefore that was repaid incrementally over the following months (iirc this was 10% of that balance, per month). Any further spending was not covered, and would be repaid by him in the normal way.

Thus, if one repaid their credit card spending prior to the statement date, there'd be no balance showing on the statement, no balance being protected and the insurer would presumably have nothing to cover. And as I mentioned from my UK-based experience, no premium to pay. Something that occurs to me, a possible flaw in my thinking (in addition to any others that you might have picked up on?) is that the balance on a credit card as at the date of the insurance claim might not necessarily be the same as the balance (nil in this case) at the statement date, so it might be that you could have an insured balance at the claim date even if you generally repay your credit card prior to the statement date each month and technically never paid a premium. So I am likely wrong about that, first of all.

If you pay the balance after the statement date but before the due date, you pay the premium but from my point of view, paying out an insurance premium on a balance that I have the ability and willingness to cover seems like a waste of money but that's purely a matter of opinion and scale, so I hold my hands up and say I was wrong about that. And I guess that's the main reason you're taking issue with my post. I can only defend myself by saying that I am not a frequent or big-spending credit card user so my mindset will differ. But I gather from this thread that others do run their every expense through their credit card, which no doubt amounts to thousands on a monthly basis, and then pay it off each month, so having the insurance cover that in a bad situation would of course be a relief, allowing you to use the funds that you intended for that purpose to instead support yourself. Whether the cost/benefit in the long term balances out for each person is not for me to say, so I do admit I am wrong. Certainly the cost/benefit wasn't going to work out for me as a fairly minor spender and that was where I was coming from. Shot my mouth a bit there without thinking it through fully.

Hopefully that explains my post but, as I say, please put me right on things further if necessary.

I notice you also quoted the section of my post about credit bureau reporting but I'm hoping it was clear that I was just thinking aloud and not really stating cold hard facts about that. Can you shed any light on it? It's not clear if you were taking issue with any of that part.

gryphea

You can send me gifts if you like. Think of it as a charity as we don't wlays pay our credit card balance off.