@Anonymous-own-fico wrote:
@NRB525 wrote:
Once you BT to a card, all new purchases have the interest rate clock as soon as the charge posts. No more grace period. So you want to pay the minimum to get that taken care of, then if you do new charges, pay those soon after they post, because you can pick them off out of that APR bucket. (does not have to be daily payments, can be weekly to catch up and pay recent groups of new charges)
So you pay off the purchase once it posts. When do you pay off the tiny bit of interest that the purchase accumulates for maybe even just one day? Paying that, an estimate that is, too sooner than later would avoid having it carried over to the next billing cycle?
There can be some small residual amount of interest. That will get picked off in the next monthly payment, because the next monthly payment should always be more than the minimum payment amount. The payments I make on purchase amounts soon after the purchase are always rounded up anyway, just to be generous in the overall monthly payment amount.
@kdm31091 wrote:
This just seems very complicated for most people. I can understand if the rewards are attractive but having to pay purchases as you go, as they post, can be a total pain. Have to weigh the effort vs benefit I guess.
This is true. If the rewards aren't worth it for the cardholder, the BT card should go in the SD.
A lot of it depends on how you view managing the credit card, whether it's a game or a chore 
I have to make a clarification, which I just found in my US Bank Cash+ account.
I have been putting some BT offers on the card, intending those to last several months. $1,400 is the largest of these.
I also was using the card for Department store purchases, then paying the card soon after the payments posted, to get the 5%.
I noticed the balances on the card had Purchases still on this latest July statement. Tracing back through, US Bank does not post the extra payment amounts to the new charges. So the first month when I ran up some Department Store charges to get the 5%, which were the first new Purchase charges, the payments I made days after that went toward the Balance Transfer amount.
So an exception to the original post is, with US Bank, you have to wait for the statement to print to be able to pay those new Purchase charges.
I did reconfirm that BofA and Citi do not wait on those. I was able to apply payments days after they posted, and see no interest expense at all on the statement.
@Anonymous wrote:Great post. And for the majority of consumers, this is a great thing.
But for a select few of my family, it has been a nuisance. I don't have a problem with that being set to default that way. But if someone calls in and wants their payment applied a different way, they should be entitled to do so.
For example. If a person has a 5k balance with discover, and half is currently 0 percent for 12 more months. Maybe they have some bigger income coming later in the year. They dont want their 100+ a month even touching that 0 percent amount. They have no choice but to only allow whatever amount over their minimum to go to the higher apr balance.
CareCredit does the exact same thing however you can call in and override it after any payment. Lowes also lets you override.
Thanks, hopefully the post is useful.
The minimum payment is a small amount, though, typically 1% to 2% of total balance, so the "early payment" on the 0% portion isn't bad. It's a concession to the CCC, and a small one, since after that 1% - 2% of balance payment, the remainder goes to the higher rates. And, honestly, we should be paying the 15% - 25% APR charges pretty darn quickly
