First, make sure to know what your annual fee is on all your credit cards. Credit card rates can be notoriously high, and minimum payments hardly make a dent in your loan balance, allowing your debt to linger and generate profits. Once a bank has a credit card customer, it might look to get that customer’s business in other ways: a personal checking account for which the customer pays a monthly fee; a savings account that earns little interest for the customer as the bank lends that money out at a higher rate; or an auto loan or mortgage on which the cross-sold customer pays interest for years, even decades.
