Credit Cards Canada

As with all conveniences in life there are added expense attached to them. Credit cards are very convenient yet you pay the price for those conveniences such as higher interest rates and annual fees.

Here are a few features of credit cards that you may not be aware are associated with credit cards.

Annual fees can be up to $50 for the standard Visa or MasterCard with the gold cards having an annual fee of $80. For the credit card holder the companies consider to be good customers, they will drop or waive the fees it you ask for this with your cards. If you think you are paying a fee that is too high, call you credit card company to ask for a reduced fee or to have it waived entirely.

Contrary to what many credit card holders believe, paying off the balance every month might be a good idea with some credit cards. They like to attach a fee for the members that use the card and pay if off monthly since they are not earning interest on the balance carry over. They will call the fee different names in different companies, so watch you statements if you pay your balances every month.

The interest rate of your credit card is set by the bank or saving and loan institution that issued your credit card, not the credit card company. The institutions issuing the credit cards state to the credit card companies the interest rates they want to charge the customer. The limits are generally 13% to 16% for their card even with the introductory offers that only last a very short time of six months to a year.

Interest at higher rate is charged on cash advances as well as other fees for this service. There are fees for late payments and for over limit accounts. These fees continue to add up each month if you fail to get the balance under your spending limit.

Many people have the fraud protection on their credit cards to provide additional safety yet they do not realize there is a fee for this service. The protection is not something you need to pay for since there is law protecting credit card holders to the liability of $50 of unauthorized spending on the credit cards. Many credit card companies do not tell their customers about the law so they can take advantage of the desires for credit card fraud protection. You have sixty days to report any unauthorized charges to have the excess removed from you statement without any penalty. Do not let you credit card company try to tell you differently or make you pay for the unauthorized charges.

I found this offer online and figured i would test out the secured card to let the people with bad credit know what to expect. The application online was somewhat easy and painless and i’m pretty sure almost everyone gets approved for atleast $350. Its a good card to start off with if you have little or no credit or maybe you just went through a bankruptcy. After i applyed online i got a instant approval and recived my letter in the mail to send them the $75 dollar deposit. I send in a cheque for 75.00 so i could see when it was cashed. It was cashed about 4 days later then they will put a 10 day hold untill the cheque clears and then send out your card. I ended up getting my card about 2 weeks later in the mail. You can just call in and activate it. This is where a little bit of my problems started. Nothing too major but kind of a pain. Where i called in from my house phone and not my cell phone that i had on the application it kind of triped some sort of security junk. So the card still activated but when i went to make a purchase in ontario it didn’t approve it. It did however let some small transactions through without a problem. Thats what the capital one security rep said anyway. So it all came down to it logged the phone number i was using and the database seen i was not calling from my main number and made note of it.

Update: I had the card now for a month or so now. I can make my payments online with scotiabank with out any problems at all. They show up in about 2 days so i’m pretty happy with everything. They also added a charge for a member fee so don’t forget that will eat up $59 of whatever credit limit you had.

It will look like this on your online statement

Date , 2008 CAPITAL ONE MEMBER FEE  Other  $59.00 

If you are wondering about other fee’s you will be charged a $5 dollar fee for cash advances. For the most part i’m pretty happy with this card and technical support was very helpfull whenever i had a problem. Next i am going to try to review the Tap and Go Mastercard with Paypass. I like the idea of buying gas just by waving the card and away i go. You can also use it at places like Tim Hortons and lots of other places for small purchases.

This is a table of Canadian Credit Card Interest Rates. It compares the various credit cards offered, by type of card, annual fee, interest rates and days of grace before interest is charged. This is a canadian credit card list only. We will soon have a review for 2 new credit cards. The American Express Business Card and the Capital One Secured Visa Card. If you would like to check out more Credit Cards that are reviewed by ratings and rates. You can check out a new site called credit card rates canada. 

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This card is offered to mostly business accounts. If you have a normal paypal account in canada you may not even see the option to get one. They pretty much hide it from you untill you get a business account or hit some level. The PayPal Debit Card is the fastest way to get your paypal funds out of your account. You can use it at ATMs worldwide or anywhere MasterCard is accepted. 

