I'm looking for a card with a solid rewards programs that i can use on travel/flights. The catch is i need something with 0% on purchases for a intro period of time as i am remodeling a house and have a few other big purchases to make and would like to differ paying for them out of my pocket until the home i am remodeling is sold. I live near a continental Hub.

I thought i'd go with premier pass elite, but they do not offer the 0% on purchases. I called and asked if theyd grant me that if i went with the elite level and of coarse they said no.

capital one no hassel is basically all i can find, but the cash in teir system seems to suck.

any recomenndations is appreciated, i'm getting frusterated!

The problem as I see it is you want the 0% promo on a good reward (hotel/miles) card. Generally the cards offering the 0% incentive are usually crappy cards that use the promotional APR to lure you in. Good travel rewards cards (like SPG Amex or similar) don't need to offer teaser rates because their cards are actually worth the plastic they're printed on.

Try Citi Diamond Preferred Rewards

Chase Professional Mastercard

Not a travel rewards card, but cash back. 3% at hardware and home improvement might be a great deal for your project. Also at gas stations, restaurants and office supply. 1% everywhere else.

Lowes and Home Depot cards might be a good idea if you don't already have them. They usually come with 10% off first purchase and intro 0% apr. You won't get 10% on a travel card and could always balance transfer to a 0% card later if you wanted.

Two citi thank you network cards could be an option too. Take a 0% balance transfer on one and put it in high yield savings. Use the other for purchases. Pay card two with the balance transfer cash. This could be dangerous if you don't manage it right though. You can easily get 25K points with two citi cards as a signup bonus too. I've got the Professional, Business w/ TYN and Premier Pass.

The only miles type cards I can think of with 0% intros on purchases are Blue Sky from Amex and whatever Discover is calling theirs these days. These both offer 6 months of 0% on purchases. I'm not up on whether their miles plans are any good; I don't carry either of these cards. But some other non-miles cards might still give more 0% time on purchases. I just got one from Fifth Third Bank for a year of 0% (although this was a mailer; if you apply cold you only get 6 months). Discover and Amex also used to have other cards that gave a year of 0% (I've gotten it from both of them in the past).

Keep in mind that if any of your remodeling/big purchase stuff can come from Lowe's or Home Despot they will also probably cough up some 0% for 12 months credit for you. Lowe's hands it out like candy every so often. Plus, getting 10% off up to a pretty significant purchase at Lowe's is easy even without their card; just sign up for a coupon at http://www.lowesmoving.com/ I'm not sure if they're postal mailing or emailing these right now, but they used to be good for purchasing up to $10k at 10% off. Home Despot probably has a similar coupon.

I just got a MERRILL+ and was informed that you can get 1.9% on a cash advance for 12 months...they make a deposit into your checkings for whatever amount you request up to your credit limit and its only 1.9% for the first 12 months...its not 0% but close...

Welcome to FlyerTalk, mdd4656!

You'll be nothing but frustrated trying to find this in one card.

The trick is to split it into at least two cards. One card earns you miles or points or cashback, but has a horrible interest rate. You don't care about the interest rate, because this card you pay off in full every month.

Separately, you get cards that give you 0% not on purchases but on balance transfers (be careful, many do this on just balance transfers within a limited amount of time after you open the card). Then you do one or more balance transfers (within the time limit) to pay off your biggest monthly bills at your rewards-earning card. You don't care that this card earns you no miles/points/cashback because the other card already did. On this card you never make purchases (that usually effectively cancels your 0% rate!), you only use it for balance transfers and only when the 0% offer is still in effect.

Note that these two cards have to be from different companies, as Chase, for example, will not allow you to transfer balances at 0% from another Chase card (such as the Continental Chase card).

Now the trick is finding 0% balance transfers offers that you can apply for (if you're not already getting them by the boatload in the mail). The problem is that they're only offered to people with good credit, so these offers are usually targeted, and you may have to wait for one to come to you (rather than being able to find out out there and apply for it). But maybe someone else has a tip for finding a 0% balance transfer if you haven't gotten any offers...

