90% of all credit cards being issued today come with a variable interest rate. As the Federal Reserve hikes short-term rates, so shall the credit card companies.

Between February 2005 and January 2006, the Fed raised short-term rates by 2 percentage points. During that same timeframe, the average credit card interest rate went from 12.84% to 15.75% a nearly 3% increase. You can expect to see these rates continue to rise.

With the forcing of many credit card companies to raise their minimum required payment formula (borrowers are now required to make about 4% as a minimum payment, it used to be 2%), coupled with base interest rate hikes, you can expect to see higher default rates towards the end of the year.

During most of the 1990’s about 10 credit card companies controlled about 80% of the market. Now there are about 5 credit card companies controlling the lion share of the market place. At the same time, most consumers already have enough credit cards in their wallets so new credit card applications are getting harder to come by.

This has resulted in credit card companies resorting to stealing a client from another company for growth. They do this by offering the consumer low introductory rates for balance tranfers or rebates on purchases. This may sound good for the consumer by there are a lot of strings attached.

For an example, some issuers are offering a “low interest rate for the life of the balance”. However, you must also agree to make a minimum number of purchases with their card. Since your payments are going towards the low-rate balance transfer first, the purchases that you made on their card keep the higher interest rate and could end up costing you.

Some companies have removed the cap on balance transfer fees. It used to be about $75 for the transfer charge, now it can be as much as 3% of the balance. If you transferred $10,000 in credit card debt from one credit card company to another, that fee has now gone from $75 to $300.

Another offer is the “no late fee”, as long as you use the credit card once a month. But beware. Unless you are paying the card in full each month, you are only continuing to borrow more since you have to continually use the card, which results in carrying more debt. If you are late on a payment, you may not pay a fee but, you may find your interest rate climbing as much as 30% on your entire balance owed.

So before you take advantage of that great new offer, take the time to really read the fine print. You can review all the latest offers and current interest rates from credit card companies as site like www.creditcards.com or www.cardratings.com.

If you find yourself scrambling to make ends meet or just want to learn more about your financial options, log onto www.debtreliefoptions.com.

Jon Noble
Staff writer
Debt Relief Options
asktheexperts@debtreliefoptions.com

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 30th, 2006 at 4:12 pm by Jon Noble and is filed under Debt Relief, Debt Consolidation, Credit Counseling, Debt Solution, Debt Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.