Credit cards for seniors

Zoomer | January 1st, 2006

Some credit cards offer special rates for seniors, but watch out. What they give with one hand, they take away with the other. Here are two examples:

ScotiaGold Visa Card: People over 65 pay an annual fee of $65, a saving of $30 on the regular rate, with no fee for supplementary cards. The card comes with a number of benefits, including Scotia Rewards points and rental car insurance.

Drawback: the two most desirable benefits, emergency travel health insurance and trip cancellation/interruption insurance, aren’t offered to cardholders 65 or older. No wonder the fee is reduced!

Royal Bank Visa Gold Preferred Card. Here again, there’s a saving on the rate. Seniors pay $70 a year, instead of the usual $110. Supplementary cards are $30. You get goodies such as extended warranties on purchases. But that desirable out-of-country travel insurance is cut off here too.

Excerpted from Gordon Pape’s new book, Get Control, which will be published in fall 2003 by Viking Canada.