Everyone is doing some major shopping this holiday season and most people will almost certainly charge everything onto one or more credit cards. Anyone who uses a credit card knows that if you don’t get the balance paid off, you get some nasty finance charges. Depending on your interest rate, those finanace charges can really add up. There is a simple way to temporarily avoid finance charges if you can’t afford to pay off your balance as soon as you had hoped.

Go to the store and buy a money order for the full balance (assuming the balance isn’t something like ten grand). Instead of paying for the money order with cash or writing a check, just charge the money order with the same credit card that the money order is going to pay off. This will get the balance paid off, and then re-add the balance right back to the credit card, leaving you with a paid-in-full statement and no finance charges. This comes in pretty handy if you don’t have a ridiculously huge balance and it allows you to save and put money back until you can really afford to pay the balance off.