In the last several years, credit card fees have been getting ridiculous. That’s because the credit card companies have had free reign to charge just about anything they wanted. They’ve also been able to hide much of it from us by burying the details in long-winded fine print and legalese.

But now, things are changing in the consumer’s favor. Predatory and borderline ethical practices are being scrutinized and there’s a real chance that change is coming. Maybe there’s a way we can help ourselves a bit in the meantime though. Let’s see if we can avoid credit card fees altogether by using prepaid debit cards. Here’s what I propose.

If you make the commitment to using a prepaid debit card in place of a credit card, you can begin to replace one with the other. Over time, you can make all your usual credit card purchases with the prepaid card and stop using the credit card altogether. Then you can set up automatic payments on the credit card and lock it away somewhere.

If you do that, you’ll never have another late fee again. Credit card companies love to charge late fees. In 2008 over 19 billion dollars was raked in by these companies for their various “penalty fees.” That’s a lot of dough, especially when you consider that in some cases the companies manipulate their billing practices to put the consumer in a position to incur these fees. Here’s an example.

An over-limit fee is the penalty fee you’re charged whenever you run up your balance over your credit limit. Since you can do this pretty easily, your “limit” obviously isn’t really a hard and fast number. Rather, it’s more of a threshold that triggers extra fees from the company. Then, if you just pay the minimum payment (which the company so conveniently calculates for you) you’ll drop below the limit right? Well, not quite. You see, often the next finance charge will send your balance right back over the limit and guess what? You got it, you get charged another over-limit fee. It’s pretty sneaky if you ask me. If you used a prepaid debit card, that scenario would never happen.

Prepaid cards don’t come with tricky monthly finance/billing cycle calculations either. These are the computations the credit card companies make to determine how much they’re going to charge you to carry your balance from one month to the next. There are actually 6 or 7 different ways these charges can be calculated and everyone is designed to yield the highest return for the company based on your spending habits.

There are also hidden interchange fees that all credit card customers pay. These are fees that are paid by the retailers for the actual transactions costs of doing business with a particular credit card company. They’re negotiated in secret and aren’t really published anywhere. But you can be sure that consumers are paying them in the form of higher prices so the retailers can cover their costs. And these represent a huge profit for the credit card companies because these fees will be paid even if you can’t pay your monthly bill.

These are just a few of the reasons why switching over to a prepaid debit card can benefit you as a consumer. Let’s face it; the credit card companies have almost all the leverage. About the only options we have left is to cut our losses and prevent them from preying on us in the future. So if you’re in a position to do so, I invite you to take a good long look at prepaid debit cards and see how they can become your sensible, more consumer-friendly alternative to credit cards.