Planning Your Escape to Brazil

Welcome to The Money Friend. We are talking about Brazil today. If you have been looking at the calendar and feeling the chill, you are probably thinking about an escape. Brazil between December and March is pure energy. That is when you get the peak summer weather and that warm ocean water everyone talks about. It is also the incredible build-up to Carnival. This is the best time to get away from the cold, grab some fresh acai on the beach, and just wander around Rio. A typical trip like this runs about seven hundred and eighty dollars. Now, that is a decent amount of money to drop all at once. We want to look at how to buy that ticket now and pay it off over time so it does not hurt your bank account too much in one go. We can use the Discover it Cash Back card to break this down into small monthly steps. The key here is the zero percent interest rate. If you are not familiar with that term, interest is just the extra fee a bank charges you for the privilege of borrowing their money. A zero percent rate means you are not paying that extra fee for a while. In this case, you get a fifteen month window. But you have to be careful. We need to be honest here because there is a catch. A zero percent interest rate is a ticking clock. It is not free money. If you do not pay off the full seven hundred and eighty dollar balance within that fifteen month window, things change. The remaining balance will start gathering interest at the standard card rate. That standard rate is the regular, much higher cost of borrowing that kicks in once the promotional period ends. You do not want to be caught with a balance when that clock stops. To make sure you finish on time and do not owe the bank any extra money, you should set up autopay for fifty-two dollars a month. Autopay is just an automatic setting that pulls the money from your account so you do not have to remember to do it yourself. If you hit that fifty-two dollar mark every month, you clear the balance before the interest kicks in. It makes the trip manageable and keeps your budget intact. We like this approach because it lets you enjoy the summer in Rio without a massive bill hitting you all at once. Just remember to keep an eye on that fifteen month timer. If you want to see the numbers we talked about or check the details, head over to voatlas.com for the written version with all the sources.