Hiya everyone!
After wandering 40 days and 40 nights (plus a couple of years) through the desert of no Capital One BT offers, I received my first one earlier this year. I used it to the tune of $4000 to get some much needed pampering done on one of my cars - she needed new wheels, tires, and a major service appointment- as well as a little extra spending cash, as I had just started a new job and was a bit concerned with short term cash flow.
I've since paid that down to $2,200, and have it set to be paid off in February, long before the 0% APR runs out. However, I keep getting additional BT offers from Capital One every couple of weeks, and this week I got an especially good one - 1% fee for 0% APR for 9 months.
I was thinking about cashing one of the conveinence checks for $2K (temporarily raising my utilization to about 50% for a couple of months) to pay off my Amex bill in January. I'd rather pay $20 to Capital One and have a little more breathing room than pay the whole Amex bill.
How does Capital One apply payments if I take out a second BT? Does the oldest BT receive payment first? If so, I think I'll do this, as that will give me 10-ish months to pay off the $2K, but I wouldn't dare stretch it out that long. Realistically, it would be paid off in July at the latest, but I want to make sure taking out a second BT won't affect me paying off my first BT before that promotinal APR ends.
@Anonymous wrote:I'm not sure about Cap One. But Discover does it that way.
Good to know. Before I asked this question, I did some reasearch to see if someone had an answer for Capital One specifically, but couldn't find anything. I did come across one thing though:
Because of the CARD act of 2009, lenders have to apply payments to the lowest interest balance first, but since both of them are at 0%, it gets a little confusing for us. I was reading an article online about someone in the exact same situation as me, and the lender (unnamed in the article) was splitting the payments across both BT's, since they were both at 0%. This made it hard for the woman to pay off the first balance transfer during the promo period, since half her payments were being allocated to the other BT.
Cap One pays
your current min payment first
then your highest interest rate purchases
then your oldest 0% or maybe your soonest expiring 0%
Regardless, they are awesome when it comes to applying payments properly.
They will even tell you exactly how much to pay each month (interest saver payment) to prevent being charged interest on your new purchases without paying off your 0%.
I have done many 0% offers with Cap One and charge everything every day and never paid a dime in interest.
Of course, you could just pay off the old 0% with the new 0%.
