National Consumer Protection Week is the perfect opportunity to protect yourself. We consumers now enjoy significant protections from adverse treatment by our credit card issuers under the CARD Act (get detailed information about the CARD Act's provisions). That's the good news. The bad news is that many of those protections require action on our part. It's not significant action. We just have to be more diligent and actually read our mail.



If our credit card issuers increase our interest rates or implement new credit card fees, they are required to give us a 45-day notice of the change. And, we have the right during that 45 days to opt out of the change and pay off the balance under the old interest rate terms. This is a significant protection from higher rates, but it requires that we proactively contact our issuers to opt out.

Roughly 97% of us do not read our bank notices. And, if we do not respond with our intention to opt out within the 45 days allotted to us under the CARD Act, then the issuer can increase our rates on all new purchases. So, Step #1 for protecting ourselves from higher interest rates and annual fees is to open all of the mail we receive from our credit card issuers -- and READ it.

John Ulzheimer – Credit scoring and credit reporting expert and author, John is the President of Consumer Education for Credit.com. Formerly with Equifax and Fair Isaac, John shares his unique insight of the inner workings of credit scoring models and the credit reporting industry on CreditBloggers.com.