Back in the fall of 2022, credit card surcharge changes came into effect. Basically, Canadian businesses are now able to pass on credit card surcharge to their customers. The real question was how many merchants would decide to pass on the fee?
The new rule allows merchants to charge consumers “interchange or swipe fees” for every transaction, commonly known as payment processing fees.
We generally have 2 types of article, posts (more date sensitive) and pages (more up to date information). Posts are what we publish regularly that is date stamped. So the information provided in the post, is date sensitive. However, the ongoing updated pages are found on the menu bar. These pages are updated regularly, so you will not see the historic information, as they are deleted once updated.
A week ago, we updated our Pointshogger 101 page, which is really the first page that we recommend new people to read. The second page to read is the “Understanding Credit Cards” page. After reading these two pages and establishing some foundation, the main posts will make a lot more sense.
Looks like the big banks across Canada are looking to reduce interest rates on credit cards to provide relief to customers affected by COVID-19 pandemic.
Warning
Let’s just make this clear up front on this post. If you are someone who has no other options than to use a credit card to pay for bills during the crisis, and you are receiving an interest rate reduction, definitely take it.
We last wrote a post about this topic back in 2015, so no doubt this was due for an update.
The topic today is to discuss the different types of credit cards in Canada. The three primary credit card companies are: American Express, MasterCard and Visa. However, each company have different tiers of cards. Each level offers different benefits.
Tiers of Credit Card
I am frequently asked this question by people who have an interest in the topic, but do not know how to get started. For sure, when you first get started, it will feel like there is a lot of information to sort through. But just like most things in life, you start with one step at a time.
As you probably already know, the miles and points game is constantly evolving. Almost on a daily basis. I have added cash back to the discussion because there are days when I feel like the industry wants to shift in that directly.
This is not going to be an easy post to write, but I did want to try to pin each financial institution against each other to see how they fair. This is going to be a very subjective post where I am going to rank each each company based on their overall credit card portfolio. I am also going to list out some of the top credit cards offered by each institution.
The credit card cash back market is actually starting to heat up in Canada. Could we be seeing a shift in the industry from miles and points to cash back?
People often tell me that they do not want to earn miles and points because they do not spend enough on a credit card or they do not travel often enough. But those are not the only ways to earn points.
Each credit card company (American Express, MasterCard and Visa) names their higher level credit cards a little differently. There appears to be so little information documented on this topic, so I thought I would give it a try.