The bourgeois pastime of credit card rewards points

oh man :(

i am p wary, pay off the monthly balances whenever possible

I finally just took out a 5 year Lending Club loan since I have good credit and used it to pay off all but three of my credit cards (one of which my parents make the payments on as they maxed it out years ago, the other two have tiny balances and I will manually pay off later this year), that way the loan is guaranteed to be paid off in 5 years or less and I'll still have like tons of open credit available for emergencies.

it is definitely harder to budget when you use cards though, even if you intend to pay all back. which is what I'm finally forcing myself to get my head around after all these years.

been trying to sort out how to pay my mortgage via a card through paypal or something; it would basically involve paying my wife's paypal account and then transfering that to the bank account. more trouble than it's worth possibly but that would rack up crazy points, if I had a card that had worthwhile points (I don't right now, but plan on getting a Virgin Atlantic card to pay for overseas travel)

I have Chase Freedom but I never call to get enrolled in the special categories or to redeem my rewards.

wouldn't your interest payments be insane compared to a normal mortgage rate?

not if I paid it off every month (so, instead of paying direct to the mortgage, I'd pay to the card).

I wish you hadnt made that suggestion, now i am seriously considering it

I def know ppl who pay their rent to the management company on a credit card every month!

I've been meaning to look into the tax treatment of these cash rewards. My instinct is that they should be treated like interest.

But I should get one of these cards, and just use it for personal stuff, and not business stuff so I don't have to deal with how the rewards affect my business expenses. I'm thinking of just getting the one my bank offers so that it would be easy to just instantly transfer payments from my checking account.

I wish I could pay rent with a credit card ... my landlord is just a guy who often waits weeks to pick up and cash rent checks.

rewards on credit cards are treated as a...discount i think? whereas the cashback stuff on opening a checking account and getting $100 back is treated like interest and you get a 1099 or something

yeah, that makes sense. So if you received those rewards on purely personal expenses that were non-deductible, there would be no tax implications, but if there were business expenses or expenses you could deduct, you should reduce the reported expense amount by the amount of applicable rewards.

Decided to go for an Amex Platinum, despite the £450 fee. You get free lounge access at 900 airports, 30,000 airmiles if you spend £2000 within three months (enough for a business-class return to Moscow with BA that would otherwise cost £1350), gold status at Carlson, Hilton and a variety of other hotel chains and a concierge service that can get you restaurant reservations, opera tickets, etc abroad without you having to bother organising anything.

hoo baby

https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/credit-cards/chase-sapphire-reserve-review/

sharivari you wanna reconsider??

ya i'm getting that new sapphire reserve card

Weirdly my chase rewards travel does not give me 1.5x plus all the prices seem jacked up. Maybe it's an old card that didn't have that deal.

The Chase card looks great but they don't operate in the UK, unfortunately. Hopefully it'll lead to AmEx upping their benefits as i can imagine a lot of people are going to switch.

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do you have a chip card? stick that thing right in there and hold until I tell you to stop.

offer may not apply to you

This is a pretty good offer on Avios / BA Executive Club points for anyone in the UK:

iirc 4500 Avios would normally cost £87 - or be earned after spending £4500 on an AmEx. You can get the same for free if you sign up to the Sunday Times Travel magazine for £30:

http://www.headforpoints.com/2016/09/02/avios-the-sunday-times-travel-magazine-promo/

http://www.creditcards.com/reviews/chase-sapphire-reserve-card/

Can you get out of an annual fee by cancelling after you get your sign-on reward?

Cuz that one has a sick bonus but the annual fee is pretty high.

annual fee gets tacked onto purchase balance prior to due date of first monthly payment. user doesn't receive bonus until after spending $4k. (user has three months to meet this spending threshold.)

better of canceling after first year.

doesn't seem like a great deal with that fee

I saw somewhere that the rewards points are supposed to be 1.5x if used through chase travel? Which I guess would make that like a $1500 bonus right there. But OTOH when I looked at travel through Chase Rewards the prices seemed way inflated compared to expedia or other sites. Anyway it's at least a $1000 sign-up bonus. Minus the $450 annual fee that leaves you with $550, which is still better than most sign-up bonuses.

Then it also says something about a $300 "annual travel credit." I'm not sure I understand what that is, but if it's what it sounds like, it seems like you're netting a minimum of $850 in the first year. So one year and out doesn't sound too bad.

