Make a Phone Call that Lowers Your Credit Card Rate [Credit Cards]: ”
If you’re carrying a credit card balance these days, you have to lower your interest rates. The Simple Dollar blog can help you prepare for, and talk through, the phone call that can do that.

Photo by Jason Cartwright.

Trent at TSD, and pretty much any financial advisor, will always tell you to first try and get out of a carrying a card balance. If that’s not possible at the moment, and you’re paying an interest rate over 8 percent, or especially more than 13 percent, you’ll want to follow along.

The plan, outlined in full at the link below, involves compiling all the rate offers your card issuer makes on its web site, as well as those offered through your junk mail pitches, and coming up with a target rate to shoot for. Get calm, get on the horn, ask if the person you’re speaking to has authority to change your rate. When you get to that person (finally), try on this script outline:

‘Hello. Lately, I’ve been really having to stretch my finances to make the monthly payments on this credit card, and I need to reduce the interest rate somehow. It would be convenient to keep the balance on this card, but I have some other options that could really save me some money – a zero interest balance transfer offer is sitting right here, for one. Could you reduce the interest rate on my account to, say, 9.9%?’

There are plenty of other routes to take if your call gets you nowhere good, like transferring your balance to a new card. But let’s hear from our readers what you’ve done get yourselves a better credit card interest rate—maybe just by asking? Tell us your tactics in the comments.

(Via Lifehacker.)