Gold Standard Cardmember Agreement

The Gold Standard Cardmember Agreement 10 19 2018 filing from Amalgamated Bank of Chicago sets out a 11.25% purchase APR, a $35 annual fee and a 12-month 0% opening period. That purchase rate ranks near the 7th percentile across this corpus of 4,587 filings.

What this filing discloses

Gold Standard Cardmember Agreement 10 19 2018 is one of the agreements Amalgamated Bank of Chicago has on file with the CFPB. The filing runs 11 pages.

The disclosure covers a purchase rate, a cash advance rate, a balance transfer rate, an annual fee line and a late payment maximum. It is silent on a penalty rate and a foreign transaction fee.

Zero percent, and then what

This agreement opens at 0% for 12 months, the only period in the document where carrying a balance is free.

Zero-percent openings appear in roughly 458 of the filings on this site, which puts this agreement in a sizeable minority rather than a class of its own.

What matters more than the promotion is the rate waiting behind it: 11.25%. A $2,000 balance that survives the promotional window costs roughly $238 a year from that point on.

Valued honestly, 12 months at zero on $2,000 avoids about $238 of interest compared with the go-to rate — the whole of what the promotion delivers.

Where the purchase APR sits

Set beside the rest of the index, the purchase APR of 11.25% lands at the 7th percentile; it sits well down in the cheaper fifth of the set.

Because the rate is variable, the figure quoted is tied to an index and will drift with it. Nothing here is a fixed commitment.

To be precise about which number this is: the filing identifies it as the rate that takes over after the introductory period, not the introductory rate.

The cost of carrying a balance

Put $1,200 on the card and never reduce it, and twelve months of interest at the disclosed purchase rate comes to approximately $143.

Measured against the 21.99% corpus median, the same $1,200 costs approximately $152 less per year here.

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.

The fee structure

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.

Expressed in the card's own terms, the $35 fee equals about a year's interest on a $311 balance at the disclosed 11.25% purchase rate.

Year one is free of the fee per the filing; $35 applies thereafter.

For cash advances the filing discloses a cash advance fee of $5 or 3% of the advance, whichever is greater and a cash advance APR of 16.25%. That is 5 points above the purchase rate. Advances under roughly $167 are charged the flat $5; larger ones are charged 3%.

The transfer fee is 3% of the amount transferred; transferred balances then run at 11.25%. On $7,500 that fee is about $225 before any interest is charged.

The downside terms

$35 is the disclosed ceiling on a late payment fee, placing it near the 54th percentile of the set.

The no-interest path

Purchases carry a 25-day grace period: pay the statement in full inside it and the purchase rate never applies. That matches the 25-day median across the corpus almost exactly.

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.

More broadly, a CFPB agreement filing is a legal and pricing document. It does not describe rewards, benefits, sign-up offers, eligibility or approval criteria, and nothing of that kind has been inferred on this page. Where a card has features of that sort, they live outside this document entirely.

Where the authority sits

Everything here is a reading of the filed agreement, 11 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 11.25% the purchase rate is low relative to this corpus, which is the clearest thing the filing has going for it on cost. The $35 annual fee is charged regardless of use, so it is a cost that applies even to an account that never revolves.