Interest free credit

angelatgraceland

My dd bought a laptop last year on interest free credit. Now I have absolutely no complaints regarding how it was sold, how it was fully explained etc etc. The point of this thread is to point out the following:
When dd phoned the loan company today to find out her balance for full settlement, as her year of free credit has run out(she can take another 3 yrs to pay if she likes but will have to pay £600 interest), the following things happened:
She was given the balance, but the person on the phone said something to the effect of " I can tell that you don't realy want to part with a large sum of money like this"
"you can pay off the balance over XXXXX period of time if you like.
DD asked how much interest it would cost her. She did not get an answer-the guy kept changing the conversation around. DD siad NO I want to pay it off. She got the final figure, hoping to pay it on her debit card. No luck, it has to be paid by cheque. DD asked how long that would take, and was told between 5 and 12 days.
Its ok for us, we allowed 3 weeks, as I had suspicions that they would try "something". So if you have a similar arrangement, as soon as your last payment on interest-free has been taken, find out your final balance and pay it off asap. If she had waited until a couple of days before the last date on the agreement, she would have ended up paying £600 interest(PC world told us the amount at the onset)I wonder how many others have been trapped this way.

Sallys_Savings

I bet quite a few people have.....something I'd definitely look out for now if I made a purchase in this way.

thank you

grumbler

Read this thread:6 months interest free credit and take care about the cheque being cleared before the end of interest-free period.

angelatgraceland

Thats the sort of thing that bothered me. We intended to post it today by recorded delivery. There is an admin cost of £25 for full settlement and dd phoned them again today, just to make sure that it was in fact included in the figure quoted to her. It was, but hey-guess what? They did accept payment over the phone by debit card so she was misinformed yesterday! So now its paid off and dd has to make sure the direct debit is cancelled with her bank. Apparantly the company will not send her a receipt which I think is out of order, but she will doublecheck all is well yet again with them in about 10 days. Better safe than sorry.