Three best ways (and three worst ways) to finance holiday shopping

2. Citi Diamond Preferred Card (best)

Brendan McDermid/Reuters/File
Citigroup, whose stall on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange is pictured in this October 2012 file photo, offers the Citi Diamond Preferred Card. Its 18-month zero-percent interest introductory offer is the longest of any card around.

This Citicard offers the longest zero-percent introductory period on the market at 18 months. While the zero-percent rate applies to both new transactions and balance transfers, the fact that it charges a 3 percent balance transfer fee makes it better suited for financing new purchases rather than borrowing to pay off older balances. This card does not charge an annual fee.
 

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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