If you are one of the millions of credit card holders who saw your credit card rates go up over the past couple years -- perhaps for some minor infraction like a payment that was a few hours late, or for no good reason at all -- then you may have taken note of a provision in the Credit CARD Act that was supposed to provide some relief.

Under the CARD Act, credit card companies are supposed to review the accounts of anyone whose rate was raised on or after January 1, 2009 to determine whether the reasons the rate was increased still apply and, if not, bring the rate back down.

The Federal Reserve recently released its guidelines describing how this process should work and for those waiting for relief, my advice is to you is: Don't hold your breath.

You can read more about the Fed's guidelines for reducing credit card rates here. But to summarize, the Fed's guidelines basically leave it up to issuers to decide what, if anything, they want to do for cardholders whose rates went up. And given their track record, I don't expect they will do much. And the first batch of reviews isn't due until February 2011. Even if issuers do lower some rates somewhat then, those cardholders will have paid a boatload of interest in the meantime. Unlike rate hikes that were in many cases retroactive before the CARD Act kicked in, these rate decreases aren't.

So while the Credit CARD Act has provided cardholders with a lot more protection than they had in the past, there are probably still a whole lot of people were wondering why it didn't do anything for them.

Gerri Detweiler – Personal finance author and Credit Advisor for Credit.com, Gerri contributes budgeting, debt recovery and savings information online. She is also the co-author of Debt Collection Answers: How to Use Debt Collection Laws to Protect Your Rights.