Stores are violating their contract with the credit card companies if they set minimum or maximum charges, or force you to show ID in addition to your credit card (with the obvious exception being for age-limited purchases). Depending on your state and your card issuer, surcharges or "convenience fees" may be banned as well. The best way to straighten these guys out is to report them to the credit card company. According to new court papers, Visa and Mastercard are saying that the TJ Maxx security breach actually affected 94 million accounts—more than double the amount that TJ Maxx reported.

The new estimate is part of a lawsuit by the credit card companies against Fifth Third Bancorp and TJX (parent company of Marshalls and TJ Maxx, among others).

Visa says that their fraud related costs are in the neighborhood of $68 - $83 million, and will only go up as more thieves use the stolen data.

Damn.

After reading our posts about getting your credit card APR lowered by threatening to do a balance transfer to a lower rate credit card, Brandon got his Citibank Mastercard APR lowered from 15.74% to 1.99%. It's an introductory rate that goes up to prime plus 4.99% after a year, but it's definitely worth it for the time being. A factor that probably helped him was the $10,000 balance he was carrying, making his business more valuable to Citibank.

Writes Brandon, "They probably saw the ten thousand dollar balance and figured it was worth it not knowing that 3/4 is tuition that the company pays back next month."

Shop around first for a lower rate card first so you can throw out names and numbers of better offers. If they call your "bluff" and don't budge, then it will probably make sense to do the switch anyway.

(Photo: I have had a Capital One Mastercard for about 10 years. My interest rate has been 4.99% for as long as I can remember. I received my statement for October to find that my interest rate had jumped from 4.99% to 13.5%.

I called Capital One to find out why. After a completely confusing phone tree and 10 minute wait, I got through to a real person who explained that the increase was not because of anything I did, but because Capital One made an "executive decision" to increase rates "for all cardholders" because of "recent market conditions."

They then offered to transfer me to another person who has the authority to review my account and see if I can get the rate lowered. This second person re-explained the reason for the rate increase and offered to lower my rate from 13.5% to 12.9%. I argued that I would transfer my balance away to another card or pay it off entirely, but this made no difference. I grudgingly accepted the 12.9%.

My wife and I are carrying more of a balance than usual as we just had some work done on the