You’re tired of paying too much interest on your credit card balance, but you can’t pay it all off immediately. You decide to take advantage of a new credit card’s special balance transfer offer. When you get your new balance transfer credit card, can you transfer your full balance to it, or will you be stuck with a partial balance on both cards? What if you only want to transfer a portion of it?

Let’s talk about balance transfer credit cards and some examples of minimum and maximum balance transfer rules they have.

Choosing a Balance Transfer Card That Can Accommodate Your Current Balance

As with most things related to choosing credit cards, balance transfer rules vary from one credit card to the next. For example, they will usually have a maximum — not necessarily a dollar amount but rather a maximum percentage of your available credit limit that you can use for a balance transfer.

The St. George Vertigo credit card for instance allows you to transfer a maximum of 95% of your available credit limit. So if your limit was $10,000, you could initiate a balance transfer of up to $9500. In other words, if you want to transfer your full balance you obviously would need to apply for a balance transfer card offering a higher credit limit than the balance you currently owe.

Now let’s look at the other side of the spectrum — minimum balance transfers required. That same St. George Vertigo card has a minimum balance transfer amount of $500. So if you only have a $350 balance you want to transfer, you wouldn’t be able to transfer it to that card (and it’s not the balance transfer card you should apply for.

There are other balance transfer cards that allow for lower minimum transfers though. Here are two examples:

•    Earth Gold Credit Card — $200 minimum balance transfer
•    Coles Group Source MasterCard — $100 minimum balance transfer

As you can see, balance transfer requirements can vary widely. This information isn’t often readily available when reviewing credit card offers. For many balance transfer cards you’ll need to find the full terms and conditions for review, or you’ll have to call the credit card company to ask about their policies before you apply for their credit card.

If you really want to save money by transferring your full balance away from your current high interest credit card, always get the minimum and maximum balance transfer information before applying for a new one. Otherwise you risk opening a new credit card account that you can’t use as intended (if your balance is lower than their minimum and you can’t move it). Or you risk being stuck with both the old and new cards if your balance is too high to transfer it all. Having more open credit cards probably isn’t the best solution when you’re trying to save on interest while you pay down your debt.