Financial Zip

If you are going to achieve financial independence in your lifetime, whether you are starting late or beginning early in life has to do with avoiding or minimizing debt. So today I wanted to go over so simple steps to lower your interest rate.

Understand something here that you are a customer of a corporation that needs you as much as you need them. They should be privileged to help you when you need help. Now that doesn’t always happen and they can end up being a little nasty and not very helpful. But they are a business and they need your money and should be willing to help you when it comes to keeping you as a customer.

Gather Information

With anything that you do financially it is good to get information that is going to make an impact and when reducing interest rates on you credit card you need to know what you’re talking about. You can’t just call up and just ask them to lower the rate because they generally won’t; you have to have some good bargaining chips.

Find out what how much interest they are charging you. Credit Card companies are notorious for putting this information where you can’t find it. They will use terms like APR, rate summary and others to confuse you. You can usually locate the rate charge on the last page of your statement if you run into difficulty finding it call them up and ask, by law the have to tell you what they are charging you. They might tell you Prime + a percentage just know as of today the prime rate is 5.25%

Rate Shopping

Once you know your rate go rate shopping. Don’t go get a new credit card but look at lower introductory offers or cards that offer an overall lower rate. One good thing to do is to collect all those annoying credit card offers and sort through those and find out what better rates are out there. Some great places to shop are www.creditcard.com www.lowermybills.com, and www.bankrate.com

Make the Call

Armed with the information you now have you are in a strong bargaining position with your credit card company. Find the customer service number on their website or on your bill. I recommend that you shouldn’t talk with the first person that answers the phone. These are frontline people and are getting paid very little so they really don’t care and have no decision making ability, ask for their supervisor. Once the supervisor is on the phone be very upfront with them let them know that you have a better offer form another bank that unless they are able to match or go lower that you intend to transfer the balance. Be sure to offer specific information here so that the supervisor knows exactly what is being offered and by who. Surprisingly the majority of the time they will lower the rate. Sometimes you can get it cut in half.

Also persistence pays off if the manager won’t talk to you ask for someone else. Keep asking for the next person up until you exhaust everyone available.

Remove Late Charges

I hate late charges and credit card companies will charge you even if you are a day late. So make sure to pay on time, in the case it is late a few days call them up and ask them to remove you late fee. Every time I have done that they have taken the charge off. That is the result for 2 minutes on the phone $29 to $39 saved and a an interest lowered. That puts money back in your pocket. It’s worth it