Once I realized that scrabbling for an additional 2% with cards wasn’t as efficient as simply working hard enough to make more than 2% growth somewhere else, be it income or investments, I found I wasted a lot less time in my life forking around with credit cards and chasing “the best one”
I can tell you this, the banker you’re paying for his vacations with those things (and raising the prices merchants charge for everything in the process) isn’t even going to get up half an hour or early from bed for 2% on his credit card.
$200 back on $10K isn’t worth the time when you count all the hours spent just dealing with the FIVE replacement cards and new numbers that Barclays sent me one year because they had clearly INTERNALS fraud going on. There isn’t any other way someone could charge $100 from the exact same gas pump in California to FIVE consecutive new card numbers in five months.
I still put a few things through cards for REAL perks, like doubling manufacturer warranties on crap that WILL fail as soon as the warranty is up, and letting the card insurer buy me new appliances, for example. Or there’s a card that’s paying for all annual Clear and whatever the other fast pass thing is for travelers. If I still travelled I’d be on that one.
But the 2% isn’t even worth the hassle.
Amex lowered one of my card limits a while ago. I finally had to call them for something else and asked why. They told me it was because I “wasn’t using it enough”. Hahaha.
I told her my credit “score” (there’s an impressive psychological scam based on gamifying debt... wow) and said if she wanted me to, I could cancel it. Because we took that card when costco dropped their Amex, and Amex decided to report that as “new credit” instead of saying I’m a 15 year customer, they actually HARMed by credit rating.
She kinda didn’t know what to say. I joked, “I’ll keep the stupid useless thing for now.” and hung up on her.
About the only use I have for Amex is they’re the ONE card that never has any fraud, that they bother me with, anyway. EVERY other card has been replaced for fraud at one time or another.
And yeah. That 2% back is spiffy if you can put it on autopilot and have stuff get paid and then automatically pay the card off. But then you get to change card numbers with thirty vendors every time the crappy card system is defrauded. A FEW vendors know how to use the recurring charge thing that survives a card number change, but the vast majority don’t, and you have to waste hours changing all that.
Ain’t worth it. Not to me. I can make 2% more than my spending by doing other things. Not even hard things. A couple hours of research into my investments and dumping the weak stuff will yield WAY more than that stupid 2% cash back.
That’s all I’m sayin’. I loath debt. I really loathe broken security systems that waste my time. I will happily mess with cash back when some card company hires a concierge to go to all of my vendor websites and changes the card number for me every time they get their asses handed to them by the fraudsters. And they can call the small town vendors who don’t have websites and fix those too, like my propane company.
Nah. It’s not a chase I need to bother with. I’ll leave $200 worth of free crap for spending $10K with them, on the table, if it means never having to do a large card number update ever again.
That five time card replacement thing happened when I ran EVERYTHING through that card. I was intensely ****ed off by the fifth one. I called and told them that it had to be internal fraud for that to happen and one more and I was gone. I actually got a call from Barclays security after that and they were actually interested. I explained the whole thing to the security guy and he was genuinely interested. It also stopped and elbever happened again. I hope they pressed charges on their former employee once they figured it out.
So I will give them credit for that. Behind my credit union, they’ve been the most trouble free card ever since I lost it on their customer service department.
I have never had a card compromised at a CU. Not any of the four I’ve used. Ever. Banks can suck it. But CU cards don’t have the perks.
I haven't paid any credit card interest in probably 15 years but have received lots of cash back.
