Visa Secured Credit Card Agreement and Disclosure

Visa Secured Credit Card Agreement and Disclosure, as filed by First Financial of Maryland Federal Credit Union, carries a purchase APR of 8.9%–11.4%, no annual fee and a 1.9% introductory rate. The purchase rate sits at roughly the 7th percentile of the 4,587 agreements indexed here.

What this filing discloses

This page covers the agreement First Financial of Maryland Federal Credit Union filed for Visa Secured Credit Card Agreement and Disclosure. It is issued on the Visa network and the filing runs nine pages.

The filing is explicit about 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.

The promotional period

A promotional rate of 1.9% applies for six months under this agreement — lower than the standard rate, but not free.

Among the 763 filings here that disclose an introductory rate, 1.9% sits at about the 62nd percentile.

The go-to rate is 11.4%. Any balance still outstanding when the promotion lapses starts accruing at that figure — about $362 a year on $3,000.

The purchase APR against the corpus

Purchases price between 8.9% and 11.4% under this filing. The 2.5-point gap between the two is material, and nothing in the agreement indicates where a given account would land.

Read against the index, the low end ranks around the 6th percentile and the high end around the 7th — the band straddles a wide stretch of the market this corpus describes.

The rate discussed in this section is the go-to rate — the one that applies once the promotional period described below has ended, not the promotional rate itself.

The arithmetic of revolving

Put $1,500 on the card and never reduce it, and twelve months of interest at the disclosed purchase rate comes to approximately $181.

The corpus median purchase rate is 21.99%, which on the same $1,500 would cost about $369 a year. This filing saves roughly $188 annually against that benchmark.

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.

What a missed payment costs

$15 is the disclosed ceiling on a late payment fee, placing it near the 11th percentile of the set.

What the card costs before you borrow

The annual fee is $0. Roughly 75% of filings here that state a fee state zero, so the absence of one is unremarkable in this market.

Cash advances carry a cash advance APR of 8.9%. Cash advances also tend to fall outside any grace period, which means interest typically starts on day one rather than at the end of a billing cycle.

Transferred balances are priced at 8.9%; no separate transfer fee was captured from the filing.

Foreign transactions attract 1%. On $2,000 of overseas spending that is $20, charged on top of whatever exchange rate applies.

The grace period

Purchases carry a 28-day grace period: pay the statement in full inside it and the purchase rate never applies. That is longer than the corpus median of 25 days.

The filing sets the minimum interest charge at zero — small balances are not rounded up to a floor.

Inside First Financial of Maryland Federal Credit Union's filed lineup

3 separate First Financial of Maryland Federal Credit Union filings appear in the corpus.

What you cannot learn from the filing

This page cannot tell you penalty pricing, because the filing's disclosure table as read does not contain it.

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.

Where the authority sits

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

In short

The purchase rate of 11.4% is one of the cheaper figures in this index — the central point in the agreement's favour. The absence of an annual fee means the rate is the only thing that can make this card expensive.