Credit Cards: The EMI Marketing Craze!

No doubt, the EMI has been an integral part of modern living. The home loans, the car loans and the like are meaningless without the EMI tenures and installment calculations. However, of late, the Credit Card issuing banks seem to have gone crazy over marketing of the EMIs. Even for spends as low as a thousand bucks you get the message to 'convert'. They make it overpoweringly easy for you--just click yes and select the tenure, and it's done! Not only that! If your card bill consists of quite a few EMIs, some banks even give you the option of paying your bill in EMIs too! Yes! At certain times it's very useful to be able to split up a good amount, like when buying a consumer durable, into easy installments; but it gets downright irritating if you're reminded (repeatedly) to 'convert' for every possible spend. 

It's obviously very profitable for the banks who at the present tumultuous times seem to believe that 'tiny drops can make the ocean', because for every little or moderate or big conversion, they charge interest at quite a high annual rate and also invariably charge a processing fee. Not to speak of the GST charges that hound you at every step of the conversion process. Besides, the total limit of your credit card gets blocked progressively if you go on saying 'yes' to the endless offers. 

Therefore, at a time when consumers are getting bombarded with marketing offers from every corner where the fraudsters and the internet hounds cannot lag far behind, we must not be blinded by the 'conversion' opportunities lest those become literal traps and make us go on bleeding over the months and years. Our hard-earned money should never be wasted or idled away. Our decisions must be based on our realistic needs, and those needs only.