We all love a bargain and seeing a reduced price on a product is very tempting and often persuades us to buy there and then. For stores wanting to make some fast sales reducing the sales price of an item is a sure way to get more customers buying and more money coming in to the store. For the customers getting a bargain price but is it always such a good deal?
If you buy something you don’t need and you use a credit card to pay could make it a very expensive bargain. If the price is reduced 10 or even 20 per cent it may look like a great deal but by the time you add on a few months of credit card interest charges it may tun out to be more expensive than the original full retail price charged everywhere else.
Bargains are only bargains if you are purchasing something you need to buy at a price you can afford and usually if you can pay cash. Purchasing with a credit card makes everything you buy more expensive. Unless you pay off the debt very quickly the interest soon mounts up. At around 2% per month it does not take very long for the cost to have been 10 or even twenty per cent higher than you thought you were paying.
If you can pay off your credit card when the bill comes in the interest probably won’t be a problem but if you are in the habit of paying the minimum monthly amount the debt hardly goes down and the interest charges soon build up.
The general guide should be that if you can’t afford something it is not a bargain unless you have to buy it somehow regardless of price. If you have any choice in the matter you will usually do better to wait until you can afford to pay cash and save all those expensive interest charges.
