Balance Protection
"For an additional fee" is the beginning phrase to almost every bad deal available to every consumer...ever. It basically just means "this is going to cost you way more than it's worth, but please do it."
Balance protection is just such a deal. If the card owner buys the balance protection plan and is subsequently injured or unemployed, the balance protection plan will pay the minimum monthly payments on her card balance (that's good for the credit card company, not so good for the card holder) to keep the card from going into arrears. Sounds good, but there are better ways of accomplishing the same thing (disability insurance, cash reserve, not carrying credit card balances, etc.).
Typically, the additional fee for the balance protection is a specified percentage of the existing balance on the card, and is added to the monthly statement. It's basically the bank selling you a very high margin (to them) insurance product. Instead of buying it, like...why not just pay off your bills on time?
Related or Semi-related Video
Finance: What is contribution margin?12 Views
Finance a la shmoop... what is contribution margin, well, shmoop has spent a fortune
building the oh so fine content you digest and then mostly for free and you [Girl watching Shmoop videos]
could pay us if you wanted to..For years we've made no operating profit choosing
instead to roll any excess cash we found in our cigar boxes into building more
content so while our operating margins ie the cost of running the entire
business paying our writers, our clowns, our rent, our cloud storage facilities the [Clown bouncing on the spot]
office jester we have on retainer permanently to entertain the writers
have been low or nearly zero our contribution margins are really high
that is our cost of serving another thousand pages which you view hungrily
clicking on our ads thank you very much that cost to us is well something less [Person holding half a penny]
than a penny but we sell it to advertisers for a thousand page views
and about three bucks a unit there thousand pages for three bucks what a
deal so the contribution margin of that additional n plus one unit of our
product a thousand page views is extremely high like $2.99 divided by
three dollars or well over 99% contribution margin those are
our contribution margins here at Shmoop, very very high and not all companies [Man discussing contribution margins]
have such high contribution margins our sister company robot-date-eat-pray-
love which manufactures emotionally deep robots designed to take the place of [Emotional robot walking with a woman]
well you know special friends well they sell their robots for 15 grand each
but their cost of building that robots really high like 12 grand each no matter
how many robots they make so RDEPL carries a contribution margin of just 15
minus 12 or 3 grand / 15 grand or about 20 percent sorry all these numbers may
sound a bit tedious but if you're on a date with the robot they make for some
scintillating conversation [Girl sitting with robot on a date]
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