Using Your Intuition When Choosing a Card

If you were to sit down with ten different website articles about how to choose a new credit card, you would find that they all offer different types of advice (much of which is contradictory). What you would find that all of these articles have in common is that none of them will tell you to rely on your intuition when choosing a credit card. For the most part, this makes sense. When choosing a new credit card, you want to make an informed decision based on the facts and financials of the credit card account. However, you shouldn’t discount the importance of checking in with your gut instinct and using your intuition before applying for and signing a credit card application.

Choosing a credit card can be a really confusing process. You need to look at the interest rate on the card. You need to take into consideration how the balance is computed before the interest charge is applied. You must review the perks and rewards of the credit card and weigh those against and fees or other drawbacks that might be a part of the card’s financial terms. In other words, you really need to know what you are doing when you try to choose a credit card. Taking the time to learn what you should be looking for is crucial to making sure that you choose the right credit card.

However, all of this information doesn’t take away from the fact that you do have an internal gut instinct that might be able to assist you when choosing a card. Should you impulsively rely on your intuition to select the right card? Of course not. But you shouldn’t entirely dismiss the idea that you could have a good sense of which cards are right and which ones aren’t just by relying on what you already know about yourself.

For example, you may start looking at a credit card rewards program and just get a feeling that it isn’t quite right for you. You just get a general internal feeling that you probably wouldn’t use the rewards or that you are so confused by the terms of obtaining and cashing in on the rewards that you probably wouldn’t be able to maximize the benefits of the credit card. Everything about the card might look good on the surface. All of the articles that you’ve read might have provided you with information that indicates that this is a good credit card. However, your gut instinct is probably right. If you think that you’re not going to be able to use the card right then you’re probably not going to be able to benefit from it like you should.

It isn’t just rewards programs that you might get a bad feeling about; it could be any type of credit card application. The gut instinct is usually particularly good for helping you to weed out the bogus ones — those “no credit” or “poor credit” offers which are designed to look beneficial but turn out to have a lot of problems associated with them. Don’t count on instinct alone to help you select a credit card but don’t ignore that little voice when it does pop up during your credit card applications.

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 22nd, 2008 at 6:28 am and is filed under New Card Offers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.