Credit cards; depending on your viewpoint, they are either tools of the devil or a modern fact of life when it comes to money!

And as if is isn't difficult enough to pay the cards off , it appears that the major credit card companies have been finding ever more sneaky ways to impose fees on us all!

It is claimed that the credit card companies have raised numerous charges for those of us using our cards in the past year. It appears that the cost of using a card adds up to more than just the interest as the card providers are keen to make money out of us all!

The consumers' association Which? says that since the Office of Fair Trading ordered a cut in default fees to £12 last year, "ingenious methods" had been used to recoup the income!

The desire of the banks to recover income lost after the OFT ruling was highlighted by the HBOS group earlier this year which admitted that the cut in the level of credit card default fees would result in it losing £60m in income in 2007.

Among the charges highlighted by Which? in its September issue of Which? Money are low-usage fees, raised interest rates for withdrawing cash, annual fees, and raised balance transfer costs.

But the banking industry denied it had acted unfairly and said different fees were inevitable after the OFT ruling (but what else where they going to say?)

"Credit card providers seem to be resorting to a raft of ingenious methods to recoup lost revenue following the OFT crackdown on penalty fees," said Martyn Hocking, editor of Which? Money.

"We always said that charges would change as a result of the OFT ruling," said Sandra Quinn of the UK payments association Apacs. "We have been much more upfront about how charges are applied - every statement now has a summary box listing charges and key information about charging," she said.

In May, Barclaycard, the UK's biggest credit card issuer, said it might start charging up to 1 million customers up to £20 a year unless they started using their cards more often.

Barclaycard were following hot on the heels of Lloyds-TSB which started levying £35 a year on "low users" back in February.

Northern Rock was amongst the first firms to levy an annual fee and they now charge you £2 a month for their base rate tracker credit card. The Co-op Bank also charges the same amount if you are a user of its Platinum Visa credit card.

MBNA have introduced penalty fees for people they deem to be "inactive" customers; and they have contacted its customers with a credit balance who have not used their card for more than a year to warn them of a £10 penalty.

Barclaycard (still the most popular card) is the latest to threaten us with new fees. It is expected to contact its 1 million inactive customers with fees of between £10 and £20.

And its not just usage fees that are changing; the cost of switching a balance from one card to another is going up; from a typical 2% to around 2.5% or 3%.

Some firms are also changing the way repayments are allocated, so the cheapest debt is repaid first, and others are cutting their minimum payments, so the debt takes longer to repay...and accrues more interest charges!! (the card companies are pretty smart aren't they?!)

But Apacs pointed out that some credit card charges were effectively "optional".

"6 out of 10 credit card users pay off in full each month anyway, so they don't pay some of these charges," said Sandra Quinn.

A big way in which the credit card issuers have saved themselves money is by doing away with their favourite marketing tactic; interest free deals on balance transfers!

Some of these offers lasted for more than a year and led to hundreds of thousands of you becoming so-called "rate tarts"; moving your credit card debts from one card to another on the expiry of each interest free offer! (which was your smart idea!)

Although you can still get some of these deals, they have now become more expensive because card companies now typically charge a transfer fee upfront, usually of 2.5% to 3% of the balance being moved.

And its not just credit card fees that are under scrutiny! The credit card industry is already under pressure to adopt a standard method for calculating the annual rate of interest (known as the APR) being applied to each card.

Following a complaint from Which? in April, the OFT said it would investigate the issue.

Which? complained that there were at least 12 different methods in use for calculating an APR, making the concept meaningless for comparing the real cost of using one card with another!

So, are credit card companies playing fair with us and playing ball with the OFT?

Or are they just finding new ways to make even more money out of us?

What do you think?

Credit card companies still making lots of money out of you!

Have your credit card charges been secretly raised?

It seems that that most of us fancy the idea of a place in the country as our most desirable location to live!

Apparently recent figures show that nearly 30% of us would love to live in the countryside (and 25% of us would like to live by the seaside!).

But the idyllic notion of a waking up to the sounds of songbirds, lowing cattle and looking out across misty hayfields as a regular occurrence is all well and good; the cost of the good life comes at a high price! (and we're not just talking about the occasional farmyard smell!)

This is because most rural homes are now less affordable than urban ones, with average prices more than 7 times a typical local wage!

Figures from the Halifax show that current inflation has pushed the average rural property value up to £246,104. (that is about £30,000 above a house in a town!).

The bigger problem is that in the last five years, average rural house prices have shot up by 72%, thus making the idea of leaving the rat race for the country completely unrealistic for most of us!

