The fees....the fees..... the fees...

Dear Congressman,

By the end of this month, credit card companies will be regulated by new guidelines established by you and your co-workers during last year's sessions of Congress. Since these companies are going to be limited in some of their previous practices that generated much of their profits, they have begun to announce a whole new set of fees that will allow them to pad their bottom lines with additional profits courtesy of the taxpayers.

Examples include one bank charging an "inactivity fee" of $19 if you do not use your card in a 12 month period. Another more drastic fee is a $60 annual fee if card holders charge less than $2,400 a year, as rolled out by one of our wonderful Fortune 100 bailed-out financial institutions. So don't forget to charge that $200 per month to avoid that fee!

But as the need for fees drives on, I believe that banks and processing companies will only get more aggressive when it comes to this topic. Here are some ideas for them to ponder.

Early internet payment fee - Yes, it is a real hassle for the banks when you pay your credit card too early, as they have to go to the trouble of applying your payment outside of their "planned window", thus clogging up their administrative infrastructure.To fix this irritating problem, banks will designate a 30 minute period on a monthly basis when you can pay your bill online. If you miss this window, it's a $39 fee. Typically, for everyone's convenience, the window will be open between 3:30am-4:00am Eastern Standard Time on the first Sunday of the month.

Call center fee - Yup, those fine folks over in India have to eat as well, so the major banks will be instituting a fee for every time you feel the need to call the 1-800 number on the back of your card. No a lot of money, just a simple $5 connection fee and then 35 cents a minute after that, conveniently billed directly to your card!

Bonus administration recovery fee - Every year the banks issue their bonus checks, and then the majority of the payroll staff quit in disgust when they see insane amount of money the top 10% of employees are paying themselves, while they are trying to get by on an annual salary that is less than an average executive team member's monthly expense allowance. Thus, the bank incur an ongoing irritation of having to constantly hire menial payroll staff to process their grotesquely large annual payouts. A consultant was hired by a number of banks to address this problem and recommended that they forgo a small portion of their bonuses to placate the disgruntled employees by sharing it with them. The banks thanked the consultants for their hard work, escorted them the door, and then proceeded to institute this fee on cardholders to offset the additional costs of continuously hiring new payroll department employees on an on-going basis.

BWC fees - If you read your credit card statement it will say the following: BWC fees are levied on all customers of XXX bank as per outlined in the cardholder agreement dated January 31, 2010. BWC fees are calculated as 0.01% of all outstanding balances on a 28 day cycle, and billed in arrears. If you pay your balance in full each month, then your BWC fees will not be billed in the ensuing month's activity, provided that BWC waiver conditions are met. BWC waiver conditions require that once during the 28 billing period that the BWC fees are accrued, a verified 1/4 inch or more of snowfall is recorded in an area commonly defined as the Sahara Desert. (if you read far enough into the fine print, you will find the BWC stands for : "Because We Can")