Personal Finance Q&A: How do I get my credit card rate lowered? - The Business of Sports (blog) |
| Personal Finance Q&A: How do I get my credit card rate lowered? - The Business of Sports (blog) Posted: 16 Aug 2010 08:52 AM PDT Need help with a money problem? Columnist Harriet Johnson Brackey is working with certified financial planners to get answers. Submit your questions at SunSentinel.com/moneyquestion or call 954-356-4628. To see previous questions, visit SunSentinel.com/PersonalFinanceQandA Go ahead and ask for a lower APR, suggests Certified Financial Planner Howard Kramer of Plantation. Call customer service and talk about your unhappiness, try to build rapport with the customer service representative and hopefully you will get an initial offer. Then try to get to a manager who will inevitably do better. If the first offer to lower the rate is not significant, keep pressing the case, he said. If you have a good history with the credit card company, with no or few late payments, you have a better shot at a lower rate. It is always helpful, too, to mention any balance transfer offers from other credit card companies if you have them. Ultimately, you have to be friendly, persistent and determined to get a lower rate. In general, credit card companies place a lot of emphasis on credit scores, so you should brush up on what goes into them. The most important factor in calculating a credit score, according to www.myfico.com, is timely payment of your bills and not having any negative marks on your record, such as a delinquency. Next comes the balances in relation to the credit lines. Those two factors you can control. First take a look at your credit report, which you can get for free at annualcreditreport.com, to make sure there are no errors that are lowering your score. Then, do all you can to bring your balances down. To get the best credit score, your goal should be to use no more than 30 to 50 percent of your available credit. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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