Tag Archives: Cash Back

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My Best Practices for Closing a Credit Card

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Good morning everyone, I hope you had a great New Year’s Day!  A few weeks ago, I wrote My Best Practices for New Credit Cards and Sign Up Bonuses.  In that post, I shared a variety of tips and tricks to stay organized and squeeze out the most value from your new credit cards.  In today’s post, I will talk about the other side of the coin – best practices for closing credit cards.  There are many things you need to do before you call to close your credit card.  Here are some tips and tricks to follow:

Is the Credit Card Worth the Annual Fee?

Whenever a credit card has an annual fee, you need to ask yourself, “Does the value you receive from the credit card benefits meet or exceed the cost of the annual fee?”  Most credit card benefits are intangible (you cannot touch them), but you must assign a value to them.  For example, if your credit card offers these benefits, how much are the benefits worth to you?

  • Airline Elite Status – you must fly in order to use your status.
  • Free Checked Bags – you must check bags on flights.
  • More Award Seats / Better Award Availability / Lower Pricing – you must search and book award tickets using miles and points.
  • Hotel Elite Status – you must stay at the hotel chain (or match to another hotel elite status).
  • Free Night Certificate – you must find participating hotels and award availability to use your free night certificates.
  • Rebated Points – you must have enough points to redeem for an award in order to get rebated points.
  • Statement Credits – you must spend money (hopefully on something you want / need) in order to get the statement credits.
  • Airline Travel / Incidental Reimbursement Credits – you must find qualifying charges to make in order to trigger the credits.
  • Refer a Friend Bonuses – you must have friends, family, or blog readers who will apply for new credit cards with your referral links.

If you are interested, check out my Keep, Cancel, or Convert? Series to see how I decide which credit cards are worth keeping and paying the annual fees.

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How Much Money Did I Make from Bank Account Bonuses in 2020?

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Good morning everyone, happy New Year’s Eve!  Doctor of Credit has a Best Bank Account Bonuses page that he keeps up to date with the best offers each month.  In that master post, he links to individual bank account bonuses with helpful information regarding the bonus details, how to avoid monthly fees, when to close the account, how often you can open a new account, and much more.  For the last 6 years, I have been opening new checking accounts for the new member bonuses.  And at the end of each year, I share my results on the blog.  Over the last 6 years, I have made $12,250 in bank account bonuses.  You will receive 1099-INT tax forms every year, so you have to pay taxes on the bank account bonuses, but sometimes you can fund the opening deposit with a credit card and earn miles, points, or cash back.  If you are lucky, you can meet a minimum spending requirement by funding a new checking account or reach a high spending target to earn more rewards.  Here are my results from the last 6 years with links to corresponding blog post summaries:

Drum roll please… Here are the 3 new checking accounts I opened in 2020:

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Need a Last Minute Gift? Earn Rewards for Buying Virtual Gift Cards from Slide, Fluz & MileagePlusX

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Good afternoon everyone.  The holiday season is upon us and we are now in the home stretch.  If you still have a few more gifts to give this year, there is still time to send your friends, family members, neighbors and teammates a gift card.  Of course you can run out to your local grocery store, restaurant, pharmacy, or office supply store to pick up a physical gift card, but if you don’t want to leave your house, you can buy a virtual gift card from the convenience of your phone (and earn rewards).  Whenever I need to buy a gift card for myself or for someone else, there are 3 apps that I use: Slide, Fluz, and MileagePlusX.

I will go into more detail on how to use each app, but there are 3 important things to know about these apps: your virtual gift card is ready to use right away; you can usually purchase the virtual gift card in an exact dollar amount; and you earn rewards in the form of cash back or United Airlines Miles.  Without further ado, let’s go through these 3 apps.

Slide (Apple App Store / Google Play Store)

Slide offers 4% cash back on all virtual gift card purchases (which may be higher or lower than the other 2 apps, depending on the store).  If you are a new member, please use my Slide referral link and you will get a $5 credit towards your first 4 purchases ($20 off total).  For comparison purposes, I bought Panera Bread virtual gift cards from all 3 apps to compare the process and show the various rewards.  After you create your Slide account, type the store name into the search box.  If the store is offered on Slide, you will see it in the search results.  Click on the store name to purchase a virtual gift card.

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My Best Practices for New Credit Cards and Sign Up Bonuses

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Good afternoon everyone, I hope your week is going well.  I recently completed the minimum spending requirement for 4 different credit cards (My October 2020 Credit Card App-O-Rama Results) and wanted to share my best practices for new credit cards and sign up bonuses.  I currently have 32 credit and charge cards open and have had 90 other cards since I started travel hacking in 2011.  To the best of my knowledge, I have never missed a credit card sign up bonus by not completing the minimum spending requirement.  Feel free to use all, some, or none of my best practices with your next credit card.  For this post, I am going to use a fictitious credit card as an example to illustrate some of the pitfalls to avoid.

ABC Credit Card has a sign up bonus of 50,000 points after spending $3,000 in 3 months with a $95 annual fee.  You apply for the credit card on January 1 and your application is pending.  Your application gets approved on January 5 and your new credit card arrives on January 15.  You activate your new credit card on January 18.

Credit Card Tidying and Organization

When your new credit card arrives, I recommend activating it immediately.  Then set up online access to view and track your purchases.  If you get paid monthly, you may want to change the bill due date to a date that is more convenient for you (unfortunately, this may not be possible until after the first statement closes).  For simplicity, I like to have all my credit card statements close around the same date, so that I do not need to remember several different credit card due dates or statement closing dates.

If you are concerned about accidentally making a cash advance purchase, call the credit card company and ask to lower your cash advance limit to $0.  If you were approved with a small credit limit and have other credit cards from the same credit card company, ask if they can transfer some of your credit limit over to your new credit card.  If you want to receive your statements electronically, sign up for electronic statements (I will explain why below). Continue reading →

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Many Small Wins with Cash App Debit Card (Up to 20% Off Select Stores)

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Good evening everyone, I hope you all had a great weekend.  I had a great time on Saturday morning attending the first FTU Virtual Seminar and look forward to the next FTU Virtual Seminar in February 2021.  A few weeks ago, Nick at Frequent Miler wrote Stop Sleeping on the Cash App.  I have had a Cash App account for several years (opened when Cash was only a money sending and receiving app similar to Venmo), but I was sleeping on the Cash App debit card and the boosted deals where you can get up to 20% off select stores (and sometimes even higher than that).

In today’s post, I will show you how the Cash App works and go through some of my recent “small wins” with a few different boosted deals.  If you are not a Cash App member, please use my referral link to sign up for a free account and get a $10 bonus (I will also get a $10 bonus when you join).  One of the cool features of the Cash App debit card is that you can design the debit card with various colors, various emoji’s (I selected the Money Eyes emoji with the tongue being the chip) and you can scribble a design or signature on the front.  Here is the front and back of my Cash App debit card:

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