I paid off the balance on my GM Flex Earnings Card from HSBC bank a couple weeks ago.  Today I double-checked the account on-line, and was surprised to see my balance was not $0.  It was $6.66.  I scratched my head for a bit, and then realized what happened.  When I paid the balance a couple weeks ago, it was the balance from my last statement, not the "pay-off" amount.  The pay-off amount is higher than the last statement balance, because interest charges are applied daily.  If I paid the statement balance the day it was posted, I would have been paid in full.  In actuality, I paid a few days after it posted, thus I owed additional interest for those days.

New rules are on the way to regulate credit card issuers. While the House of Representatives shaped a new bill to reign in issuers (see Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights), the Senate ran out of time and failed to address it. The Federal Reserve, on a parallel track, has devised a set of rule changes in the same spirit as the Bill that stalled in the Senate. On the down side, the rules don't take effect until July, 2010, giving issuers another year and a half to bleed consumers under the current lax regulations.

The common thread between the two initiatives is broad consensus that issuers have spiraled out of control over the last few years in their exploitation of consumers. Referring to the Fed actions, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., said the new rules "are a good first step, but they don't prevent a number of unfair, deceptive and predatory practices that saddle many American families with crushing debt."

I just realized that my United Airlines credit card from Chase uses the double-cycle billing method, one of the schemes currently under scrutiny by Congress. I had wondered about this earlier in the year, whenI started using this card as a "pay off every month" card for everyday purchases.  It seemed to take a number of months before I was no longer free of interest fees.  I found this clause in the "Grace Period" section of my cardholder agreement: