These days we are just being fee-d to death. Fees, fees, and more fees are coming from the banks and the legislation that comes into effect in 2010 is not helping us yet. The credit card companies are raising rates and are getting every penny they can from us until its time for new laws to come into play next year.
One example of this is from Bank of America who received a good share of money from the government to keep its company afloat from taxpayers basically. The same tax paying people who have some of their credit cards. Well the big bank is thanking people by raising the annual fees or charging annual fees on certain credit cards for their consumers.
Bank of America is the third largest issuer of credit card and has over 80 million in circulation. Of these millions of card holders some will get notices saying they will be charged an annual fee of around $29 based on the banks assessment of “risk and profitability,” from each consumer.
The bank claims it is the risk of providing unsecured credit along with the new laws coming into effect in the new year that is forcing them to make this change. They claim they are not going to raise interest rates such as other banks and assessing the annual fees instead where needed.
If you received an annual fee notice in the mail from Bank of America it might be high time you change banks to Chase, American Express, or Discover. You may also want to check out what your credit union is doing in terms of rates. The only reason I would stay with BOA is if the annual fee was less than the rate increase would be over a years’ time which may well be the case for some households.