This is a decent list of cards with possible 0% balance transfer offers. http://www.creditcards.com/balance-transfer.php Many are possible for a year. Amex Blue might offer you 15 months but apparently this can be a shorter time as well. Some also offer 0% on purchases, usually for a shorter time. I have had good luck getting 0% for 12 from Amex and from Discover. I got Clear from Amex when I last did this; not sure if that one still comes with 0% for a year.

I agree the two card split can be good if you do it right. But it might also be useful to take advantage of easy 0% money from the home improvement stores if applicable. Sounds like OP could need to apply for two cards to make this work, and approval for two new cards may not necessarily be forthcoming.

I am beginning to think 2 cards would be my only option... HOWEVER i have very good credit and would like to keep it that way. would closing the balance transfer card after my year of 0% be bad for my credit??

Today i just so happened to receive an offer from bank of america for 0% on purchases balance transfers and cash advances for 12 billing cycles. on top of 0% they have NO BALANCE TRANSFER FEE.

if i got this card AND the premier pass elite and made my purchases on the premier pass then BT them over to the bank of america card does anyone know if i would lose my TY network points i gained on those purchases?

i would close the bank of america card after the 12 months into period or whenever i felt like paying the Balance transfer balance off.

Would my credit get dinged for this??? THANKS!

This is a good deal when they have no fees on top of 0% purchases and transfers. These don't often line up for you in the same card anymore, although I did just get a similar card from Fifth Third Bank. (Theirs did not include cash advances, though, just 0% for 12 months on purchases and transfers, with no transfer fee, as long as the transfers were done within the first 90 days.)

You wouldn't lose the points. Balance transfers when you're paying off the card post just like a payment. You earn the points based on your purchases, not based on keeping a balance. The balance transfer is no different than if you wrote them a check.

Or just leave it open with zero balance. This is what I do these days. I haven't bothered to close an account voluntarily in ages. There have been occasions where a card issuer closed an account for me when I applied for and received a different card from them. I still have excellent credit and no real trouble getting a new card every year (more 0% free money!) if not more often.

Nope. Well, if you actually close the account after a year oddly enough that might ding it a tiny bit, and if during the time you're using the 0% card you use a large portion of its available credit, that can bump it down a bit temporarily, but otherwise no. If you have excellent credit and don't already have a stack of cards at home, you probably will have no trouble getting approved for two different cards. Having cards where you charge some stuff and pay it off generally helps your credit in the long run. Keeping older accounts open can help too. When you do the balance transfer(s), even though that card is 0% make sure you pay more than the minimum payment. That's another thing that affects the scoring. For more info than you ever want to see on how various things affect your credit see creditboards.com

Your credit gets dinged primarily if you close older accounts. It's always better to close new accounts than old ones. But what's even better is consolidating (if you have a old account at the same place where you have the new account, you may be able to combione the credit histories yet end up with one less card).

But you're doing all this just for 1% cashback??? (That's all I've ever heard of TY points being good for.) The only kinds of points that tend to get you much more than 1% cashback are real airline miles and real hotel points (because those two systems at most airlines and most hotel chains don't have a redemption value that's proportional to the cash value of the reward, while all "fake miles/points" like TY points, Capital One, etc, simply use your points at about a 1% cashback rate to buy cash tickets outright (through their travel agency). So you get no more back than with a simple 1% cashback card (and then using the cashback savings to book the flight or hotel yourself), but you have restrictions on redeeming!

