Don't be a banker... (Egg Card)

Member Name: dave27

Product:	Egg Card
Date:	21/06/01 (130 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Very easy sign up, Very flexible, Good rate

Disadvantages: It's still borrowing

...says the blurb.

The credit craze of the 80's has had a new lease of life in the last three or four years and these days you can't turn a corner without getting offered all sorts of deals on credit cards.

Me and Mrs D got well and truly stung twenty years ago in those bad old days and are now very much older (VERY, VERY, VERY MUCH) and wiser (well one of us is) and are never going to get caught out that way again. (Yeah, we say that now, check us out in another six months when we're up to our very bleary eyes in debt)

Anyway, the fact is that about a year ago I arranged a new credit card account through the Royal Bank of Scotland because it seemed to be the only way that I could arrange any form of flat rate internet access. I was with BT at that time and they insisted on having payment via credit card and when we switched to AOL they also insisted, so reluctantly I decided to get a card. When I contacted RBS, they offered me two cards, a VISA and a Mastercard and altogether they allowed me about £5000 on my limit on the two cards.

The only trouble is that as soon as you get a card, all the other banks, building societies and credit card companies start showering you with junk mail in order to try and get you to take out their deal as well, and in many cases they offer EXTREMELY ATTRACTIVE deals to switch to their card, sometimes offering 0% interest for the first six months.

Now at the moment Mrs D and I are having to run up a fair balance on the old plastic because we're getting a load of work done on our hovel in France and are using the cards to take the strain (we know what we're doing, honest...) so we checked some of the deals out.

The Egg Card, offered by the Egg financial services organisation, seemed to be the most promising deal....

They offer 0% interest for the first six months on any balances transferred to the new card by the end of July 2001 (and that's clearly
a big incentive for us at the moment...)

There is no annual fee.

You're allowed to manage your account via the Internet site.

The ongoing interest rate at 11.9% is competitive

You get 2% cash back at Egg Shop and 1% cash back on all other purchases (although I haven't got a clue what that means - it sure sounds sexy, however)

Egg is actually part of the Prudential financial services group and has certainly been pushed extremely hard over the last three or four years. In the end, Mrs D decided that it would be a good idea to check out the credit card deals available and she thought Egg offered a very good package so she trotted over to www.egg.com and tried to apply online. We were both extremely impressed by the ease of the process (it was almost TOO easy actually) and we were provisionally accepted straight away - they even offered us a limit of anything up to £15,000. God, that was a temptation I can tell you, but once bitten twice shy I always say (boring git aren't I?) and so we asked for a limit of £5,000.

The whole process took only two or three minutes and was all very impressive. Egg sent us the authorisation form a couple of days later, we signed it and sent it back in the prepaid envelope and THAT WAS IT. We were in and shortly after got our lovely little green card - how very civilised!

Another thing to note is that as well as being able to manage your account on the Internet, you can also do the foul deed re the Open facility offered by Sky Digital through the television set (for you really lazy folks - now that's me and Mrs D, alright!)

I can't really say how very impressed we both were by this very simple and user friendly process, although I am still very uncertain about the merits of companies pushing this sort of credit so very strongly. If you don't know what you're doing or have A LOT of self discipline you can quickly come a cropper - we kno
w, we've been there.

Having said all that, and coming over as Mr Middle Aged Worry Wart with all my "Wasn't like this in my day" spiel, if you are going to take out a credit card, you want an easy process that makes it simple to do the deed and I have to say that Egg seem to have got the thing down very, very pat.

Summary: