I’ve Paid For This Twice Already…

The credit card with the reward they *want* you to earn

There is plenty of talk around the blogosphere and in the general media about responsible credit card usage: use your credit card and pay it off in full every month so you get the convenience and benefits of credit card usage (like cashback rewards) but don’t pay any interest.

Simple. And smart if you do it right.

And then there is the credit card I just saw a commercial for. The Discover Motiva card. From their website:

With the new Discover Motiva Card, your good credit management earns you cash rewards. Just make 6 on-time payments in a row and we’ll pay you the next month’s interest back as a Pay-On-Time Bonus. That’s twice a year, every year when you pay on time every month!

So to earn this reward, basically, you have to carry a balance. That’s the reward Discover *wants* you to earn. Discover gets interest from you for 5 months, then you get basically an interest-free month in the form of a cash reward. Rinse and repeat. And this is called “good credit management” by the marketing peeps at Discover. I don’t see how this can be a good marketing strategy unless a lot of people aren’t using their credit cards responsibly and are carrying a balance month to month.

Maybe it should make me feel more normal that there are theoretically lots of people out there in the world carrying a credit card balance and this reward would presumably appeal to them. Enough to make a marketing campaign targeting them at least.  It doesn’t make me feel better about my credit card debt though, just kind of sad that there are people so comfortable carrying a balance on their credit card that they’d jump at an incentive for keeping that balance. I guess I am part of Discover’s target demographic. Hopefully not for much longer.

~J

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