The Sainsbury's Finance Mastercard

John Fitzsimons reviews the pros and cons of the Sainsbury's Finance Mastercard.

The main reason I like the Sainsbury's Finance Mastercard is because it allows you to neatly avoid a nastly little trick credit card providers love to play, called Negative Payment Hierarchy.

Negative payment hierarchy drives all of us at lovemoney.com up the wall. It works like this. Say you take out a credit card with different time periods of 0% interest – typically 3 months of interest-free purchases, but a year of interest-free balance transfers.

Your payments each month will always go towards your cheapest debt – the debt that is still interest-free. Until that’s cleared, not a penny will go towards the new debt you’re run up, and each month that debt will be subject to interest. Nasty.

A good way to avoid this is to have one card with the same period of 0% interest on both purchases and balance transfers.

The Sainsbury's Finance Mastercard offers a whopping ten months of 0% interest on both purchases and balance transfers, a fantastic deal, placing it straight into top spot on the best buy table.

In fact, when using the Sainsbury's Finance Mastercard for shopping at Sainsbury’s, you actually get 0% on purchases for a whole year, which is pretty attractive in my view, though remember this does potentially expose you to negative payment hierarchy after 10 months.

Even better, thanks to the new Nectar card initiative, if you get a Sainsbury’s financial product, you get double Nectar points on your shopping for two years! That’s a hell of a bonus for taking out a market leading card.

Apply for the Sainsbury's Finance Mastercard via lovemoney.com