Care Credit VS springStone for dental work

[TimeToRecover]

Well work has been horrid lately but I am about to have quite a bit of dental work done almost 25000 dollars worth (long story don't ask) 

anyway.  Obviously I don't have money like that laying around and the office accepts both SpringStone and CareCredit. 

I have 2 questions.

1  Has anyone used either of these what was their experience positive or negative?

2  What type of scores are typically required?

thanks,

[Peter1142]

I have used Care Credit and my experience has been great. There are a lot of negative experiences on the net, but it is mostly people who do not understand how credit cards work and/or do not read the terms.

The APR is huge, so what you will need to do, is use it for no more than can be paid off in the 18-month special financing period - make sure that's what you get (I think they might have a special 36-month you can work out with your dentist if the amount is high enough), or they will back-charge you interest if you don't. However, they have a special 15% APR you can use if you opt not to use their no interest promo, and that's probably as good a rate as you are going to get. Just be certain of what you are signing! You need to verify with the dentist how long interest free they are giving you. You can have them do more than one charge using different terms.

If you can pay it off in the promo-free interest period, it is a no hassle interest free loan. Their credit requirements are not strict, and you can get CLI easily if you have an estimate from the dentist.

I have had 25k in dental work too, so I feel ya!

[TimeToRecover]

bumping to see if there is more input out there in my fico land....

[Ron1]

I google it and I found out the card is issued by Comenity Bank.

Try google it. You might find the  feedback of the card.

http://www.google.com/#q=Springstone+financial

Ron.

[TheConductor]

With either provider, Peter is correct.  You need to use it to finance only what you know you can pay back during the 0% interest period, otherwise the interest rate takes effect not from the end of the 0% period, but from the date of purchase.  That can amount to a lot of money you didn't expect to be paying.

As for whether to choose one or the other, just go for whichever can give you the longest 0% interest period.

In addition, I'd recommend considering whether you can delay at least some of the dental work long enough to use a tax-advantaged Flexible Spending Account to pay for some of it.  Hopefully your employer offers one of those.  Ideally, DW's employer does as well.

If so, you could each elect to contribute up to $2500 to your FSAs during 2014, enabling you to get $5000 of that dental work done in early 2014 at a big discount equal to your tax rate. The beauty of FSAs is you don't have to have actually contributed all the money yet to make use of it...you can spend the full $5000 on day 1 of the year if you need to.

Unfortunately, the new limits make FSAs less useful than they used to be for expensive elective surgery.  Many employers used to set much higher maximum limits that meant you could save a lot of tax-free funds for your upcoming planned medical procedures.  But now we have the federally-mandated $2500 limit per employee, so you won't be able to fund the whole thing tax-free.  But I still recommend taking as much advantage as you can.

Also, if you can push $5000 of the work until 2015 you could do the same approach in the following year as well. Maybe if there's some cosmetic work that's part of all that work you need, you can save it for 2015.

Obviously, if you're in immediate pain, you don't have time to wait for any of this.  But if you can make it work, then the FSA accounts in combination with the 0% financing might enable you to get this $25,000 of work at an actual cost closer to $20,000 or less.