It's no different north of the border either, where prices in rural Scotland have risen by 112% in the last 5 years and hiked the average price of Scottish rural home to £177,007. This is 12% more than in the city.

Martin Ellis, chief economist at Halifax, said people in rural areas faced "particularly tough" housing market conditions.

Carrick in Cornwall, (which contains Truro and Falmouth) was found to be the least affordable rural area as its average house price was £269,241; over 10 times the average local salary!

Chiltern in Buckinghamshire (which boasts the upmarket towns of Amersham and Chesham) is the most expensive rural location; its average house price is £474,850!

Overall, the figures found that the average property price was 7.1 times the average annual salary in most rural areas. Of course, this means that were a lot less first-time buyers in the countryside; they only made up 17% of home-buyers, compared to 33% in urban areas.

Higher prices have also meant low-levels of social housing with only 13% of this type of property in rural areas, compared to 20% in cities.

Another problem is that there are more "second homes" outside of the city; they make up 1.8% of property in the countryside and only 0.4% in urban areas.

As there are many people in urban areas who can afford another property, they naturally look to the seaside or countryside when considering their second home. Unfortunately this only serves to do a number of things:

• Drive up property prices in desirable locations
• Make less housing available to those living locally who wish to buy
• Forces locals and/or first time buyers out of the local property market

Guess that means we wll have to stick to watching re-runs of "The Darling Buds of May" won't it?

Here is something to encourage many of you in the ongoing bank penalty charges saga!

A judge has stopped Barclays bank taking any more penalty charges and interest from Nadine Fry who was claiming her charges back!

Judge Abrahams, at Luton County Court, has ordered Barclays to stop continuing to apply further penalty charges until the High Court test case finally settles all the legal issues involved.

Barclays said it will be entitled to reclaim any further charges from Nadine Fry should the test case be successful while Judge Abrahams also suspended Ms Fry's claim until the test case was resolved.

John Fry, who took the case to court on behalf of his daughter, told how he persuaded the judge to suspend any further penalty charges.

"I argued that a stay would have serious financial implications for my daughter as she would have to continue meeting interest payments on her debts, whereas the sum in question (£1,384) would have been sufficient to clear her debt entirely," he said.

Judge Abraham's decision is likely to be deeply disturbing to the UK's banks, in case other judges around the country take a similar line!

Can you imagine how the banks would feel if they a) weren't allowed to continue imposing penalty charges until the test case is resolved and b) they couldn't continue to make the huge amounts of money they do from penalty charges?

In the past year, tens of thousands of you have been winning refunds of overdraft penalty charges from your banks; so far this has cost the five main banks almost £400 million while Barclays has so far repaid £87milion of that.

As well as announcing the test case, the banks got a waiver from the Financial Services Authority (FSA) so that they can largely stop processing new claims against them until the legal issues are sorted out.

Likewise, the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) decided to stop dealing with the thousands of similar complaints it has been receiving. The banks also asked the courts to suspend all existing legal actions against them for the time being.

However, any decisions on cases that are already before the courts have been left up to local judges to decide; hence Judge Abraham's decision.

Marc Gander of the Consumer Action Group said the Luton judge's decision was both just and encouraging:

"This is what should have been done from the start to maintain fair play. This waiver adopted by the FSA and the Ombudsman has been profoundly unjust because it is so one-sided," he said.

So, here's hoping that Judge Abraham's decision to stop banks continuing to impose penalty charges until the High Court case is settled, is the first of many more!

Q & A: bank penalty charges court case

Breaking news: Tom Brennan case dismissed

Calling customer services...a process that makes thousands of us rage with anger every single day!!

You call a "customer service" line to ask a question or to complain, they place you on hold while they poison your brain with really annoyingly crap music, and then they play pass the parcel with you from section to section...

...and if that isn't bad enough, the company that is supposedly "helping" you pockets your money, often at premium-rate prices!!

It's enough to make you scream...and many of us probably do!

However, growing numbers of you are now getting your own back on the companies which so often tell us that our "calls may be recorded". We the consumers are now taping the conversations in the hope that customer service staff buck their ideas up when told they are under scrutiny.

If they do not, or if promises are not honoured, the caller can send the recordings to the company with a request for action, or even use them in court!

It is legal to record all calls without telling the person you speak to, provided that it is for your own use.

But if you intend to share the call with a third party (i.e. for use as evidence in a small claims court) the failure to explain that you are taping the conversation at the start of the call could lead to a civil prosecution.

EasyCallRecording.co.uk is a new website that enables you to record and download telephone calls for 10p a minute (including the cost of the call) and has helped many of its users score consumer victories against big names including Dell and Excel Airways.