One thing I have been wondering -- is there a good way to compare something like Delta miles vs. cash? My Delta Skymiles card gives me 2 miles per dollar spent on Delta, but I'm wondering if that works out better than just getting the 3x points for travel that my other card has.

maybe helpful? http://thepointsguy.com/category/series/mile-and-point-value-series/

The $300 kicks in almost immediately after you spend on travel. Like, as you charge travel expenses, you'll see a travel credit equal to the amount spent show up in your account (until you've spent up to the full $300 and thus exhausted the credit).

my dad got good use of the american airlines miles programme. i believe it's 30k miles for every 70k miles travelled. good if you do a lot of travelling. american's business class and service in general has suffered though tbh

Seems like maybe the Delta card isn't even worth booking Delta with. I'll probably just keep it for the perks.

Can you get out of an annual fee by cancelling after you get your sign-on reward?

Hypothetically you could spend $4k in the first month, get the bonus and subsequently cancel (i think you get two months from opening the account to get a refund on fees) but Chase reserves the right to take the bonus points back - and almost certainly would.

You can get a pro-rata refund on a Platinum AmEx after bonus in the UK but i think they might have stopped this in the US recently.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/business/dealbook/credit-card-rewards-chase-sapphire-reserve-annual-fees.html

It is so popular that JPMorgan Chase, the bank that issues the card, ran out of the engraved card’s fancy metal stock in only 10 days, and had to send a temporary plastic placeholder to disappointed customers.

i've got a Fidelity Visa that gives me *2% on every purchase, no fees, no fuss. which is good for me bc i am lazy and don't make purchases strategically or anything. i just travel a lot for work.

*the catch is it's 2% put into your Fidelity IRA. (1% if you just straight up want cash - i think). but if you were going to make auto contributions or otherwise funding an IRA, it's kinda like 2% in your pocket.

will you can open a fidelity cash management account and get that 2% back as cash

xp that sounds good actually! I just got one that's a basic 1.5%, no fees, no fuss one that I want the rewards to go into a self-employed 401k ... but there's no automated thing with mine.

If you do the Fidelity card, it makes much more sense to do it into a Roth IRA than a regular IRA, because you don't get the tax advantage of a regular IRA for using cash back rewards from a credit card (i.e. the rewards are already tax free so you're not reducing your tax load).

Marriott have bought Starwood so if you have a credit card that gives you either Marriott or Starwood status, you can status match with the other for free.

Idk if this will have an impact on whether Starwood sticks with Amex in the future but it's a nice bonus to have Marriott gold status (free breakfast, lounge access, etc) for now.

I did a round of travelling earlier this month (London to Dubai to Dhaka to Singapore to Dubai to London) and the AmEx Platinum bonus of free entry to airport lounges makes a huge difference. Jade status at the Shangri-La in Singapore was also great - i got about $70 worth of drinks (so four beers), fresh fruit, etc, thrown in, plus a box of chocolates on my birthday. Add travel insurance and the bonus points i redeemed for a business class flight to Moscow in December and the initial fee has paid for itself about four times over already.

That Hilton HHonors Visa turned out to be way shittier than I thought because the points are nowhere near as valuable as I got the impression they were. Obviously it varies depending on the prices of the room you want at the time, and there are better deals and worse deals, but 80K+ points turns out to only be enough for a few nights in a mid-range, non-urban hotel (Hampton Inn, Doubletree).

Also we decided our CC spending was getting a little out of hand, so we're switching to only paying fixed expenses on CC and doing everything discretionary from a separate checking/debit account from our main account. Making sure we only spend what we have etc.

I realized the "rewards" thing really does give me this dangerous little adrenaline hit that makes me spend more.

Something worth considering for anyone who has to renew their transport season ticket soon is that you get 25000 Avios points for spending £3000 in the first three months of having a BA AmEx credit card. It is a terrible APR so only good if you have cash in the bank or a season ticket loan coming in from work.

If I buy my fiancee's season ticket for £4000, I will get 6000 air miles and trigger the £3000 target, meaning 31000 Avios in total. Enough for a business class return to Moscow nominally worth £1200.

There is a £195 fee but if is refunded pro rata so if you cancel next month, in theory, you can get a £1200 flight for about £20 of outlay.

I will keep mine to trigger the two for one flight redemption voucher you get at £10,000.