Balance Transfer Fee

Most commonly, a balance transfer fee is a fee charged by a credit card company to transfer a card's balance (i.e. the money you owe on that card), from one company to another.

Example: Seemingly daily, you receive in the mail an exclusive offer from Credit Card Company A to transfer your card balance from whatever card you currently have. The Card Company will charge you 0% on that transferred balance for 18 months. But there is a transfer fee of 3 to 5 percent of the transferred amount. You'd only want to do this if you a) desperately needed the cash and had to transfer dough to make room for more bills coming due; or b) because there was such a huge spread in interest rates on the various cards that the math made sense. Otherwise, credit cards exist to be paid off.

Note the really nice corporate jets at Amex, Visa, and Mastercard. Somebody pays for ‘em (and likely not on a credit card).