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Stacking credit cards against each other for the purpose of comparison can be rough, and feel a bit like comparing apples and oranges. You have rewards cards, low-interest cards, cards offering balance transfers, and plenty of others. If you are shopping for a single card, it can get really overwhelming trying to wade through all of your options. Luckily, someone else has already done all of the work for you! Bankrate.com is one of my favorite sites on the World Wide Web for catching up on the latest news talking place in the credit card industry so I can stay up to date. They recently published the result of a comparative review of some twenty credit cards that they looked at: a platinum card and a reward card apiece from each of the ten largest companies in America. The information that they compiled from this research could be invaluable to you as you search for a credit card that is right for you.

If you are the type of person who occasionally pays their card payment late – and it happens to a lot more of us than we would think – then it is helpful to know that there is a difference of almost twenty dollars between the lowest late fee and the highest between the cards surveyed. The lowest was twenty dollars and seventy cents. The highest was thirty-eight dollars and fifty cents – and truly astronomical sum! Unfortunately, the report I read did not spill the names of these cards, so that I could check out which issuer thought it was acceptable to charge nearly forty dollars for making a late payment on your account! Likewise, there was a wide discrepancy between the average over limit fee on the cards surveyed, but this was presented as a average fee: thirty-two dollars. That means that if you happen to make your payment late when you are close to having a maxed-out card and the late fee sends you over the precipice of your limit (a pathetic state of affairs that seems to be happening to more and more people I know these days), you could easily end up being stuck with over sixty dollars in fees. No wonder consumer advocates are chomping at the bit for stronger credit card regulations!

The mean balance transfer fee on the credit cards that Bankrate surveyed was three percent, with no upper cap on the fee amount. We’re guessing that this research was carried out before JP Morgan Chase – the biggest card issuer in America (which makes me think that they were almost certainly in on the study) announced that some of its credit cardholders would be seeing their balance transfer rates jacked up to five percent. In terms of cash advances – often one of the highest fees in any credit card agreement – six of the ten issuers charged three percent for advances on their cards. The others charged more.

The majority of the issuers are not above “nickel and diming” their customers – they charge anywhere from ten to fifteen dollars for the convenience of customers getting to make a payment on their credit card account over the phone with a company representative. This is one of the most disgusting fees that card issuers charge, in my honest opinion. I mean, most of these representatives do not even live in America – there’s no minimum wage, so the megabillionaire credit card companies can get away with paying these folks nothing, and the customer service level is minimal (if you can even understand the representative through their thick accent!). How can they possibly think that a phone conversation during which you probably spent five minutes navigating the touch-tone menu and twenty minutes on hold is actually worth ten dollars, much less fifteen? Make sure that you deprive these greedy jerks of your hard-earned money by making a payment by mail or internet.

Seven of ten of the credit card issuers charged consumers for sending off an extra copy of their credit card statement – and not just the cost of postage, either. We’re talking about three to ten dollars, here. Grace periods during which cardholders can pay off new charges without penalty range from twenty to twenty-five days. All the companies with the exception of Discover will immediately boost your interest rate to a higher category if you pay it late or go over limit. Discover will give a consumer two billing cycles beforethey raise rates, which is reflective of the new standards that Congress has passed under the Credit Cardholders’ Bill of Rates which was signed into law by President Barack Obama during Memorial day weekend. Five of the issuers were not abashed in admitting to Bankrate that they had no qualms about raising interest rates at any time, for any reason, Bankrate called out these companies by name: American Express, Bank of America, Chase, First National Bank Omaha and US Bank. Citi stated that it would not arbitrarily raise rates unless a consumer “violated” their account’s terms and conditions, but also mentioned that it re-examined the rates for each credit account when it expired on the basis of every two years. Default rates ranged from eleven percent (at USAA) to the whopping figure of almost thirty (twenty-nine point nine-nine) that was shared by four of the U.S.’s credit card giants: Chase, Citi, Discover, and FNB Omaha.

Hopefully this data had guided you in considering your choice about which credit card is right for you. On the other hand, however, I would definitely urge you to not consider this data exhaustive. I honestly believe that there is no such thing as too much research when it comes to choosing a credit card. There simply is not enough transparency in the credit card industry in America at this moment, and there will not be until the Bill of Rights makes disclosure standards very different than what they are right now. What this means for you as the consumer is that you are shouldering a considerable onus to check out any potential potholes in your credit card terms and conditions before you sign your name on that application and receive your new plastic in the mail. Do your homework, and I guarantee that it will pay off – you really do not want to be on the receiving end of any nasty surprises.