Have a look at some of the threads out there. With a Citi Amex Plat it's rather easy to get 3% cash back when redeeming for gift cards, and double that for airline tickets. I calculated a 21% rate on my last redemption, under the old system. That kind of crazy return is not possible anymore but there's still some good values out there, when you understand the program. Even my Amex SPG is in a drawer...

how do you mean? I just looked up flights on continental.com to redeem onepass miles earned on the co mastercard and a roundtrip domestic from cle to Las would be 50,000 miles.

the same flight or any other domestic on any airline can be had from citi TY network for 20,000 miles???

thanks

One or two new cards won't ding your credit much if it is already excellent. Carrying a balance on the 0% card might hit it depending on what it does to your overall utilization. One easy way to avoid that is to use a busiiness card for the 0% balance transfer. Business credit won't report on your personal credit report, other than the initial inquiry. Just report $0 in income and 0 years in business when applying for a business card.

One thing to watch is that balance transfers are often only fee free when you open the account or for short time thereafter. If you are planning on doing a balance transfer every month to pay charges from the previous month you might find they start hitting you with 3% fees. A better strategy is to take a big balance transfer in cash (Citi, Chase, BoA and others have no problem sending you a check). Put it in a savings account to pay for things as you buy them.

The TYN does have a fixed point redemption - 20,000 points for a domestic ticket up to $400, you pay the taxes. There are other threads in this forum with more details.

If you wanted to go with the Thank You Network, I would recommend three cards from Citi.

Purchase card: Citi Amex Platinum - 3 to 5 points on each purchase for first two years, 15K bonus points, no fee first year.

Purchase card 2: Citi Premier Pass Mastercard - extra TY points for flying, no annual fee, 10K bonus. This would be for coverage where Amex is not accepted.

BT Card: Citibusiness Premier Pass: Do the balance transfer with a check to yourself. No fee first year, 15K bonus points.

This would also give you 40K TY points after your first purchase on each card, enough for up two domestic flights up to $400 each.

First of all, the value is compared by comparing the award to cash cost. So using $20k of spending to get an award that would have cost you $350 cash is equivalent to 1.75% cashback. Ok, not as bad as 1%, but it's nowhere near paying 50k real miles for a summer flight US<->Europe in economy which would cost $1100++ (2.2%), or paying 90k real miles for a summer flight US<->Europe which would cost $3000++ (3.3%).

Next, you're seeing 50k CO miles cost because you're looking at dates when the 25k award level is sold out. But it you had booked further ahead, you could have gotten it at 25k. (Not sure whether you could have booked far enough ahead in what people often call NonePass, but that's how it works at better FF programs anyway.) It's the 50k CO award that's a lousy value, not the 20k TY award that's a great value.

If all you're really interested in is cheap (in cash) economy flights within the US to popular destinations, and you don't earn through anything other than credit card spend*, then TY may indeed be better than some FF programs, especially ones known for being hard-to-redeem like NonePass. But then, these kinds of flights are not-so-great-values in either real miles or TY points. But if that's all the travel you intend to do, I guess that's all the value you can get.

But in all real miles programs, the real value comes in either snagging 25k awards to expensive destinations (last year I got LAX-JAC, Jackson Hole WY where there's little competition and the prices start at $500+ and are more typically $600+ and up for 25k easily on UA), or 50k/60k economy awards to Europe when it's not on sale (when prices go through the roof in the summer), or business class awards overseas most anytime.

Those are the kind of situations where I'm not sure that TY points measure up at all. I know numbers of people have posted that TY charges twice as many points for business class overseas as real mileage programs do, for example.

Of course, there's the other problem: Unless you're a high card spender, it's going to take quite a while before you amass enough TY points for those theoretically higher-value destinations overseas (if they are indeed higher-value at TY). So most people who use TY "burn" their points at lower-value domestic trips because they're not sure they'll ever accumulate enough for a longer trip.

"Real" miles on the other hand, combine from all sources. Not just credit cards, but also dining programs, hotel stays, rental cards, Netflix signups, etc, etc.

But, again, "real" miles are only valueable if the FF program you choose is one you can actually redeem in. I don't have the isssues you do with NonePass since my primary is AA and secondary is UA and because I plan my trips well in advance and have been reading FT for years.