Secured Mastercard Disclosure

On the record for Secured Mastercard Disclosure: a purchase APR of 9.49%–17.99%, no annual fee, a 0% opening rate and a 17.99% penalty rate, filed by Texas Dow Employees Credit Union. That purchase rate ranks near the 28th percentile across this corpus of 4,587 filings.

What the agreement puts on the record

Secured Mastercard Disclosure is one of the agreements Texas Dow Employees Credit Union has on file with the CFPB. It is issued on the Mastercard network and the filing runs 12 pages.

Terms captured from the document include a purchase rate, a cash advance rate, a penalty rate, an annual fee line and a late payment maximum. It is silent on a balance transfer rate, a foreign transaction fee and a grace period.

The promotional period

The filing discloses a 0% introductory rate, though it does not state how long the promotional period runs.

About 458 agreements in this corpus carry a zero-percent opening rate; this is one of them.

The go-to rate is 17.99%. Any balance still outstanding when the promotion lapses starts accruing at that figure — about $591 a year on $3,000.

Where the purchase APR sits

Purchases price between 9.49% and 17.99% under this filing. The 8.5-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 8th percentile and the high end around the 28th — the band straddles a wide stretch of the market this corpus describes.

The agreement labels the purchase rate variable, so the quoted figure reflects the index at the time of filing rather than a locked-in price.

The cost of carrying a balance

Put $1,500 on the card and never reduce it, and twelve months of interest at the disclosed purchase rate comes to approximately $296.

Priced at the median of 21.99%, that balance would generate about $369 in a year — so this agreement comes in around $73 cheaper for the same debt.

Per statement cycle that is on the order of $22.34 on $1,500, which is the number that actually shows up on a bill.

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.

Fees, and what triggers them

No annual fee appears in the filing, in line with the roughly 75% of disclosing agreements in this index that charge nothing to hold the card.

Taking cash against the card means a cash advance APR of 9.49%. 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.

Default pricing

The agreement discloses penalty pricing of 17.99% — about the 12th percentile of the 794 penalty rates recorded across this index.

On the fee side, a late payment can cost up to $25, which is around the 32nd percentile here.

Inside Texas Dow Employees Credit Union's filed lineup

There are 14 filings from Texas Dow Employees Credit Union in this index. The others all file the same 17.99% purchase rate. Whatever separates these products, it is not the cost of borrowing.

What is outside the disclosure

Absent from the captured terms: balance transfer terms, a foreign transaction fee and a grace period. The original document is the place to look for any of these.

It is worth being explicit about scope: these filings record terms and pricing. They say nothing about rewards programmes, cardholder benefits, promotional offers or who the issuer will approve, and this review does not speculate about any of it.

The document itself

The original filing, 12 pages long, is linked on this page and should be read before any figure here is acted on. It is also a snapshot: issuers refile as terms change.

In short

At 17.99% the purchase rate is close to ordinary for this corpus; nothing in the rate table sets this filing far apart from its peers. Because there is no annual fee, everything depends on the revolving behaviour: used as a payment instrument and cleared monthly, this agreement costs nothing.