Card Disclosure

On the record for Card Disclosure 188: a 14.9% purchase APR and a $35 annual fee, filed by TIB, National Association. The purchase rate sits at roughly the 14th percentile of the 4,587 agreements indexed here.

What the agreement puts on the record

TIB, National Association filed this agreement for Card Disclosure 188 with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The filing runs four pages.

The filing is explicit about a purchase rate, a cash advance rate, an annual fee line, a late payment maximum and a grace period. A balance transfer rate, a penalty rate and a foreign transaction fee are not stated.

Where the purchase APR sits

Set beside the rest of the index, the purchase APR of 14.9% lands at the 14th percentile; it falls in the low band of the corpus.

The cost of carrying a balance

The purchase rate turns a $2,500 revolving balance into roughly $402 of annual interest.

A typical filing in this index would charge about $615 on that balance; this one is roughly $213 a year below it.

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

Where the fees are

The annual fee is $35, charged whether or not the card is used. Against the filings here that disclose a fee, that sits at roughly the 82nd percentile.

The filing states the fee is waived for the first year, so the $35 is a second-year cost rather than an immediate one.

Taking cash against the card means a cash advance APR of 14.9%. The grace period described below generally does not extend to cash advances, so interest on them usually begins immediately.

Transfers are charged $10 or 3% of the amount transferred, whichever is greater, though no distinct transfer APR appears in the document. Shifting $5,000 across attracts something like $150 in fees on day one.

What a missed payment costs

The maximum late fee is $25 — roughly the 32nd percentile of the late fee ceilings disclosed across this index.

The grace period

25 days is the disclosed grace period for purchases — the interval in which paying in full costs nothing.

Against the rest of TIB, National Association's filings

52 separate TIB, National Association filings appear in the corpus. The issuer's own range is 9.25%–17.49%. At 14.9%, this agreement is dearer than 15 of its siblings.

The limits of this document

This page cannot tell you a foreign transaction fee and penalty pricing, because the filing's disclosure table as read does not contain them.

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 filed PDF is linked from this page and runs four pages. It is the authority for every figure summarised above; where this page and the document disagree, the document is right.

In short

At 14.9% the purchase rate is low relative to this corpus, which is the clearest thing the filing has going for it on cost. Note that the $35 annual fee falls due whether the card is used or not.