I'm looking for a little advice. A couple of months ago I bought a new Macbook ($1200) on Amazon and got the Chase Amazon Visa to pay for it. I chose the 12 equal payments for 12 mos. at 0% option.
Since then, I made a few small house repairs and I've added around $2000 in charges to the card. The current balance on the card is $3139.
I made a mistake at first by not reading the fine print and not completely understanding the 0% promotion- I thought it was 0% on ALL purchases for a year. I paid the minimum balance last month before reading the statement (and the interest due part) and realizing my mistake. Lesson learned.
So, obviously I want to pay the card to zero now. However, when I went to make the payment and selected 'current balance' I got a warning that I'm about to pay off my plan or loan early.
My question is should I pay the 'Interest Saving Balance' now and continue making the payments on the original Macbook purchase, or is it better to just pay it in full? I get that I'd be essentially robbing myself of 10 mos. of interest free financing, but I never needed to finance in the first place- I only applied for and used the card because it came with a $200 Amazon gift card (Prime Day deal). My scores are in the mid 700's with 100% payment history. Will 12 on-time payments to this particular installment plan weigh heavier on my scores than a zero balance now and PIF monthly (normal Amazon shopping) from here on? Thanks.
Your scoring shouldn't be impacted at all unless the total amount still owed pushes your utilization score up above a threshold.
If you can pay it off now, then I would pay it. I'd rather have a card sitting at zero balance with 100% access to the full credit limit, than having to make sure that I am paying off not only what I have added to the card that month plus making sure the installment part is also taken care of.
