The Credit Tracker

If you like charts and keep track of your things, Capital One has a nice tool to track your credit: The Credit Tracker. I like it because it is FREE.

All you need to do is to enroll online and request the access to it, you accept the terms and conditions and you are good to go.

The information from the Credit Tracker is coming directly from TransUnion (yes, it is real data).

The reason why I like so much is because it brings you information from the present, and also from the future!. You can even simulate future actions on your accounts and see what will happen to your Credit Score.

Enjoy!

What is the Grace Period and how you can destroy it..

It is quite simple: Credit cards have great benefits, but only if you use them wisely.

90% of people have no idea of what the Grace Period is and the sad part is that many of them simply don´t care about it.

Credit card companies make millions for the lack of this knowledge in most of their customers.

Grace period: Is the number of days you have to make a full statement balance payment without having to pay interest. You get this benefit when your card is brand new, but...

Here comes what many many people does not know: YOU CAN LOSE IT.

The way to lose your grace period with most Capital One credit cards is very easy:  By not making your full statement balance payment in one due date.

Once you lose the grace period the only way to get it back is by making a FULL PAYMENT and this includes the Current Balance, plus the interest in advance, plus the amount of any transaction scheduled to be posting before your next billing cycle date.

If seems complicated, you may call customer service and the will calculate it for you, this is what is called: The Payoff Amount. 

Keep your Grace Period, just dont spend what you can not afford to pay in full.

Enjoy!

Why I use Capital One automatic payments

I learned the hard way how important it is to not to trust in my own memory. Life changes and for different reasons we may forget to make our payments manually.

Capital One credits card have available the feature to set up automatic payments. This feature has three options:

• Withdraw the minimum payment.
• Withdraw a fixed amount.
• Withdraw the statement balance.

For different reasons I prefer the last one.

This payment will process always by the due date. If the current balance is less than the amount to be taken, the system will take the current balance. 

I know to ways to set this up:

• Online
• Calling customer service.

Being late even one day will affect your relationship with Capital One. May be this will not affect your credit, but they wont see you the same way anymore.

Go automatic!

Get more from Capital One

Do you want to get more from Capital One?

I will explain what I found are key factors for getting more benefits in your Capital One credit card. Of course I am not a millionaire, I am a customer like any other but I like to keep track of everything.

Make them lose money.. Do you want Capital One really care about you? If the answer is yes, what you need to do is to a make them lose money and also, just pretend you do not really need that card in particular..

Let´s say you are approved for a credit line of $1000. What you are going to do is to use about 35% or 40% of your credit line and then pay ALWAYS in full by your due date.

If you do that, first: you are making Capital One lose money since they are sending you cards, letters, statements etc at no charge and you are NOT paying any interest. Second, you are pretending to not to care about using your credit line.

Since they are not making money, they will start sending you offers of every kind to make you use your credit line at a point where you can not pay in full (and pay interest). They may do things like:

• Activate rewards on your account.
• Increase the credit line proactively.
• Send you checks to have you use your credit line.
• Activate Balance Transfer offers with temporary low interest. 
• Lower your APR
• Waive membership fees. etc.

Do this for a while, at least 6 months. Then give them a call periodically to check what features your account has available.

Enjoy!

Get miles on your Capital One cards

This is going to be like a mirror to the post "Get cash rewards".

Basically the same principle applies: ALWAYS ASK. Call the customer service phone number (the one in the back of your card) and just kindly ask if they have rewards available for your card (s).

When you ask this question I found that they will always tell you the truth. If they have them they will transfer your call to another department to get it activated, if not they will apologize.

Enjoy your miles!

Get interest charges waived

Interest is the way the banks make money out of us and everyone knows that. Now, for some reason, Capital One is willing to waive the interest charges in some cases.

Seems to be that they wont have any problem to do it when it is for less than $10 and only if you request it.

I had an account in the past that I usually paid in full every single cycle. One time I missed a payment on that account and lost my Grace Period.

I called customer service and they waived more than $20 in interest because of my payment history. (By the way, I learned how good it is to pay the cards off every month the hard way).

Get your deposit Post faster!

Once you make a payment to your card there are two option for it to post. This depends on the time you do it.

If you do it before 8.00 pm ET, they will post it the same day. Then, if you do it after 8.00 pm ET they will post it one day after.

When you are new to Capital One and you do not like to read the terms very carefully, most likely you will miss one or more payment due dates because of this.

However, there is another option if you really need to use the money right away.

Basically you can call Customer Service and explain (or pretend) that this is an emergency and you need to have the money AVAILABLE right now.

Once you request this they will bring to the line a supervisor and will make a three way call with your bank to realease the payment in 10 minutes.

Keep in mind that they WONT do it if:

• you are past due or,
• you are over the limit

Enjoy your money!