Well, there are probably a bunch of things in the contracts saying that you need to be notified a certain number of days before certain changes take place. That could be part of the reason for the long window.

I'm in agreement with Cameron. I have a credit card that was giving me trouble acting shady (might have just been my view of the situation) so I picked up the phone and called them...all the time. They were pulling shady shit like every single time I was charged the interest fee, it would put me over by one cent. Just enough for them to charge me their fees. I called and called. Usually, after knocking off a fee or two, most companies will stiff arm you and tell you no after that. My card company tried that, and I still got them to take off almost another $130 in additional fees. For them to drop that much in fees tells me that it wasn't soley my fault. After that whole mess, I got my act together and cleaned that card up tremendously.

The point I'm making is that this credit card rule change has only made things worse for me on ALL of my cards. I was handling the situation nicely on my own, now I have to continue, but at an unjustified rate hike all across the board.