Credit Card Blog

I had a credit card when I was a student – I’d only use it for emergencies and sometime when I couldn’t find my debit card (and yes, it accidently got used a few times when I couldn’t find my debit card) but on the whole I’d try to keep it away from day to day spending.

It’s easy though to use your debit card or your credit card and to not pay attention to what you’re using each of them for. As long as you can pay off the balance or have the funds, what does it matter which one I use?

Well – this is something I’m hoping everyone will know anyway, there are things you can buy with your credit card that will cost you more than if you had used your debit card. I’m going to look more into providing a list of things but for now the main one to focus on is flights and holidays. Using your credit card for these incurs extra charges..

Easyjet is classic example. I tried booking flights a little while ago and saw this:

Paying by credit card
£112.96

Paying by debit card
£109.76

Paying by Visa Electron
£108.01

Hmmm – ok, I’m glad I didn’t skim over this at the time… could have wasted me £3 just by using the wrong card.

Ryanair also used to adopt this policy – however they’ve changed their charging slightly now. If you use a “Visa Electron” then you don’t pay an extra charge (what on earth is a visa electron – I think I had one about 15 years ago but as far as I remember it wouldn’t let me buy anything anyway!)

If you use any card (debit or credit) with a via, mastercard, solo, or maestro on it then you get charged £4 for the privilege. Is this the cost of processing the credit or debit transaction? Wait, that’s not the whole story, if you book a return journey then you’ll get charged £8 for using your card as payment. Right, that makes sense. Two journeys, two charges. No wait – that doesn’t make sense at all! This is called a “handling fee” – handling of what? It can’t be the handling of the transaction because whether you’re doing a single or a return journey it’s only one transaction..

Anyway – I’ve gone on a bit of a rant, the motto though is be careful when you’re making purchases, and especially with flights and holidays, when it comes to paying, make sure that there are no hidden charges, handling fees, and if there, choose your payment method carefully!

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 20th, 2008 at 5:56 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.
You can leave a response.