Do you have a credit card that you frequently use to manage monthly expenses in better ways? Congratulations!
Credit cards have become one of the most vital financial tools that one should own these days. Not only a credit card lets you raise money to pay during emergencies but even prevents you from borrowing from the family.
Another advantage of owning a credit card is that you don’t need to pay the utilized limits instantly. You get up to 40-50 days to repay the bill after the generation of the credit card statement. Also, if you have made a big-ticket purchase, you can always break it into EMIs and pay easily over a tenor.
However, once your credit card statement gets generated, you need to check its particulars. A credit card statement is a summary of all the transactions that you including the outstanding amount, reward points gained and redeemed and more. As per the credit card statement, one can pay credit card bill online.
Nonetheless, a credit card statement may contain some mistakes or errors such as some purchases not made by you at all. If you don’t crosscheck all such issues, it may increase your debt, and you would need to pay it without having used.
Thus, what matters is checking the credit card statement every month to take control of your outstanding debt and keep things clear.
In the same context, we have created a post for all credit card users. They can go through it, and check a few elements in the credit card statement to be aware of all. Read on!
1) Outstanding amount
Your credit card statement will contain two amounts – the minimum amount due and the total amount due respectively. You can pay either of the two numbers as per your needs. However, it is always suggested to pay the total amount due because paying the other one will cough up interest until you pay it. Also, paying the minimum amount due will have a negative effect on your Credit Score.
2) Billing cycle
A billing cycle is 30 days. Transactions made during this period should be repaid within the payment due date. The payment due date usually appears after 15 days from the end of the billing cycle. You also know the slot as the grace period.
3) Opening balance
The credit card statement shows the remaining balance from your previous statement as the opening balance. It gets added to the transactions that you make in the current month.
4) Payment due date
You can pay credit card bill online either for the minimum amount or total amount within the payment due date. If you do that within the payment due date, there will be no charges or interest fee. Hence, be aware of the payment due date so that you may know what type of payments (minimum or total) you can make.
5) Credits and debits
Your credit card statement will also show the amount paid towards the bill as credits and total expenses made via the credit card as a debit.
6) Available credit limit
You will also be able to see the available credit limit in the statement, which is the left amount up to which you can use for making payments. Using the credit limit more than 30-40% is not a good practice as it may hamper your CIBIL Score.
7) Cash limit
The cash limit is the total amount that you can use to withdraw from an ATM. Withdrawing cash via your credit card from an ATM is not a good practice. It is because that will attract massive interest charges till the time you make the payment.
8) Rewards points
Every credit card company offers you some reward points for making a purchase. You may later redeem them to enjoy discounts on your future transactions.
A few credit cards such as the Bajaj Finserv RBL Bank SuperCard offer you the advantage of pocketing 20,000 rewards points on joining as a welcome bonus.
Now, you are aware of all the vital points in a credit card statement so that you may avoid the mistakes not incurred on your part. It is better to pay credit card bill online after confirming all the particulars of the card statement to prevent all loss.
