Visa More Rewards Federal and Secured Agreement and Disclosure (3)

Visa More Rewards Federal and Secured Agreement and Disclosure (3), as filed by Certified Federal Credit Union, carries a purchase APR of 8.9%–16.9% and a 17.9% penalty rate. The purchase rate sits at roughly the 20th percentile of the 4,587 agreements indexed here.

What this filing discloses

The document behind this page is Certified Federal Credit Union's filed agreement for Visa More Rewards Federal and Secured Agreement and Disclosure (3). It is issued on the Visa network and the filing runs four pages.

Terms captured from the document include a purchase rate, a penalty rate, a late payment maximum and a foreign transaction fee. A cash advance rate, a balance transfer rate and an annual fee line are not stated.

What "secured" changes

This is a secured agreement — the credit line is collateralised by a deposit. The disclosure table captured on this page covers pricing only; the mechanics of the deposit live in the body of the document.

Securing the line has not placed this agreement at the bottom of the market — 16.9% ranks near the 20th percentile across every filing indexed here.

The purchase APR against the corpus

The purchase APR is quoted as a range of 8.9% to 16.9%. That 8-point spread is the whole of what the filing commits to; the method for assigning a rate inside it is not in the document.

Those two numbers occupy very different places in the corpus: roughly the 6th percentile at the bottom and the 20th at the top.

The arithmetic of revolving

Carry $4,000 on this card for a year without paying it down and the purchase rate alone generates roughly $736 in interest.

A typical filing in this index would charge about $983 on that balance; this one is roughly $247 a year below it.

There is also a floor: the filing sets a minimum interest charge of $0.50, so any cycle that accrues less than that is billed at $0.50 anyway.

These figures are arithmetic on the disclosed rate, not a quote: they assume the balance is never reduced, ignore any payments, and take no account of fees charged separately.

Fees, and what triggers them

Cash advances carry a cash advance fee of $5 or 2% of the advance, whichever is greater. Advances under roughly $250 are charged the flat $5; larger ones are charged 2%.

Spending abroad costs an extra 1% — about $50 on $5,000 of purchases, independent of interest.

The grace period

A minimum interest charge of $0.50 applies in any cycle where interest is due, which makes very small revolving balances disproportionately expensive.

When a payment is late

If the account defaults, the filing permits a rate of 17.9%. Among disclosing agreements here that ranks near the 8th percentile.

Late payments are capped at $29 under this filing, about the 47th percentile of late fee maximums in the corpus.

What you cannot learn from the filing

Absent from the captured terms: balance transfer terms, an annual fee and a grace period. The original document is the place to look for any of these.

It is worth being explicit about scope: these filings record terms and pricing. They say nothing about rewards programmes, cardholder benefits, promotional offers or who the issuer will approve, and this review does not speculate about any of it.

The document itself

Everything here is a reading of the filed agreement, four pages of it, which is linked above and which governs. Terms also change between filings, so the date on the document matters.

In short

At 16.9% the purchase rate is low relative to this corpus, which is the clearest thing the filing has going for it on cost.