Transferring balance

[newbie]

I saw some ads offering credit card holders to transfer their balance to another card. Does this make sense? I suppose this is sort of a "buy out" thing.

[jellybean]

What it sounds like to me, and I could be wrong, is the idea of getting a new credit card (supposedly with a lower rate) and transferring your balance to that card. Meaning pay off the other cards with this one so that your total balance has a lower rate.

There are different views on this. My personal one is not to do it. I have heard that some look at this action and think that you are unable to pay at the other rates which, so for applying for loans it wouldn't look good. But I do not know how accurate it is.

[Jeff]

Newbie, I guess you could look at it as a buyout, one that you have to pay back obviously. It can make a lot of sense to make this move, but there are several things you need to be aware of. I won't rehash, but I just recently posted a quick reference to help people debating doing such a thing.

JellyBean, you mention you wouldn't do it, and there are also a lot of reasons you wouldn't want to, and you come pretty close to some of the reasons a person shouldn't do this. In a lot of cases signing up for a new card actually hurts your credit, but it normally won't hurt your credit just to move debt from one card to another. Unless you are getting a mortgage creditors won't look at your credit rating with a microscope, so they will only know the big things like how much debt you actually have, your available credit, or how many credit inquiries you have had recently. I touch on this in the post I mentioned earlier. Take a look, I hope it helps you.