Being frugal with your spending and keeping costs to a minimum is, as many other posts on this site testify, the first step to sorting out your personal finances.

But some costs are inevitable and, once you’ve parted with your cash, losing money by not getting what you’ve paid for can be incredibly frustrating.

That’s why it’s worthwhile knowing about the basic protection available to credit cardholders under law. It could just help you get what you paid for.

How did you pay?

The Consumer Credit Act protects any form of borrowing relationship so that includes credit cards and store cards even when you paid off the whole balance in full (i.e. didn’t actually pay for the borrowing at all).

How much did you pay?

The act only applies to purchases over £100 and under £30,000 (although the Consumer Credit Directive should protect up to £60,260).

A ‘purchase’ is defined as one item or a group of linked items. A shopping basket of different goods that comes to £100 altogether won’t cut it but if you buy, say, a pack of ten tickets at £10 each you could claim the whole amount back.

What happened?

Section 75 is designed to protect consumers when goods or services are not delivered or are sold with a pre-existing fault.

In theory, Section 75 means that the credit card provider and the retailer have equal liability when a problem arises. However, there’s a good reason that the archetypal Section 75 claim is made when a company goes bust.

Having a claim accepted is a long process, often made longer by uncooperative or poorly trained bank staff. Attempting to sort the problem out with the retailer or service provider first is much more pragmatic.

Were there any other costs?

Be aware that section 75 allows you to claim for extra costs you had to incur as a result of the faults.

Recently, for example, the Financial Ombudsman Service revealed that it had ordered a credit card provider to pay for a whole new laptop after a consumer found that the one they had recently bought was faulty.

The classic example is that when an airline goes bust while you’re on holiday and you need to buy an extra flight to get home, the credit card provider should cover that flight.

This post was bought to you by Choose.net, a news, reviews and credit card comparison site. Choose.net has a full guide to section 75.