“If you only apply for one credit card a year, this could be the one,” gushes Steve Willey of moneysupermarket.com on the Abbey site. Abbey’s new card launched in April this year has certainly turned heads with its veritable banquet of 0% rates on pretty much everything. To recap, the Abbey Zero card comes with the following:

• 0% on balance transfer fees
• 0% on balance transfers for 6 months
• 0% on purchases for 6 months
• 0% foreign usage fees
• 0% cash withdrawal fee
• 0% annual fees

OK, so the last one shouldn’t be expressed as a percentage per se, but it looks nice and uniform when typed like that. Anyway…

At Compare Now, we reckon that the Abbey Zero card is going to be one of the most popular cards this year, mainly because of the fact that customers can move balances across without incurring any extra charges at all – a real life raft in these current financial climes.

Many customers who sign up for card which promise 0% on balance transfers for a limited time find that they have to end up forking out for a handling fee, usually charged at around 3%. The Abbey Zero card takes the sting out of 0% balance transfer cards by doing away with handling fees altogether. The upshot of this great feature is that any transfers made over to the Zero will have to be done within the first month of opening the account.

The 0% rates on balance transfers and purchases also expire after 6 months – some 0% cards, such as the Barclaycard Platinum card which comes with 0% on transfer for a whopping 14 months, but comes with a 2.9% handling fee. Likewise, the Virgin Money card comes with a slightly bigger 15 months of 0% balance transfer fun, but a 2.98% handling fee also applies to all transfers.

Customers should be aware of the fact that the Abbey Zero card does come with a higher than normal rate of APR – 18.9% typical (variable) – but if you’re smart, you should never have to pay a penny in interest.

Whilst the 0% rates on purchases and transfers expires after a 6 month period, the other freebies – no charges for ATM withdrawals in the UK or anywhere abroad and no annual fees – remain, so once your done with juggling balances, the Abbey Zero is still worth hanging onto.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 13th, 2008 at 8:55 am and is filed under Credit Cards, Savings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.