Saturday, September 27, 2008

Selecting the Right Credit Card

Picking the best credit card for your needs can be tough to do. I mean there are so many options available on the market these days (even with the current state of the economy). So here's an interesting concept, a website that sorts through all the available options and helps you choose the best credit cards.

This website gives you a vast range of options for finding the card that's right for you. For example, you can search for cards appropriate for your credit history, or cards that match your reward preferences. My regular readers know that I am big on cash back reward cards, so the first thing I did was to see which cards the site recommends in that category. The first card that appears on the list is Blue from American Express - which happens to be my favorite card. There are 6 other cards that are included in that list, but I couldn't tell what order these appear in. It would be useful if the site offered a method for sorting through the recommendations, by each one of the relevant parameters, but no such functionality is available. There are many other recommendation categories. For example, you can search for the cards with the longest grace periods or find the cards which are most suitable for users who take advantage of the cash advance feature (although personally I think that carrying a balance or taking a cash advance is a misguided and expensive way to manage your finances).

The press room section of the website is written blog style, and offers weekly articles on the topic of credit and credit cards, with some pretty interesting and useful information. There is also a section of the website that allows readers to ask specific credit related questions. All in all, this is a very good site, but it still requires some work. One area that requires improvement is the advanced search function. I searched for cards with the following parameters: country: USA; credit score: Excellent; Credit Card Type: Visa; and Customer Category: Consumer - pretty straight forward, but the site could not find any cards that matched the search parameters. I'm not sure why.

Anyway, if you're in the market for a new credit card or just want to figure out what's out there, the site is worth taking a look at.

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