I got an-email today from Discover about saving money on interest via a balance transfer.
Obviously this piqued my interest given I run a website about credit card balance transfers.
While I wasn’t in need of one, I still wanted to see what they were offering customers like me. I had to click through on the e-mail to “view my offer,” at which point I landed on the screen seen below.
As you can see, Discover is offering a no fee balance transfer offer, though the APR isn’t the 0% you’re probably looking for.
Instead, it’s 4.99% APR. However, you get to enjoy that rate for a full 18 months, which is better than the standard 12 months most card issuers stick with.
I have a couple of accounts with Discover so I tried a different login and the same offers were presented to me. So it looks like most anyone with a Discover card can take advantage of these two offers.
How You Can Save Money with This Offer
You can actually save money with the 4.99% APR offer versus the 0% offer depending on how much debt you have and how long you take to pay it off.
For example, say you transfer $2,000 in credit card debt to Discover via one of these offers.
If you go the 0% APR route, you’ll pay $60 upfront and nothing more in the way of interest for the first 12 months.
If you go the 4.99% APR route, you’ll just pay 4.99% of your balance over a year. So if you start with that same $2,000, you’ll pay about $8 per month the first month and less each subsequent month as the balance is chipped away.
That gives you around seven months ($8×7=$56) before the 0% APR offer is the better deal. Any longer than that and it’s better to just pay the upfront 3% balance transfer fee.
In other words, if you need a short window of relief, going with an APR above 0% can be a winning solution if there’s no associated balance transfer fee.
For the record, you should be able to access these balance transfer offers even if you didn’t receive the targeted e-mail from Discover.
Just login to the Discover website, click on Manage, then select Balance Transfer.
Now if only Discover would re-release their once-seasonal 0% APR no fee offer…