MSE News: Virgin Money offers 'free' case of wine on its credit cards: Is it...

Starline wrote: »

To be fair, when I googled, I found that Asda also refer to a case of wine as 6 bottles
http://direct.asda.com/Mixed-Cases/AD120105,default,sc.html

As do Tesco
http://www.tesco.com/wine/

And even Majestic Wine offer a 6 bottle case of wine (but also offer 12 bottle versions)
https://www.majestic.co.uk/mixed-wine-cases

Thanks. I didn't realise how common the phrase was for 6-bottles. They say the wines are worth £55 so I will probably go for the offer.

Pincher wrote: »

These 32+ months deals are a little annoying.


If you don't spend on the card, the monthly minimum payment seriously reduce the 0% balance, so I try to spend roughly the same amount as the minimum amount. Barclaycard seems to have an odd way of charging interest on the purchases, though.


Traditionally, you get an interest free period with purchases, but I seem to get charged interest whatever I do. Obviously I pay off the new purchases fully, as well as satisfying the minimum. By paying as soon as the statement is generated, I seem to be keeping the interest to less than a pound currently.


Hopefully, I will still have a decent balance to transfer to the next card, in two years time.

Pincher, this is normal but something that often confuses people.

The "traditional" (as you put it) interest free period with purchases is usually in the T&Cs as only applicable if the previous statement balance was cleared in full.

If you have a 0% balance transfer running, obviously you are not paying the statement balance off in full as you're leaving that balance there (except for minimum payments) to roll on for 32 months.

This means you don't qualify for the interest free period on purchases, and interest on those starts to run from the day you make the purchase to the day you make your payment.

This is better than how things used to be when the payment would probably go towards the BT and not pay off the purchases, but still even though the payment now usually goes towards purchases first they will be racking up interest between the purchase date and payment date.

Just don't try to prevent this by paying off the purchases immediately (straight after buying) before they've appeared on a statement. Payments usually go to amounts that have appeared on a statement first, before anything more recent, and so those will end up clearing your BT rather than the new purchases if you don't wait for a statement. This means there's no way to avoid interest from at least the purchase date to the statement date.

All of the above is of course dependent on the exact T&Cs for your particular card.

tomxlisa wrote: »

Do you have good credit history then, do you normally get accepted for credit, I am building my history to get a mainstream card like virgin but if you have been decline with a good credit it dont give me much hope for when mine is good, is guess you might of just been the unlucky one the computer wanted to say no too though.

I do have a good credit history. No defaults. It might be that within the last few weeks I opened a Post Office credit card account and did a balance transfer of £6k into it. I also do the multiple current account thing (TSBx2, Nationwide, Clydesdale, Halifax Reward, First Direct, Club Lloyds, etc), so perhaps Virgin assumed correctly that I'd spend the £1k on their card, get the wine, then close the account?

Hope your application is successful.

I'll update the thread with their written "further details".