American Pacific Bank Visa Classic Review

Back in 2005, American Pacific Bank had two unsecured credit cards. One was a Gold MasterCard, and the other one is the card we are going to describe here. It is a Visa card instead and has a different card design, fees and rates. But essentially, they are the same in the sense that they are both vanilla cards that charge an annual fee.

Fees and Rates Are Slightly Different From Their Gold Card - In terms of annual fee, the Classic Visa version has a lower fee than the Gold. It is $18 a year versus $35 for the Gold MasterCard. The annual fee for the first year is waived. The APR is 3% higher than the Gold MasterCard at 16.92%. One of the nice features of this card is that you get a 25 days of grace period rather than the usual 20 days grace.

You Must Have A Job To Apply - One of the things that caught my eye when I was looking at their application page was the fact that you actually need to show proof of income if you want to apply for this card. The minimum income is $12,000, and debt to income ratio of no more than 40%. You cannot have a bankruptcy history and must not have been foreclosed on your home.

If You Can Get Away With An Annual Fee, Then Charge It! - If this card were around today in it's present form, it will never survive in the market place. A card that charges an annual fee and yet does not provide any form of rewards (be it cash back or a reward program) is unheard of today.

But back in 2005, a small community or regional bank might just get away with it because it can up-sell these cards to their existing customers who already have a banking relationship with them.

But if you were savvy and bothered to do some research, you would have noticed that all the large mainstream banks offered no annual fee cards that came with rewards. For example, Citi has the Platinum Select Card, Chase had their Visa Platinum just to name a couple of examples.

There were also a no annual fee rewards card like the Citi Dividend Card and the Amex Blue Cash.

But at the end of the day, I guess American Pacific Bank were able to get away with charging an annual fee for their cards even if there was no rewards.

We Didn't Recommend It - One thing for sure was that we did not recommend this card back we first reviewed it. We certainly would never recommend a card like that today. But thankfully, this card is no longer being issued because American Pacific Bank has been bought by Riverview Bancorp in 2005. Riverview Bank was ordered by the FDIC to close in 2009.