Credit Card Agreement 01

The Credit Card Agreement 01 2023 filing from Brightstar Credit Union sets out a purchase APR of 13.24%–18%, no annual fee and a six-month 0% opening period. Against the 4,587 filings on this site, that rate lands around the 34th percentile.

On the face of the filing

What follows is drawn entirely from Brightstar Credit Union's CFPB filing for Credit Card Agreement 01 2023. The filing runs four pages, and It is issued on the Visa network.

On the record here: a purchase rate, a balance transfer rate, an annual fee line, a late payment maximum and a foreign transaction fee. A cash advance rate and a penalty rate are not stated.

The interest-free window

This agreement opens at 0% for six months, the only period in the document where carrying a balance is free.

About 458 agreements in this corpus carry a zero-percent opening rate; this is one of them.

The go-to rate is 18%. Any balance still outstanding when the promotion lapses starts accruing at that figure — about $493 a year on $2,500.

Put the other way round, the six-month zero rate is worth roughly $246 on a $2,500 balance relative to paying the go-to rate from day one — a real figure, but one that only materialises for someone who was going to carry that balance anyway.

How the purchase rate compares

This is a tiered agreement: the filing discloses a purchase APR anywhere from 13.24% to 18%, a spread of 4.76 percentage points. Which end of that band applies is set by the issuer at account opening and the filing does not say how.

Read against the index, the low end ranks around the 24th percentile and the high end around the 34th — the band straddles a wide stretch of the market this corpus describes.

This is disclosed as a variable rate. The number above is a snapshot: it tracks an index, so it changes without the agreement being amended.

The rate discussed in this section is the go-to rate — the one that applies once the promotional period described below has ended, not the promotional rate itself.

Translating the rate into money

A $4,000 balance left untouched for twelve months accrues about $789 in interest at this purchase rate.

The corpus median purchase rate is 21.99%, which on the same $4,000 would cost about $983 a year. This filing saves roughly $195 annually against that benchmark.

Month to month it reads as about $59.60 per cycle on that balance.

That maths assumes a static balance and nothing else — no payments, no additional purchases, no fees folded in.

Charges beyond interest

No annual fee appears in the filing, in line with the roughly 75% of disclosing agreements in this index that charge nothing to hold the card.

Cash advances carry a cash advance fee of $1.

The filing discloses a 13.24% balance transfer rate without an accompanying fee figure.

Foreign transactions attract 1%. On $1,500 of overseas spending that is $15, charged on top of whatever exchange rate applies.

What a missed payment costs

Late payments are capped at $25 under this filing, about the 32nd percentile of late fee maximums in the corpus.

The no-interest path

The filing gives 25 days' grace on purchases, meaning a statement balance paid in full within that window attracts no interest.

No minimum interest charge is imposed, so a cycle that accrues a few cents of interest is billed a few cents.

The issuer's other agreements

This is one of 4 Brightstar Credit Union agreements collected here. Every one of the others that discloses a purchase rate discloses the same 18%, so the issuer's filings are near-identical on pricing and the differences between its cards lie outside the rate table.

What the filing does not tell you

The disclosure parsed here does not state penalty pricing. Those gaps are gaps in what could be read from the filing, and the PDF may well address them in prose the rate table does not capture.

What this analysis can address is bounded by the filing: rates, fees and the terms around them. Everything a card issuer might advertise — rewards, benefits, bonuses, who qualifies — falls outside the document and outside this review.

Go to the source

The original filing, 4 pages long, is linked on this page and should be read before any figure here is acted on. It is also a snapshot: issuers refile as terms change.

In short

At 18% the purchase rate is close to ordinary for this corpus; nothing in the rate table sets this filing far apart from its peers.