Who has not ever thought of paying for a purchase in installments to be more relieved? Doing it is very easy. All you have to do is take your credit card out of your wallet, pass it through the dataphone and that’s it. The problem comes later, when the account of everything that is going to end up paying is made.
Paying for a purchase with a credit card is expensive. The average interest on these products is 17.99%, according to the Bank of Spain. This means paying 100 euros in interest for every thousand euros returned in a year.
An example. Paying for the 256 GB iPhone 14 Plus, which has a market price of 1,289 euros, in a year with a card with average interest would cost 129 euros more.
“Calculating how much you will pay is not always easy, because all cards do not allow you to select a purchase and pay it within a specific period of time, which is the easiest way to know how long the debt will last and how much interest will go to turn off. Sometimes, the client can only select a fixed monthly fee or pay a percentage of the debt each month, which makes it very difficult to know how long it will take to repay the money and how much will end up being paid”, explain the experts of the credit card and financial products comparator HelpMyCash.com.
These systems can confuse the consumer and make it difficult for them to choose an appropriate installment to return the money quickly and pay less interest. Going back to the previous example, “if the customer decided to pay for their iPhone with a fixed monthly fee of 50 euros, which could be reasonable for certain budgets, it would take almost three years to repay the money and the interest would rise to 353 euros,” they explain in HelpMyCash . To settle the debt in just one year, the monthly fee should be 125 euros.
The term greatly influences the cost of a deferred purchase, but also the APR. The lower it is, the less you have to pay. “There are credit cards, not many, that have an interest rate well below the average and with which you can save interest,” they point out in HelpMyCash.
The WiZink Click card allows you to pay for purchases of between 85 and 1,000 euros in three months without interest or commissions, at 0% APR. For the rest of the terms, the interest is 21.76% APR.
The El Corte Inglés card also offers the possibility of paying for purchases in three months without interest, although in this case a management fee of between one and 18 euros must be paid (minimum APR of 3.66%).
One of the cheapest credit cards is MyInvestor, which has an APR of 6% for any term.
Another alternative to save when financing purchases is to use the Banco Mediolanum credit card, which charges 9% interest (9.38% APR) for purchases of 150 euros or more that are paid within a period of between three and 24 months.
The Tú de Abanca card allows you to defer purchases to three, six, nine, ten or twelve months without interest with a management fee of between 1% and 4% (from 9.42% APR). You can obtain the Abanca Tú Visa, free for the first year, easily by opening a Clara Account without commissions.
Financing the iPhone and paying for it in a year with the Abanca card would cost only 52 euros. Do it with the MyInvestor card, 41 euros and with the Banco Mediolanum card, 64 euros. Much less than the almost 130 euros that you would have to pay with a card with medium interest.
