With the festive season starting, banks are now promoting features to convert your large purchases at offline and online stores on debit cards to EMIs (equated monthly installments).

Typically, you can choose an EMI tenure of 3, 6, 12 or 18 months. The effective interest rate of converting to EMI could is 14.70 percent annually for a SBI debit card, for instance. In such schemes, consumers ends up buying more than what they can afford as they have to make payments in seemingly small monthly installments.

Remember, any form of EMI is a loan. There are costs attached while applying and when you default.