Cardholders of consumer credit cards are not the only ones who are trying to save money and manage their budgets this year. Major credit card companies are also struggling to keep their accounts balanced and remain profitable. While some credit card policy changes during the recession upset customers because they made it harder to manage money – with higher interest rates, more fees and charges, and lower credit ceilings – a new set of cardholder tools from Chase named “Blueprint” features is really designed to make life easier for cardholders.

The features menu in the Blueprint program gives you four main resources to help stick to your budget and manage credit card payments easier. Basically these tools help you see where you credit card dollars are being spent, they help you calculate your various payment options, and they also make it simple to just pay off an outstanding balance for a purchase to relieve yourself of unwanted debt.

First there is the Blueprint feature called Full Pay, and this lets you pick and choose among more than a dozen categories of expenses – such as dining, gas, and groceries, for example. Once you have selected the category, the card company then separates any expenses that fall under that section and you do not have to pay interest on them, even if you decide to carry an outstanding balance on your overall credit card account. So, for instance, you could designate entertainment expenses, and then the card would peel those off into a separate section that you can pay off in full each month – despite the fact that you may have other charges you don’t want to pay in full.

Another tool lets you figure out how much it will cost you to buy and then pay for something over time. You specify how much you can pay each month and how many months you want to use to stretch out your repayment, and it gives you a quick snapshot of your total cost to finance that purchase on your credit card. You can do a similar kind of calculation to figure out how much it will cost you to pay off your entire credit card balance in a specific period of time, and there are tools that track your expenses in various categories, something you can also get from other major credit card companies besides Chase.