I mostly use mine at at the bank of montreal machines since i never seem to have a problem with them. If you tryed to get your funds out before and it never worked then i most likely know your problem. If your in canada you need to have the funds in US dollars. Why might you ask… I have no idea other then paypal makes money on the exhange since the money is most likely in CND funds. It took me forever to find this out and why it did not work.

But now i go to the bank almost every week to get my $400 out. There is a $400 dollar limit that you can take out per day and they will not raise it from what i am told. I called a few times asking if they could bump this up to $1000 a day since $400 is just not a lot of money and the answer was always sorry SIR but thats a NO.

For buying goods online it works great just be carefull if you are buying goods all over the world since they won’t hesitate to disable it if they think someone got a hold of your card and is using it to buy goods. I buy auto parts in California with mine and it has been disabled a lot since i live in canada. I always have to call the number on the back to tell them that the charges are ok and i indeed did make them. After about 2 times of having to do that they seemed to leave me alone and i never had a problem again. I would not make a trip to the USA with this card and buy GAS in Maine and then again in New York. Their is no doubt in my mind if it was the only source of money you had you would be high and dry on the side of the highway.

So yes its a great card for buying online and using up your paypal balance. Another good thing that is in canada it takes 5/7 days to transfer to your bank account. If you have this card you can get the cash just buy running to a ATM. I use this card with paypal all the time even more then my own bank account.

 I would recommend the paypal debit card to anyone. Just don’t forget you need to have a USD balance to take out money at the ATM. When i called one time i told the paypal girl i could not get my money out she at first told me i had no money in the account. I was like WHAT!!!! i have over $1500 dollars in their. Sir the account says $0 dollar balance. Then after checking her system or whatever she then found out i was from canada and that i did have a balance of $1500 just it was not in US Funds and that was the problem. So now that you know that. You are all set to go.

I had this card now for about 4 years and use it a lot for business orders. The best thing about this credit card is the rewards are pretty much hassle free with no bull. I started off with just a normal royal bank student visa card when I was in college, I was using that for mostly business transactions for car part orders in California when I started my small business. I think it was the Royal Bank Visa Classic II student card I had.

Why was I using a student card at first you might ask and not getting any sweet avion reward miles?  The problem was at the time to get the avion you needed a $5,000 dollar credit limit to get the card. My problem was the max credit they would give me starting a new business was $3,000 for not really having a steady income and being open for 3 months. I’m not sure if it’s still like that or not but it was a few years ago. Anyway a few months passed and I packed on the orders and put some major cash through that card and kept paying it off in full and RBC had no problem giving me the new avion visa card. This time with a 10,000 dollar limit I guess they figure if you’re spending lots of money on the card and paying it off fast with no problems you would be a good future customer.
 
Now on to the card review…  This card came in the mail with in no time and I didn’t waste any time calling it in to activate. From what I remember for the first few months they were giving double points for a promotion. They have lots of promotions for double points this was around august or so and before I knew it I had around 40,000 racked up. By the end of October me and my business partners wanted to fly down to USA to visit the Sema Car show in Las Vegas. I called the 1-800-Royal-12 number on the back of the card and in no time was forwarded to the right department and had my flight reserved. There was no lock out dates and I think you could use any airline. I ended up using continental airlines and it turned out to be a very good choice. I was happy with their service and didn’t run into any delays. I can’t say the same for when I flew with delta. Continental at least seemed like they had everything together and got us in Vegas on time.
The card itself the interest is kind of high but I guess 19.5 is normal now days. The annual fee is $120 dollars a year with a 17 day grace period for late payments.  If you want to add a co-applicant it’s another $50. The cool thing with the avion card is you can use your points to buy items and not just airline tickets. After I built up some more points since the SEMA trip and they sent me a book with mostly overpriced crap to grab your points away. But there was one thing in the book that caught my attention. You could buy future shop gift cards and get as many of them as you had points. So I cashed them all out and waiting for Xbox 360 launch day ended up with 2 core systems out the door and sold them on eBay. That i think was the best use of my points. It was just as if royal bank giving me cash and trust me that will ever happen looking at my bank account statements and all the service fee’s. I do however from time to time see nice sums of money enter my account and then leave a few seconds later. You wonder sometimes….. why that happens is it really a mistake? Is something else going on behind the scenes. Anyway the card is pretty good and if your thinking thats the card for you then get it.

