NYT ON 0% CARDS: According to a New York Times headline, 0% credit card balance transfer offers are back. The author offers his own experience seeing a single 0% offer, but we’ll throw in a lot more data points: the PFD household has about 30 credit cards, and we’ve seen several dozen 0% offers over the last year or two, with Capital One and Citi being the biggest solicitors. Unfortunately, every single darn offer has fees–usually 3%, though occasionally we’ll see 2%.
Really, the 0% offers never stopped, though the no-fee 0% offers have certainly dried up. If you poke around, you can sometimes provoke your issuer’s algorithms into giving you one–that’s what happened a couple of years ago when the awesome folks at FWF found that you could take out a tiny balance transfer at 5% interest which would then prompt an automated offer of a no-fee 0% transfer. We experienced something similar with Capital One a few years ago when we paid down all but a little bit of a 0% balance and were swiftly offered another one to replace it.
Credit criteria tightened in the wake of the credit bubble’s bursting in 2008, so people with low to middling credit probably see less action than they did during the glory days of 2005-07 when anything with a pulse could get $10K at 0% for a year. According to the CardHub report linked in the article:
0% offers and initial rewards bonus are experiencing a resurgence after appearing to peak in months past: The average 0% balance transfer term (10.29 months) is 2.39% longer than in Q4 2012 and the average 0% purchase APR is available for 2.53% longer than Q4 2012 (10.13 months). The average cash back initial bonus ($76.81) is 33.77% more lucrative than it was this time last year, and the average points/miles bonus (11,446) has risen 13.89% since then.
So if o% offers are becoming more prevalent, maybe it’s due to looser underwriting standards… or it could be due to looser marketing budgets, who knows. In our past banking lfe, Q4 tended to slow down due to end of the budget year and the holidays, while Q1 generally got more active.
But get a load of the bonuses! $77 and $11,000 miles? People aren’t trying hard enough. We generally won’t consider a signing bonus unless it hits $300 or so.
In any case, those who want a no-fee 0% offer can always go for the Chase Slate. It’s remarkable how long that offer has been available on that card.
SAVE MONEY BY SWITCHING ELECTRIC COMPANIES: Dough Roller has a pretty thorough guide to switching electric companies. Around half the states now have some amount of utility switching. We don’t live in a deregulated state, so this is not something we’ve ever looked into, but our guess would be that people who are good at figuring out deals (for example, the readers of this blog) are likely to make out okay from a switch, while people who are not (most of the population) aren’t likely to do well by switching. As always, read the fine print.
$10 OFF AT THE GREAT COURSES: Since we enjoy the courses offered by The Great Courses, we’ll pass this along: $10 off any order through April 28 with coupon code T6EP.
STICK SHIFTS ARE BETTER: Edmunds has an article worth reading on the financial (and other) virtues of a manual transmission:
Cars with manual transmission will appeal to budget-conscious shoppers, because it costs an average of $800-$1,000 to upgrade to an automatic transmission. On the higher end, buyers interested in a Saturn Astra will have to pay an additional $1,325 to drive an automatic.
Also, the maintenance of a manual transmission offers some savings. According to Marc Uchiyama, assistant service manager at Honda of Santa Monica, the fluid for a manual transmission needs less frequent changes than on an automatic. And if a manual transmission ever breaks down, it’s usually because the clutch needs to be replaced, a $1,200-$1,500 repair. Compare this to the $3,000 it costs to replace an automatic transmission and the savings is apparent.
If you have kids, you’re out of luck: as far as we know the last manual transmission minivan (we don’t count the Mazda5 as a minivan) was the Dodge Caravan Turbo, which was discontinued in 1991. This van could also be tuned up to do 12-second quarter-miles. In your face, minivan-haters!
And on that note, have a great weekend!
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