I had a similar situation...got $5000 (no transfer fee...you have to watch that too), at 0% for one year. I put the card away (outta sight), and set it up to take automatic fixed monthly payments (about $200 over the minimum required), which assured me that it would never be late. They (the cr cd companies) are assuming that you will put other charges on the card, and then pay interest on those items until the transfer is paid off. They apply the payment to the amount that has the lowest interest...the transfer, b4 the other purchases get paid off. 3.x% for the life of the balance transfer loan amount sounds good to me. Sue

Greg H, Your message tells me how you are managing ... debt. Wisely, yes. To your advantage, yes. It's still ... debt. D-E-B-T - a four-letter word! Cut it whatever way you like, it's still debt. Which can be become a *serious* problem when it's misused. That you are obligated to pay - even if you get a temporary lay-off, or with certain specific skills no longer in demand, a pretty well permanent one, or suffer permanent disability, or have a kid who subsequently develops a need for $50,000. worth of uninsured medical care - or even die. There's only one way you can avoid it - go bankrupt. Which steals from other folks who gave you services in good faith, from which you walked away. Some do that several times - walk away ... smiling. The message was, as I said earlier, not directed to the likes of you or people anywhere near as smart as you when it comes to managing money. Like, maybe, your friend's kid who, though s/he was in college, wasn't too smart when it came to money management. A local Canadian financial consultant complains that they don't teach much about it in school. If the corporations, including the financial ones, get their feet more heavily into the schools, there'll probably be even less. In his book, he offers advice on how to make a rate of return of 40% or better on your money - guaranteed. Proviso - you can only make that (before-tax) rate on store-issued credit cards whose balance you pay off. Maybe, had your friend's offspring not been willing to pay attention to his/her parent, as being out of the dark ages when it came to instructions as to wise ways to live, s/he'd have listened to you had you offered some advice. The reason for making the point about it actually being a debt that was being incurred when you use the card was to try to get some people who know much less than you about money management to begin to think about it somehat differently. The point of the message was to show them how they might reduce their cost somewhat if they followed a different pattern than some may have started through following the easy path of signing up for a store-issued card. I approached it with some trepidation, for I was advising ... taking out an additional card. Which could (too?) easily have a major debt run up on it, as well - leaving the holder in a deeper hole than previously. Should I become aware of that result springing from advice which I had given, it would trouble me greatly. Much more concerned than I was about complaints such as yours - which I hear about half of the time that I make this point. By the way - you didn't say that I was wrong - you just said that everybody does it, right? By the way, elsewhere in the message, when I was not dealing with the specific issue of the debt aspect of the card, I referred to them without using the quotation marks. Your country - government and people - is drowning in debt. And digging the hole deeper, daily. The "value" of your dollar is dropping - had you noticed? Good wishes to you for wise management of your money - and assets, Greg. ole joyful

I know this for a fact. If you are an authorized user, you are only authorized to use the card and the c/c does not report anything about you to the credit reporting agencies. Your mom is solely responsible for the card. If you became a JOINT user of the card, then you are equally liable for the charges and they report the payment history to the reporting agencies. How I know this is I am from Canada and married an American. I had no US credit history and they do not take Canadian credit history here even though I had good credit back home. At first I was an authorized user of dh's cards, thinking they would report the info to the credit bureaus. When I checked my free annual credit reports, tehre was nothing on me. No info whatsoever. It wasn't until dh made the cards joint (and me ultimately responsible for the cards too) that the info was reported to my record. I also have almost the same high fico score as dh. Basically, all his credit history transferred to me and I reaped the benefit of his high score. Authorized user = no reporting to agencies Joint user = report to agencies and the user is liable for charges.

Before you get your knickers all knotted, do some research and not just take the hysterics flaunted by "news" programs. There is an RFID chip in the cards that can be read, but not all cards have them. I looked at mine and none of mine have this chip. And as said all you need to do is punch a hole in the chip's logo and it's destroyed. A paper punch, a nail, whatever you have handy. People are also all worked up over the info supposedly contained on the magnetic strips. You actually don't need the magnetic strip to make most credit card purchases. They can key in the card number manually but stores don't like to do this because it costs them more in transaction fees. Way back when I used to demagnitize the strips purposely but found out that was just paranoia, just like the paranoia that rages about key cards at hotels. Safety is all in the person. Azzalea, I recall you lost something like $1200.00. The most I can lose on a credit card is $50 and that's covered by my insurance. I'm far more concerned carrying $1200.00 than I am carrying a credit card! But with you it's different so that's fine. And considering I've received WAY more than $50 in cashback it'd still be profitable to use the card even if I lost one. Which I guess I did, but it cost me nothing more than a phone call to get it stopped and replaced. Who replaces your cash? I'm certain your insurance company does not. I use pay-at-the-pump so there's no way they can "borrow" my card. I'm not quite sure how this happens as often as you describe. Please explain. I guess we disagree on "so much safer" obviously. Chisue, I use a double thickness of heavy duty foil hat. They don't know what I'm thinking now! One chain around here tried that thumbprint scan charge which didn't last long. I laughed at them when they tried to get me to sign up for that.