If you have taken out a credit card and have used some of the little perks that the credit card companies gave you to entice you to join up with their card, is set for change. Instead of having your purchases protected with insurance and some offered cover for your car in case of a breakdown, will now be changed to offering you smaller perks that you can use from day to day. These will include such things as discounts on CD’s and holidays, which may seem a lot more useful to many.

Credit Cards

Many banks and credit card issuers have started to take the old perks away, but with the introduction of the new ones has been seen as a less than useful compared to the purchase protection insurance, travel insurance and breakdown cover that were worth more, even if they were not used as much. Some of the banks that have started to faze these out are Halifax, HSBC, Lloyds and the TSB with Barclaycard being one of the major credit card issuers that has already done this.

A lot of the lenders who have changed these perks, are telling us that they are doing this to the advantage of the customer, not to their detriment and are only trying to give them better value, as the old perks were hardly ever used in the first place. But what they do seem to forget to tell us is that the new perks, though maybe more useful for day to day use, can only be used in certain stores, this gives us less freedom of choice to use the discounts, but also no doubt you will be able to find them cheaper in other stores, thus rendering the discount worthless.

This will leave many of us to be more choosy when it comes to taking a credit card, so with someone trying to dazzle us with the hard sell on the perks that the card they are trying to sell you can give you, look beyond this as at the end of the day they could be no good to you and just concern yourself with the number one thing that you should be paying most attention too, a low APR and maybe with a cash back facility if you can get it. But always remember the credit card that you buy into should always be what suits you.