Rugby fans who have bought tickets for the 2011 Rugby World Cup on their credit cards but only make the minimum repayments could still be paying for the event in 2025.
This astonishing fact was something that came up when I was talking to my mate last week about the Rugby World Cup in New Zealand. He was telling me how keen he was to get tickets to a few of the different games and the final. I told him I’d look at the prices and work out the best deal, what games he should go to, where, when and which seats would suit him best – that’s the kind of friend I am!
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Anyway, I started to look into the ticket prices, availability, when and where the games were going to be played. Some of the first round and knock out games tickets cost from anywhere between $31 for the cheapest general admission tickets to $460 for the Category A seats to the All Blacks games.
When the quarter finals come around, the cheapest tickets are priced at $194, with the category A priced at $491; the semi-finals are a bit pricier than this coming in between $296 for the cheapies and $797 for the category A seats and for the final (which my mate was insistent on attending) the tickets were priced between $399 and $1278.
He was looking at a spending a ‘few bucks’ to get to the games he wanted. After I told him how much it would cost he said, “it’s all going on the credit card then.”
The other factor that played into this was the location of the games; they are placed all across New Zealand. I figured if he stuck to the Eden Park stadium where a lot of the games and the final were being played that would make the most sense. This also ruled out the option of general admission tickets, all the tickets for Eden Park are seated.
Anyway after a lot of discussion and working out of seats, games, quality view and the matches that he had to see we worked out a price of $2468. This gave him seats of either B or C grade to the first game, 4 others, a quarter-final match, a semi-final and the final.
He was more than happy to load this amount onto his credit card until I told him that if he only pays the minimum repayments he would be paying for the tickets for the next 13 years and 9 months!
This was calculated on the average credit card interest rate of 17.13% and minimum repayments of 2.5% a month. Also included is the $2614 in interest that he would pay on top of the ticket price! Basically he would be paying double the price of the tickets and paying it off well after the winning team goes into retirement!
My advice to my friend, and others like him, is to plan ahead and save up so you can pay the whole cost up front in cash or on VISA debit. Or pay on your credit card but pay off the amount the next month within the interest free period. Other than these two payment options, the next best case scenario is to pay off as much as possible up front to set yourself free from years of monthly repayments. Basically, if don’t remember anything from this blog post, remember this: don’t let your credit card balance float from month to month, always pay off more than the minimum repayments so that you can keep the amount of dollars in interest to an absolute minimum.
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Mark is in his early twenties, a qualified and practicing journalist who loves to dabble, working in recent years across all fields and platforms in his niche. Originally hailing from Northern Ireland he has lived in too many different countries and due to this has developed an accent that is foreign wherever he goes.