charity cards

katoe

Are charity cards (cancer research, NSPCC, etc) more linient with their credit scoring?

Rafter

No. Usually no different. The charity involvement is purely around receiving a payment from the card issuer for each card issued and a tiny percentage of any card usage.

Most cards are issued by either Bank of Scotland or MBNA.

If you really want to help charities, you are much better getting a top cashback card and donating the money to charity. You can probably even save tax in the process.

Top cashback cards paying 2% give you 20x the reward of some charity cards and 8x that of most of them.

If you have impaired credit, you are unlikely to get a 0% card and may have to go for a credit rebuilder product from someone like Capital 1 or Barclaycard Initial.

Good luck.

R.

lindabea

Some of you may not yet be aware that MBNA who run most of the charity cards are now imposing an annual charge to card users. I think this is utterly dispicable and I feel very angry about it. We use these cards to support our charities, but I must draw a line that MBNA are profitering with such greed.

Can I please make a suggestion to everyone who has these charity cards? Please stop using them and to make a firm point to MBNA, perhaps all users of MBNA cards whether charity or not to also stop using their cards. This will hit MBNA where it hurts most, and perhaps they will get the message that they can't push people around just to satisfy their greed.

Rafter

Linda, the charge seems to apply to customers who aren't using their cards enough to cover the running costs.

Agree the charge is unfair, but there really are much better ways of giving to charity than an MBNA backed card.

Let's say you spend £250 a month on a credit card. The charity will get between 25p and 63p depending on the card.

Now change that card to a 1% cashback card and you get £2.50 a month in cashback.

Give that £2.50 to charity using 'gift aid' and the charity gets £3.20.

So, you can increase your donation from possibly £3 per year to £38.40 an increase of 1180% just by changing your card!

R.