Why do I love the beginning of the month?
I try to make my life as simple as possible, so I schedule all of my credit cards to have their statements close on the 1st of the month. This makes it easy to know when payments are due and helps me make sure I never miss a payment.
For Chase, you can change your bill due date online easily by going to Customer Service and clicking on change bill due date. Select the credit card and the date of the month you want. It may take 1-2 billing cycles to go into effect. While you are on this page, you might want to rename your credit cards by clicking on Nickname accounts under the My Information section.
Citibank also lets you rename accounts and change the bill due date online. For some reason, I could not get the first of the month for the Citi AA MC Card.
To change your due date on Citi, go to Benefits and Service and click Customize Payment Due Date. When I checked today, they wouldn’t let me change to due date before the 8th of the month, so YMMV.
Anyways, why do I love the beginning of the month? That’s when all my “earned” miles and points post to my accounts. It’s like Christmas morning every month, I love it!
I have been experimenting with Bluebird, GoBank, Blue Cash Preferred, and Chase Gift Cards. I will pass on my findings soon, so stay tuned for more interesting posts.
In the meantime, I recommend signing up for a GoBank card (very similar to Bluebird) here. If you have any questions, please leave a comment below.
Why sign up for go bank when bluebird is free and works well?
That’s a good point, Jacob. IF you are happy with Bluebird, continue using it. If you want to expand your monthly manufactured spend limits, you might want another card to play with.
Jacob, that is because Bluebird has a draconian $5,000 per month load limit. Grant, I was wondering that despite being notorious for shutdowns, why are you not afraid of Gobank? With the number of prepaid cards out there, it might be better to use reputable cards such as the H&R Block Emerald Prepaid, the Rushcard, or Visa Buxx. Of course the drawback of those is that almost all prepaid cards other than Bluebird and Gobank can’t be loaded with Visa gift cards, so there’s the hassle of searching for a store that lets people buy reload cards. Anyway, do you think I should be scared if I use Gobank or another Greendot prepaid card product myself?
Yes, I know GoBank is risky, but if you act like a normal customer and not abuse the reload and bill pay features, you should be fine. There is a lengthy FT post about how to avoid being shutdown, but it seems that it is a tricky road to take.