CAPITAL ONE Balance Transfer Warning

A question about : CAPITAL ONE Balance Transfer Warning

I wanted to warn you of misinformation I was given by Capital One. Their call centre assured me that a balance transfer was protected and free for a year, but this is not the case if you make any purchases.

I have been a customer for a while, paying off my full balance each month. They contacted me with an offer for balance transfer for 1 year with a 3% charge. Given I have an offset mortgage with a 6% interest rate, it made sense to take advantage of this and put the balance on my mortgage account.

I then continued to make purchases and paid off the full value of my purchases last month. This month I was charged interest on my purchases because they informed me that the purchase money had gone to reduce the balance transfer. The only way I can avoid paying interest next month (as I have already purchased this month) is to pay off the full balance transfer. I have therefore wasted a fee of 3%.

The moral - if you want to use the balance transfer - STOP PURCHASING IMMEDIATELY.

Best answers:

• This is the case for most other cards too.
  Always heed the advice Martin gives Never, ever, ever spend on a balance transfer card.
• I received this offer - also on a 'main spending card' - and did my research. To take advantage of the offer I had to do the following things
  1) Stop spending on the card immediately
  2) Switch Continuous Payment Authorisations from for three organisations to a different card
  3) Manually pay the current months transactions on the last day of the statement period (the DD took the previous statement balance a few days earlier) - so got a '£0.00' statemented balance instead.
  4) Amend the DD (had to contact Capital One - no way to instruct them online) so that the next payment was for minimum amount not full amount
  5) [Finally!] requested the balance transfer 'from' Egg on the first day of a statement period - giving maximum 56 days until first payment due.
  There is also another 'barb' in this offer from Capital One. It says 0% for '12 months' and 'end date will be advised' after your make your transfer by letter - but no letter and when I asked them (before the BT was requested) how the end date was worked out they said '8 July 2009'. Now the offer letter is dated 'July 2008'. I did not receive the letter until 19 July, and (by choice) I put back the balance transfers request until 4 August - so I'll be getting 11 months - not '12'. But the letter (and a follow up letter too) is not express about the fixed end date - not possible in practice if the letter takes a few weeks to reach its target and (arguably) is plain misleading because it says things like 'get a whole 12 months 0% compliments of us'. That word 'whole' may come in useful if I now query this with Capital One - but when might be the optimum time (YB?) I'm thinking that I should query when the statement indicates the end is iminent - in about 9 months from now...
• I made a really silly mistake not so long ago, i thought all balance transfers were free, then I went ahead without looking at the small print. I found that they [barclaycard] charged me a 3% fee. Of course it was 0% balance transfer, so I didn't pay any interest as long as I made the minimum monthly repayment. But the 3% was a bit harsh.
  I just signed up to capital one, 5% cashback seems nice, I'm gonna make use of it, do all my spending and just pay off the card. I realised my nectar american axpress is utterly useless, I get 0.5% cashback in nectar points effectively. 5% is more rewarding.