I could be wrong, but I really doubt we’ll see high annual fees on credit cards for people with good credit any time soon. Or, at least, it will still be easy to get a credit card with no annual fee from somewhere.
I’m defining a “high” annual fee as one that’s higher than the tangible benefits you get from the card itself. If I get ~$100 in rewards a year from a credit card, I’ll willingly pay a fee for that, as long as I still come out ahead.
As long as the credit card companies make some money from people with good credit ratings who pay off their bills every month (the deadbeats), they don’t really want to drive them away entirely. And the last thing they want is for the people who actually have money to start spending only cash.
I bought a car at 3.9% for the life of the advance, unsecured, when car loans were going at 6.7. Paid it off in 2 1/2 years instead of 60 months. Saved a bundle. Nearly put in a cash advance to clear the second mortgage on the house(80/20 loan). If I could get that 3.9 again I still might.
I never carry purchases and the only time I use cash advances is when they offer me a special rate I can lock in and it’s a better deal than conventional ways of funding a purchase like the aforementioned vehicle. Other than that, yea, I don’t know what the rates on my cards are. I never pay interest. I take ~400 a year out of my discover card(that we charge EVERYTHING to) and don’t pay them a penny in fees or interest. Sure merchant fees have raised the prices of everything, but they did that before I started using credit cards, so I may as well play the game too.
This would cause us to start closing accounts. We’re wondering if this will ever come around, because that would be irritating.
Still, consumer credit cards, while it’s the lifeblood of the everyday purchasing power of many individuals, just isn’t that huge a part of the economy. 2.5 trillion as of Sept 09, and declining fast. Contrast this to the $12 trillion mortgage market in the US and you’ll see why the mortgage crisis is a much bigger problem.