Ben Fry, who set up the site was inspired by the "terrible trouble" that he and his wife had with the call centre staff of two household names. Mr. Fry advises consumers to record all conversations where money is at stake with calls to insurers and banks especially important.

A prime example is when Montague Kobbe recorded a conversation he had with his bank. He used it to prove that he had not requested loan insurance at £14.99 a month after he spotted it as an extra on his bill. His email to the customer services, with the recording attached, was answered with an instant refund. Service since then has been "excellent". (no surprise there!)

Meanwhile, Natalie Bishop used the service to record a series of calls to British Airways in the run-up to her holiday with her boyfriend to Barbados. When BA's check-in staff said that she had not bought upgrades, she said she had and told them that files of the relevant telephone calls could be accessed online in minutes.

It turned out that the operator had agreed to book the seats but had failed to process the payment. The result: free upgrades worth £600!

EasyCallRecording.co.uk's system appeals greatly as it requires no technical knowledge and is fairly straightforward to use.

• To use the service dial 0871 2385555.
• You will be given a PIN code and put through to the number you want to dial.
• To access the recording, dial 0871 2386666 and enter your PIN.
• You must register online to download free audio files of calls, which are otherwise deleted after a year.
• Their current pay-as-you-go service allows you to record calls to UK landlines, 0845 and 0800 numbers only.
• A subscription service set to launch this week will allow members to record incoming calls as well as calls to all British and international telephone numbers, including 0870 numbers, from 12.5p a minute.

The founder of Callsmayberecorded.co.uk, on which people post their recordings to name and shame complacent companies, says that users of Skype, the internet telephone provider, can download software to do the same job.

A lower-tech solution is an old-fashioned cassette recorder and a telephone-to-recorder adapter and these are available from Maplin, the high street retailer, for about £35.

You could also try bluffing as the merest mention of the process can transform customer service!

Neil Fowler, editor of the consumer magazine Which? says: "Simply telling a company that you are recording the call could be very effective, whether or not you actually record it."

Mr. Fowler and the Information Commissioner's Office both point out that you can also ask companies for transcripts of their telephone calls if these have been recorded!

Customer Service rip off tips!

• From next January new rules from Ofcom, the telecoms regulator, will bring 0870 rates into line with standard landline rates.
• In the meantime, ask for a refund whenever you are kept on hold for more than a few minutes or when you are not satisfied with the service you receive.
• Recording your calls could increase your chances of a payout and should ensure speedier service. Invest in a recorder or visit EasyCallRecording.co.uk or Callsmayberecorded.co.uk.

If you are one of the many people using HIPs, you could end up paying hundreds of pounds twice for the same work!

The Government's controversial new scheme to speed up the house buying process has hit yet another obstacle after it emerged some mortgage lenders do not trust the packs, and so are replicating (and charging for) the key elements of them!

HIPs, which contain title deeds, an energy performance certificate (EPC) and a string of local searches, have been required for all 4 bed homes put on the market since August 1, and from September 10 they will also be required for any 3 bed homes.

The idea behind HIPS was that rather than paying for this information when you looked into a buying a home, the person putting the property up for sale would have to provide the information up front.

This would (in theory!) mean fewer sales breaking down and that no matter how many properties you looked into you would not pay the fees more than once! (when selling your own home).

So what is happening now?

Barclays and HSBC, two of the biggest mortgage lenders, appear not to trust the reports, although both have denied that they are unhappy with the whole HIPs process.

Local searches contain information on planning applications, drainage and building permissions. Before HIPs were introduced buyers carried out around two searches in five without a solicitor, a process known as a personal search.

However, because this type of search is cheaper, it is anticipated that most of the companies providing HIPs will take this option to keep costs down.

HSBC has said it would make homebuyers pay for its own local authority searches (costing up to £200) as those provided as part of HIPs are not all underwritten by a solicitor and so would not provide enough insurance.

This means that as a buyer you would have to pay for the local authority searches both for your own home and for the one you are trying to buy!!

A spokesman for HSBC said there was nothing new about his bank's policy and stressed that the bank was supportive of the introduction of HIPs.

"But we have never accepted private searches rather than those from a solicitor," he said. "We just need to be sure that the customer's solicitor will sign off the search so that it is covered by their personal indemnity insurance" he added.

A spokeswoman for Barclays agreed. "We will accept a personal search, at the conveyancer's risk. We are not demanding that house buyers spend more money on more searches," she said.

Hmm, we're not entirely convinced that this is true...and we're not quite sure what is going on with searches but before you get all HIP, you had better make sure you are not paying twice for the whole process!

Its HIPs time again!