Review: Art Van Credit Card

art-van-credit-cardArt Van Furniture, in partnership with Synchrony Bank, offers a credit card that allows you to finance your furniture, possibly at a 0% rate. Our complete overview / review of the Art Van credit card is below:

The first thing to understand about the Art Van credit card is that it can only be used at Art Van Furniture, nowhere else. This is a big strike against it, as you’re not going to buy furniture very often, but you’d be opening up a new credit line that could hurt your credit rating, especially if your credit history is not great.

That said, the one reason you might open a credit card like this is if you were getting a great financing offer on a big furniture purchase. Art Van promises that its card has “special financing offers,” but does not give any details online. So, we will tell you how these offers usually work: In most cases, you will have the opportunity to finance your purchase at a 0% interest rate for 6 months, 12 months, and sometimes even longer. However, read the fine print, because these are usually deferred-interest offers, meaning that you must pay every penny of your purchase within the 6-month or 12-month period or you will get charged ALL of the interest that would’ve accrued from the date you made the purchase — as if the 0% offer had never existed!

And what interest would you pay if that happened? 29.99%!!! A ridiculously high rate! Do not get gotcha’d by this card!

There is absolutely no reason to even consider the Art Van credit card until you are in the store and ready to make a purchase, to see what their current promotional offers are. However, you can see an online application with all the gory details here.