The credit card market is highly competitive and this can work to the consumers benefit, but you need to know how to play the system and what opportunities are open to you.

There are several things you can do to lower your credit card bills and handle your debts more efficiently.

• If you have two credit cards, one with a lower interest rate than the other you can play one off against the other.

• Find out exactly what interest rate you are paying with the cheaper credit card. For the benefit of explaining this we will call the cheaper credit card Smith Finance and the more expensive card Grogan Bank.

• Then phone up Grogan Bank and explain that you have another credit card with Smith Finance where you only pay 6.9% (for arguments sake) and that you would rather not transfer your balance from Grogan Bank to Smith Finance, but the interest rate you are being charged by Grogan Bank is to high for you. Ask them if they can lower the interest rate to the same rate as Smith Finance. Customer retention reps usually have the authorisation to make these decisions and will often be prepared to lower the interest rate to the same as the card you are with or at least lower than it is at the moment.

Another thing you can do is to move your debt between cards. This works in a similar way to the common trick of moving your debts to a new credit card that you have received a 0% for 12 months offer.

Moving your debts around existing cards is much easier. As the credit card industry gets more and more competitive and the banks are aware that people are transferring their debt to new cards, they have started offering lower interest rates on transfers to existing customers to get them to transfer their debt with one card to another.

Even if they do not offer any special deals if the interest rate is lower than the card you are transferring from it is worth moving your balance over. Just 2% can make a lot of difference over the space of a year.

First of all phone up the card who you intend to transfer the balance to and ask the following:

• Will you allow me to transfer a balance from another card?
• What percentage of interest do you charge on balance transfers?
• How much do we currently owe you.
• What is my limit.

From this information you can work out weather it is cheaper than the card you would like to transfer the balance from and how much you can transfer. Sometimes they may even let you extend your limit.

Always shift all your debt into the cheaper cards, so they are at there maximum. Only pay the minimum monthly payments on the cheap cards and pay as much as possible of the smaller cards.

You can even shift other unrelated credit card debt such as overdrafts. But always way up the cost first. If your over draft is cheaper than the credit card then do not move it.