application solicitation disclosure

On the record for application solicitation disclosure: a 9.4% purchase APR and a 15.4% penalty rate, filed by 1st United Credit Union. That purchase rate ranks near the 4th percentile across this corpus of 4,587 filings.

On the face of the filing

1st United Credit Union filed this agreement for application solicitation disclosure with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It is issued on the Visa network and the filing runs two pages.

The filing is explicit about a purchase rate, a cash advance rate, a balance transfer rate, a penalty rate and a late payment maximum. It is silent on an annual fee line.

The purchase APR against the corpus

Set beside the rest of the index, the purchase APR of 9.4% lands at the 4th percentile; it lands at the extreme low end of the filings.

The filing marks this rate as variable, which means it moves with the index the agreement names rather than staying where it is quoted today.

The cost of carrying a balance

At the disclosed purchase APR, $5,000 revolving for a full year costs something like $493 in interest.

A typical filing in this index would charge about $1,229 on that balance; this one is roughly $737 a year below it.

Treat this as an illustration of what the disclosed rate does, not as a projection of a real account, which would be shaped by payments and by the fees described elsewhere in the filing.

Fees, and what triggers them

Taking cash against the card means a cash advance fee of $5 or 2% of the advance, whichever is greater and a cash advance APR of 9.4%. Advances under roughly $250 are charged the flat $5; larger ones are charged 2%. The grace period described below generally does not extend to cash advances, so interest on them usually begins immediately.

Moving a balance onto this card carries an up-front charge of $5 or 2% of the amount transferred, whichever is greater, with the transferred balance priced at 9.4%. Transferring $5,000 would cost roughly $100 at the door.

Spending abroad costs an extra 2% — about $20 on $1,000 of purchases, independent of interest.

What a missed payment costs

If the account defaults, the filing permits a rate of 15.4%. Among disclosing agreements here that ranks near the 5th percentile.

That is 6 points above the standard purchase rate. On a $3,000 balance, the shift from 9.4% to 15.4% adds something like $204 of interest over a year — the real cost of the default, quite apart from the fee itself.

Late payments are capped at $10 under this filing, about the 6th percentile of late fee maximums in the corpus.

Paying in full

25 days is the disclosed grace period for purchases — the interval in which paying in full costs nothing. That matches the 25-day median across the corpus almost exactly.

What is outside the disclosure

Absent from the captured terms: an annual fee. The original document is the place to look for any of these.

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.

Against the rest of 1st United Credit Union's filings

37 separate 1st United Credit Union filings appear in the corpus. Their disclosed purchase rates run from 9.4% to 20.4%, and this one at 9.4% is more expensive than 0 of them.

Where the authority sits

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

In short

9.4% places this filing at the inexpensive end of the set, which is the headline here.