The CardBuzz blog
Card-by-card write-ups from our team, features, fees, lounge access and who each card actually suits. For the numbers after every cap and exclusion, head to the card pages.
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How-To GuidesConverting a big purchase into EMI after the swipe: the post-transaction route
You bought a ₹84,000 television on full swipe because the no-cost EMI option at checkout looked confusing, and now the statement is looming. Most Indian issuers let you convert an already-posted purchase into EMI through
How-To GuidesLoan on card vs personal loan vs EMI conversion: picking the cheapest credit
You need ₹2,00,000 for twelve months. Three doors are open: the loan-on-card offer flashing in your banking app, a personal loan from the same bank, or putting the spend on the card and converting it to EMI. All three ar
How-To GuidesLoan on your credit card: how instant loan-on-card offers actually work
Open your bank's app and you may see an offer you never applied for: a ready-to-disburse loan sitting on your credit card, money in your account within minutes, no documents, no branch visit. It looks like free money. It
Credit HealthWhen a bureau error costs you an approval: the correction playbook
The rejection letter says "credit history not satisfactory". Your CIBIL file is clean — but the lender pulled Experian, where a closed personal loan still shows as active with a ₹2,00,000 balance, torpedoing your debt-to
Credit HealthA quarterly bureau routine that costs nothing: monitoring all four reports
Credit monitoring in India has a pricing problem: the paid services charge for what the RBI already gives you free. You're entitled to one free full credit report per calendar year from each of the four bureaus — four re
Credit HealthEnquiries, DPD, and settled: decoding the codes printed on your credit report
Your free full credit report arrives — twenty pages of tradelines, codes, and abbreviations that might as well be a foreign language. "DPD 030", "STD", "SET", "WOF", "hard enquiry", "suit-filed". Every code is a precise
Credit HealthThin file, no score: what the bureaus show when you have never borrowed
You've never taken a loan, never held a credit card, paid for everything outright — financially responsible by any common-sense measure. The bureau file says "NH": no history. No score. To the credit system, you are invi
Credit HealthCIBIL 300 to 900: what the score bands actually signal to a lender
The CIBIL score runs from 300 to 900, and every Indian borrower eventually learns their number. But the number alone is trivia — what matters is what each band signals to the lender reading it, and what moves you between
Credit HealthDisputing a credit report error: the lender-first route across all four bureaus
Your report shows a ₹45,000 personal loan you never took, or a "30 DPD" on a card you closed two years ago. Errors like these are common — lender reporting mistakes, identity mix-ups, settled accounts showing as open — a
Credit HealthWhich credit bureau does your lender actually check
You've polished your CIBIL file to a shine. The home loan lender pulls Experian. Your perfect CIBIL score is suddenly irrelevant, and the Experian file — which you haven't looked at in two years — carries a wrongly-repor
Credit HealthWhy your CIBIL score and Experian score never match: reading two numbers honestly
CIBIL says 782. Experian says 741. Same person, same month, a 41-point gap — and both numbers are "correct". India's four bureaus compute their scores from different files with different formulas on different update cycl
Credit HealthOne free full credit report a year from each bureau: the RBI rule and how to claim it
Buried in RBI's regulations is one of the most underused consumer rights in Indian finance: every individual is entitled to one Free Full Credit Report (FFCR) — including the score — per calendar year from *each* of the