Joe and Jacquie Mirsky own a small jewelry store in New Jersey, but business isn't what it used to be. Like a lot of jewelers, Joe says selling gold is all that's been keeping them solvent. "But once it's all gone, that's it," he says.To make ends meet, the Mirskys watch their expenses carefully - especially interest rates on credit-card debt that dates to less-lean times. "Joe is very astute," says Jacquie Mirsky, . "About a year and a half ago, he said, 'Boy, you're paying a lot of interest.' So when Chase Card Services offered Jacquie a chance to pay off a higher-rate balance with a loan at percent, Joe said they should take the deal. He also welcomed a subsequent offer from Chase, this one at percent.All told, the couple paid off about in debt, sending Chase more than $200 in balance-transfer fees and trusting in the megabank's promise that the interest rate was guaranteed "for the life of the loan," as Jacquie recalls it.Their goal was to pay off their debt slowly but methodically. "I never used the credit card to buy anything," she says.Then Chase pulled a fast one - or so it seems to the Mirskys and thousands of other Chase customers around the country. Last month, Chase changed a key term in their deal, as it has done since November on about 1 million accounts.Not the interest rates on the balance transfers, which Chase agreed were guaranteed as long as those customers met their obligations. What Chase changed was the minimum monthly payment it demanded, raising it from percent of the balance each month to percent.Until then, the Mirskys were paying Chase about a month. In August, that was scheduled to jump to times what I'm paying," Jacquie says, calling the change a "bait-and-switch" maneuver that threatened to "blow my budget right in the head."She called to complain, at first without any success. "I felt like asking, 'What other bill would you like me to quit paying in order to pay off yourYou may be wondering right about now, as I was when I first heard this story: Didn't Congress or the Federal Reserve just do something about credit-card traps?The short answer is: Yes, but not this one.After years of complaints about sudden "any time, any reason" rate increases and the like, Washington finally reached the same conclusion that many consumers had long ago: Some card issuers' practices cross the line that separates annoying and sneaky from truly unfair and deceptive.In fact, starting Aug. the first new protections from the Credit Card Act of 2009 take effect: Cardholders will be entitled to at least days' advance notice of any rate increase or other changes in terms. And they'll also have a crucial right: The right to say "No, thanks" and pay off their debt under the old terms.Why doesn't that provision apply to increases in minimum payments? One reason may be that they, too, can be a credit-card trap. When minimum payments are low and interest rates high - say, above percent - some cardholders have seen their outstanding balances grow even without new purchases or fees.That concern doesn't seem to be in play here. Chase won't say exactly how it chose which customers to target, but spokeswoman Gail Hurdis said the lender is focusing on those who are paying off promotional rates too slowly.Hurdis said that "tens of millions of Chase customers" have taken similar, low-rate offers, and that most have paid off their balances in less than months. "Our desire is to have these balances paid back in a reasonable period of time," she said.Perhaps because they were squeaky wheels, the Mirskys won a reprieve from Chase. After the Pompton Lakes, N.J., couple complained, Joe says, Chase agreed to accept a flat a-month payout of their loan.But that sort of accommodation appears rare. According to Eric Gibbs, a San Francisco lawyer who filed one of more than two dozen class-action lawsuits challenging Chase's changes of terms, the best offer that most cardholders are getting is a Hobson's choice: Accept the larger minimum, or agree to a new, higher interest rate.Gibbs says Chase's original pitches were "clearly designed to appeal to people trying to manage their long-term debt." Now that conditions have changed, he says, Chase has decided that some just aren't profitable enough - because, like Jacquie Mirsky, they've resisted using their cards for new purchases at higher interest rates.People accepted that offer, and they made a wise choice," Gibbs says. "They've clearly had the rug pulled out from under them."One other thing seems clear to me: No matter how carefully the new credit-card rules are crafted, the perils of consumer debt aren't going away anytime soon.
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