Zero Percent With No Annual Fees For Balance Transfer Cards

Letters

The core problem

In response to "For the love of a road" (News, Feb. 3), Colorado Springs does not need another upscale shopping center like Copper Ridge or a giant low-density subdivision on the city's fringe. What Colorado Springs needs more than anything is an urban growth boundary.

For those unfamiliar with the idea, such a boundary would encourage higher-density development within the city, and discourage the kind of low-density urban sprawl that is responsible for a large portion of our infrastructure costs, and primarily benefits developers.

There is enough developable and re-developable land within our city; why should our roads and utilities be extended so developers can continue to profit at our expense? Even if they pay for the initial construction of this new infrastructure, eventually the costs of maintenance will fall to us.

— Kevin Schmidt

Colorado Springs

Still not convinced

Regarding Andy Petersen's letter ( "We need nonprofits," Feb. 10), I would like to say that I need more facts before I will accept his assumptions. Andy's statements that taxing nonprofits would be "devastating," and that "the nonprofit sector is key to the health of a thriving local economy" seem to lack facts to back them up.

Here are some facts. There are 29 pages of organizations (Exempt Organization List) in Colorado Springs that have sales-tax exemptions as of Feb. 1, 2011 ( springsgov.com ). I have no idea of the amount of sales-tax exemptions overall in Colorado, but I'll bet it is substantial.

As of 2007, there were 18,999 501(c)(3) organizations registered with the state. Together the registered nonprofits garnered $13.1 billion in revenue. State nonprofit facts can be found at colorado.gov . The U.S. Olympic Committee is a nonprofit; could we do without it and the annual mortgage we placed on our police and fire buildings to fund keeping it here?

Frankly, nonprofits use services: street lights, police, fire, roads, etc. Would it be asking too much for them to pay sales and property tax to keep the Springs and even the state out of bankruptcy? We do need more facts, like how much sales and property taxes do we forgo locally (and at the state level) due to nonprofit exemptions not granted by the IRS?

You can't have the discussion without the facts. Maybe the Indy could provide an article that details all the facts so an informed discourse can begin.

0 percent balance transfer offers stage a comeback - Credit Cards

0 percent balance transfer offers stage a comeback CreditCards.com surveys 38 cards, finds the deals -- and the new strings attached By Kelly Dilworth

If you've noticed a fresh spate of 0 percent balance transfer offers in your mailbox lately, you're not alone, say industry analysts and consumer watchdog groups. However, the latest offers come with some new terms and conditions that could trip up unsuspecting consumers.

The number of 0 percent promotional balance transfer offers being sent to consumers is on the rise. The growth defies recession-era predictions that 0 percent balance transfer offers, which once flooded consumers' mailboxes, were headed toward extinction.

"Toward the end of 2010 and 2011, we've seen a comeback in the economy, a comeback in consumer confidence," says Robert Hammer, president and CEO of R.K. Hammer Investment Bankers in Thousand Oaks, Calif. The rise in better deals for promotional balance transfer offers, in turn, "is an example of marketing that couldn't take place before ... Now that the times are better, the pendulum has swung back."  

But it's not all good news. CreditCards.com's survey of 38 cards offering introductory balance transfer offers revealed that many banks have increased the fees associated with the balance transfers and removed caps that limited those fees. That means that the 0 percent balance transfer deals may not be quite as sweet as they appear.

The way it was At the peak of the credit crunch in 2008, many analysts warned that a crisis in credit cards was on its way and that low interest and 0 percent balance transfer offers would be one of its first casualties. By 2009, experts' predictions had partially come true. The overall number of introductory balance transfer offers flooding consumers' mailboxes did decline, along with most credit card mailings, as a result of tighter credit and uncertainty over financial legislation that eventually became the Credit CARD Act of 2009 , say experts. However, predictions that 0 percent balance transfer offers were doomed turned out to be overstated.

Experts agree that the offers never disappeared; they just changed shape for a while. Rather than remove promotional balance transfer offers completely, experts say that  many banks temporarily replaced 0 percent balance transfer offers with low rate introductory offers -- typically 3.9 to 4.9 percent -- or reduced the number of months that the introductory rate applied. Then, once the economy began to slowly recover, and lingering uncertainty from the CARD Act cleared away, banks steadily resweetened their offers.