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I'm so glad to have you here on the Clark Howard Show where it's all about you and your wallet.

I want you to be empowered with knowledge so you can keep more of what you make.

A lot of empowerment at Clark.com and you want deals? I got them for you at ClarkDeals.com.

Coming up in just 20 minutes in today's Clark-ragist moment, yet another example where when a deal seems to be a deal but really isn't fair warning for you when any store or website uses the word sale.

And in a half hour, we want to talk about a new service available that's free that allows family members to know where all other family members that want to participate are at any time.

I want to talk right now about something key to your money and that's your credit card.

Credit cards are in a hard spot right now, the credit card issuers because the competition for customers is so intense that you and I, I know it's weird to say,

we've turned the tables and we have the banks over a barrel if we choose to take advantage of it.

I've talked for months about the phenomenal deals available right now on reward cards, but let's talk about other circumstances with cards.

What if you have a card that you'd like to raise the credit limit on?

Do you know right now you have a roughly 90% chance by calling your credit card company to get them to raise your credit limit?

Why would anybody want to do that? Because when you raise your credit limit, so long as you don't go crazy charging on the card and if you know you'd be tempted to, don't ask to raise your credit limit.

But when you get your credit limit raised, it also raises your credit score.

It's because of the arcane methods used to generate a credit score.

You improve something known as your ratios. And so it's a great idea for you to call your credit card issuers and ask for a credit limit increase.

Remember, 9 out of 10 chances they're going to say yes. And by the way, this survey data is from creditcards.com that surveyed a pretty wide sampling that's enough to get meaningful data from.

They also found out that if you want to get your annual fee waived or reduced, you have great odds right now of getting that done.

How many? What percent? 8 out of 10. Let's say you're paying interest on a balance. That you're not going to be as successful at.

That only 70% of people who call and ask their credit card company who are running a balance get their interest rate lowered only 70.

Those are pretty good odds right? And then finally you get hit with a late fee. If you ask for it to be waived, 90% of people approximately just with a simple phone call get a late fee waived.

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