The much music debit card is a prepaid Masterccard offered by the much music tv station issued through GE money. Since we at credit cards canada like to actually use the cards we review for a month or two I filled out the application for this card and paid the fee’s to get the card. It cost around $40 dollars and i paid with my bank account using the certapay email money transfer system.

I now read on there website they offer a pay later option. The Pay Later option allows you to get your MuchMusic Prepaid MasterCard® but pay for it later. You Pay the $39.95 with your first load after you receive your card. $39.95 includes activation and your first load fee.  About 7 days later i had my GE money muchmusic card show up in the mail. Sweet! Now its time to load the card… This is where i started to have problems. Where i bank with Scotiabank its not supported and i can not load my card from there using the online payee option with online banking. I am told this is not really MuchMusic’s fault since Scotiabank has to offer it. If you bank with BMO, Desjardins, HSBC, National Bank, RBC, TD Canada Trust they are all supported as for me i had to use what they call a Pre-authorized Debit. That ended up being a major PAIN! I read their website front to back thinking there must be some other way to load this card and i don’t want to get a BMO account just to load this credit/debitcard.

So i call the 1-800 number on the back of the card…. No wait there is not even a 1-800 number its long distance. Well whatever i want to know if theres some other way to load this thing faster i want to LOAD and SPEND to test this ole girl out. Well to my suprise not only am i paying long distance but to talk to a real live human it asks if i accept to take i think it said around 90.00 cents off my card to talk to a live operator. Well whatever its 90.00 cents who cares but i do think if you need help it should be free. Finally i have a human on the phone and a very nice girl answers she kinda sounds spanish. I pretty much find out the same thing as a read on the site they only other way to load the card was with the PAD method.  This involves downloading the PAD registration form from the secure section of the much music card website and submiting it with a void cheque. This works with all Canadian banks. It takes 5 business days from the time the funds are removed from your bank account to process and add cash to Card balance. So i do that get it loaded and it works fine.

To test it i add it to my personal paypal account that i just made. Paypal accepts the card and i go through the process to add the card. Paypal makes 2 small charges and then you verify it by checking your statement. This worked fine and the online report was updated pretty quick with the small charge. I enter it into paypal and away i go the spending limit is released. I can now send 10,000 from my paypal account and after that i would have to add a bank account. So for the kids this card is marketed towards its a great way to get a credit card to get your paypal account up and running. Since without a credit card added you can only accept payments but not send them. It would suck to be 16 and have to ask your parrents for there credit card for every little thing you want on internet and half the time no doubt it would be stuff your parrents would not let you waste your money on in the first place.

In the end i am somewhat pleased with the card. Its online setup to view you statement is pretty clean and works well. The account process was pretty care free and  i had no problems getting the card in the amount of time they said it would take. Some of the fee’s are bullshit but looking at my online bank statement from scotiabank they take me to the cleaners on bank access fee’s a lot worse then this card does. I think i just got used to it over time… as bad as that sounds its true.

Music Music MasterCard Seen Here.

Rather than surfing through tons of American credit card websites, all offering irrelevant credit cards, for banks you never heard of. You can find everything you need at Credit Cards Canada. It does not matter if your from Alberta or Nova Scotia you can now easily find just those lending companies on both sides of the border that want Canadian customers. Whether you have really great credit or may be needing to re-establish poor credit we can help. We have many reviews on cards such as Air Miles, Secured Visa Cards, Low Interest Credit Cards, Cash Back Credit Cards, Student Cards and Reward Points Credit Cards. Are you a student and just starting your first job and want to establish some credit, then you have come to the right place.