Cash advance facts: The cash available for cash advance withdrawal is, typically, half of the credit limit assigned to the purchase segment of many credit card accounts. Plus the cash credit is often reduced ‘off the top’ as the purchase balance increases.

Let me expain, with an example, so you can picture what happens and why it’s important to know about it.

Say you have a credit card account with a $10,000.00 cap for everything – purchases, cash advances and balance transfers. On that card you have a $5,000.00 cash limit. If you have made no purchases, then you can get up to a $5,000.00 cash advance.

However, as soon as you charge a purchase, the amount of that purchase is deducted from the amount available for cash advances. Charge $1,029.00 in purchases, and guess what? The amount of money you can get through a cash advance has just gone down by $1,029.00 so you can only get a cash advance of up to $3,971.00. [Read more →]

Do you know that a purchase can be transacted as a cash advance?

Because credit cardholders who have been traveling in Europe sometimes return home to find  an  expensive surprise on their credit card statements: the purchases they made using their credit cards were processed as cash advances rather than as normal purchases.

But how is this possible? Easy. [Read more →]