Barclaycard Ring Credit Card Review

Let’s face it: Few credit cards are innovative. When picking new plastic, you have similar choices and decide on trade-offs like rewards, annual fees, and interest rates.

Occasionally, however, there’s a card that’s notably different, like a new product from Barclay’s Bank: The Barclaycard® Ring MasterCard®.

Barclay’s is calling this a “crowdsourced” credit card. According to the bank, they are “actively listening” to cardmembers and will change the card’s features in real-time according to feedback.

What’s different

The card is designed to be as simple as possible, with a low 8% variable APR and no balance transfer fee.

They’ve also cut fees. For example, whereas many cards charge a 3% foreign transaction fee, the Barclaycard Ring credit card charges only 1%. Instead of a $35 late fee many cards charge, their max late fee is $25.

The rewards program is different, too. Called Giveback, it is essentially a profit-sharing system: when account holders opt in for paperless statements and pay their bills on time, the community benefits; the card will kick back more of a reward to account holders, which you can use as a statement credit or to fund charitable projects.

That sounds cool, but I have to put my blogger hat on and point out that if you’re looking to maximize your credit card rewards, one of these cash back cards is a better choice. This is not a rewards card, per se.

Who it’s for

With a low 8% regular APR, the Barclaycard® Ring MasterCard® is best suited to anyone who occasionally uses a credit card to buy big ticket items and pay them off over a few months. For that, the Ring card is ideal. If you did the same with a rewards cards (which currently have average APRs around 16%), you would pay double the finance charges as you would on the Ring card.

Let’s say you charge $2,500 to your card and plan to pay $250 each month until the balance is paid off.

• With the Ring card, you would pay $96 in interest and clear the balance in 11 payments.
• A card with a 16% APR would still be paid off in 11 $250 payments, but you would have paid $201.25 in interest. Let’s assume you got 1% cash back on the $2,500 purchase. That’s a $25 cash rebate, making the net cost of financing the purchase $176.25 – still $80.20 more than the Ring card.

Now having gotten into trouble with credit card debt myself, I always recommend that you pay off your balance every month in full to avoid paying any interest on credit cards. That said, I realize there are times when your finances just aren’t mature enough to do this – sometimes you need to float a credit card balance to pay for unexpected expenses or finance a large ticket item. In these cases, a simple card with an unusually low regular APR like the Barclaycard® Ring MasterCard® makes a good pick.

Learning more and applying

The Barclaycard® Ring MasterCard® requires excellent credit. You can check your credit score for free before applying here.

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