Controlling your Credit Card Spending

mcmorj

Just to advise that American Express (and possibly others) offer a basic card with the following facilities:

No annual fee
No pre-set spending limit
No interest charges

The only pre-requisite is you pay off your balance IN FULL each month.

For those who may benefit, this offers the convenience of a credit card (carrot) with the (stick) condition that you do not use it for CREDIT.

If you cannot trust yourself to only spend what you already have, I have come across another option to consider - a PAYPAL credit card. This allows you to "charge" your card - "pre-pay" with some money (say £200) and then any time you use the card, the spending you make is deducted from your balance.

So you have the convenience of a credit card (MasterCard) but with a "hard limit" on what you can spend. The spending on the card comes out of your paypal account. You would not be able to "add" more money to your account from your nominated account as you would be able to do if it were an internet based and not card based transaction.

One or both of these may be helpful to someone. There may be other similar offerings.

InsideInsurance

So control your credit card spending by having a charge card instead of a credit card?

There are many prepaid credit cards as well as the PayPal one but the "problem" with them is that you lose the Section 75 protection of a credit card and so there is little/ no advantage of using one of them instead of a debit card

System

American Express honour all of the payment protection that section 75 offer, so it is like a debit card with the protection.

I have a gold card, and also find that it forces me to check my spending a lot. American Express are also bang up to date online, if you call and pay someone and press the refresh button, it will instantly show. A Lot of the credit card providers can not easily show pending transactions online so you don't get a up to date balance.

Totally agree that the charge card route does help you control things, makes me obsess over how much im going through in a month and keeps me in check.