Deciding on the Best Credit Card Offer

The credit card companies are actually quite anxious for your custom. These days, new credit card offers come with all kinds of freebies and attractive gifts - free flights to anywhere you wish to go, a free iPad, interest-free cash advances - not only are they getting a lot more generous with their offers than they ever have been, there are getting a lot more creative as well. It used to be that you could collect every offer that came to you in the mail and bargain with the company that you chose by showing them what all the others were offering. That used to be the way to get the best credit card offer. And then came the recession, a time when the credit card companies just withdrew all their offers altogether. With the best credit card offer letters promising 100,000 miles, $150 in cash back rewards and 0% cash advances, the market is finally a place where it's worth your while to play one against another.

The great part about all these offers is that everyone's just being upfront. All of this is just plain old capitalism. No one's trying to pull anything. While the offers may be raining faster and thicker than ever before in the past three years, the consumer still needs to exercise a bit of caution picking and choosing among them all for the lowest fees and interest rates. It could hardly do to choose a card that had attractive-looking rewards but that took it all back with over-the-top interest rates.

Blank checks from the credit card issuers are back in style. Before the recession kicked in, credit card users would cash their blank checks, open a high yield savings account with it, and earn some interest on it for free. That really won't get you anywhere these days now that bank interest rates are among the lowest ever. But you can use the check you get for paying down expensive debt elsewhere or for balance transfers. The average American has credit card debt worth $3500. That would usually cost about $650 in interest; if you could pay off even a small fraction of that, you could save $100 in interest.

New cardholders have more to look forward to today than ever before. Your sign-on bonuses have become more generous than at any time in recent memory. If you are planning on making a large purchase in the near future, you could time your credit card application to when you actually make that purchase. If you pay the balance off in full, this could work out to be very profitable. It could be a tough call picking out the best credit card offer - seeing as how generous many of them are. Chase Freedom has upped the cashback ante by 50%; on American Express, when you spend $500 and three months, you get a top-of-the-line Kindle and a gift card worth $100. It's all about choosing the best from rewards for your needs.