Having a meal out is a good way to celebrate whether it be for someone’s birthday, an anniversary or just as a way of saying ‘I appreciate you’. Most restaurants offer the option of paying in a number of different ways including by credit card.

Tesco offer a credit card which works in the usual way in terms of its spending power, but unlike most credit cards, every time you use this credit card, you also get awarded Clubcard points too.

You might be thinking how can I save money by using a credit card? Don’t I have to pay interest on everything I spend? But, if you use any credit card in the correct way then you can avoid paying interest. It works like this:

Tesco credit card charges 16.9% APR variable. However, this interest is only charged if you don’t pay back the money within a certain number of days (on most cards including this one it’s 60 days). So, if you use your credit card to make all your purchases, and keep the money in the bank till the end of the month when you pay off ALL of the money you’ve spent on the credit card, the money stays in the bank in your account earning interest for you, and then the debt is paid before it incurs any interest.

The additional benefit of using a Tesco credit card is that you actually earn Clubcard points for every purchase you make. So as well as having your own money sitting in your own bank account earning you interest more of the time, you also get points which you can save up and then spend on things that you’d like too.

So, for example, if you took your family out for a meal in a restaurant and spent £60 on a good meal for you all, paid for it with your Tesco credit card, and then paid off that debt at the end of the month before it incurred any interest, you’d earn interest on the £60 over the days it remained in your bank account, plus you’d earn 1 Clubcard point for every £4 you’d spent too meaning that your meal out would actually earn you 15 club card points – that’s 15p towards your shopping bill in Tesco, or 45p towards a day out or possibly even another meal in another restaurant somewhere! Add this up over the course of a month using it not just in restaurants but also on food shopping (where you also earn your regular points too), and petrol, clothes and everything else you buy, and you could be giving yourself a whole load of extra money to spend.

http://prepaidcreditcardsuk.org.uk/

http://uk.virginmoney.com/virgin/