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Years ago (maybe 25 years ago?), an outfit in the UK (Mint maybe?) decided to launch their new credit card with two gimmicks. One was just a weird shape, hey it's a curved card, pointless but different. But the other was a financial gimmick. The first 12 months are 0% APR and it has a direct cash reward scheme. Some people I know abused this very heavily, they immediately took out a card, and used a mechanism to transfer all the credit (e.g. £1250) to a high interest period savings account. Sit on it for a year, then pay back the £1250, keep the savings interest (actually it's a little more complicated to do this right, but it's automatable) and get cash back. Not exactly riches, but hey it's free capital. Subsequent gimmick cards ensured you could not do this. I didn't feel right doing that, I just used the card to buy stuff, as intended, and filled up the credit limit over about 8 months. So when the 0% period is up, I pay everything and I get my cash back, but it's in the form of a credit against the account, so I have a card I intend to cease using but with like the price of a meal in credit. So I went to the pub. Burger and a coke, alas it comes to like 4 pence more than my credit, and I figure it'll auto-pay and then I'll destroy the card and forget about it next month. Nope, as well as being gracious enough to accept the (apparently eye-wateringly expensive) acquisition cost of giving all those people free credit for a year the card company also wrote off my 4 pence balance, I just got a letter saying "Because of this low balance we have written off the debt". So that was surprisingly pleasant of them. I didn't ever use their card again, but it did mean I had positive things to say about them, which is worth 4 pence at least. |