(If you know me and are interested in getting the American Express cards, please get a hold of me - I can refer you and you'll get a better account opening offer than is publicly available, and I'll get a small reward too)
Lately we've been finding ways to save more money without necessarily curbing the lifestyle we've grown accustomed to. One of the areas in which I knew we could improve was the rewards we were getting on our credit cards. I am now employing a 3 card strategy where we use an American Express Blue Cash Preferred Rewards card for Groceries and Gas, a Chase Freedom card for the reward bonus categories quarterly, and a American Express Delta Gold Skymiles card for most everything else where the bonus is not at a higher rate than 1%.
For a number of years, my wife and I were heavy debit card users for things like groceries, gas, and other bricks and mortar purchases. For restaurants and online purchases, we've primarily used a Capital One No Hassle Rewards card. Previously, I was almost entirely using my debit card, but after several fraudulent transactions for $750 hit my debit card, I switched to using a credit card for higher risk transactions (restaurants are where a lot of cards get skimmed, and online, well, things get out.) This curbed the fraud to the credit cards where it's easier to manage a purchase that you didn't authorize since it doesn't immediately cause cash flow issues.
We had been happy with the Capital One rewards, procuring various gift cards over the last several years that have allowed us to buy quite a few items from Amazon and the like. The card we have has multiple options, but the gift card options pay the best, at 1% (1 point equals .01). The cash options only pay .05% (1 point equals .005%) and I haven't looked at the travel options to figure out what those are working out to, but I suspect they are probably averaging around 1% or slightly more as well.
When our American Express Skymiles Gold Delta card came up for renewal in November after having it for a full year, I debated cancelling it as to not pay the $95 annual fee. Katie and I decided to renew it simply for the fact that they give you a companion voucher where you can book a flight with a companion and you only pay $99 for the companion's ticket. Its value is typically more than $95 just for that transaction (average airfares out of Minneapolis-St Paul, a Delta hub are in the $300-$500 range for the places we regularly travel). Not only that, but the card allows you to waive one bag fee per passenger on the booked itinerary up to 9 people, so it can pay for itself after only one trip if you have multiple travelers and checked bags. Which as a young family, with two small kids, we do.
So, we allowed the annual fee to be charged, and at the same time, I also decided to stop using debit cards completely. I did this for two reasons - at the time there were rumblings of the banks charging monthly fees to use these cards, and there was no value there for me. Also, my bank discontinued their rewards program for debit cards (it was pretty meager to begin with, but it was something). An added side benefit, which I realized in hindsight is that it actually makes cash flow management easier as long as your are disciplined in your spending. Which, for the most part, we are.
Since I moved to credit cards for everything, it made sense to see if we could do better than 1% gift cards on the CapOne card. After reading this blog post I decided to start employing the three card strategy described there, with my third card being the Amex Delta card we've already been using. It pays something a little over 1% on average which isn't the best for airline rewards, but since we're hub captive to them and the card provides other benefits with a good value, I figured it's worthwhile to continue using it. I may explorer payouts on other travel reward cards in more detail if we start traveling more.
So I have the two Amex cards and the Chase card now. The current bonus on the Chase freedom card is Amazon.com and Gas stations, which we are using it on. I also get $200 if I spend $500 in three months. No problem, we'll be there in a couple of weeks if we use the card. Amex card also has a bonus if you spend 1000 in 3 months, which we'll get next. The Chase Card has no annual fee, and the Amex Card has a $75.00 annual fee, and break even is if you only spend $25 a month on groceries. So that's not hard to get hundreds at 6%. For everything not in the bonus categories, we'll continue to use the SkyMiles card for now.
It seems a little complicated, but once you get used to it, it works great and it stands the potential to have $1000 or more back in my pocket every year without doing anything other than switching the credit cards I use.
I'll give periodic updates here on how well it's working for us.
Showing posts with label personal finance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label personal finance. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Monday, April 19, 2010
Personal Finance - Keeping Track of Bills on Google Calendar
I used to be an fervent user of Quicken. I'd load all the detail in there and even maintained a cash account to track every single last dime.
I did this up until a couple of years ago when it started getting more complicated, and also around the same time that Mint came on the scene and I started loading everything into that. I've never really had any issues using Mint to store info that's available everywhere else anyway.
Mint has slowly evolved to be an online competitor to Quicken. It's still not as full featured, but it's got basically everything I need - namely budgeting and trending tools with the ability to categorize transactions.
Mint works more seamlessly than anything in quicken ever did. I do have to review transactions periodically to ensure they are in the proper categories - it has a tendency to mis-categorize certain things, though you can give it rules to fix that stuff. For example, I bank with USAA and also use them as an insurance company. I tend to get emails that I exceeded my spending on Auto Insurance for the month when really I just made a big transfer to my USAA savings account that it classified as Auto Insurance when really it was just a Transfer. The only other issue currently an issue with my 401k provider not able to be accessed by mint after it was available for a while due to a provider change. Hopefully they'll fix that. In the meantime, there's not really a good way to track that info short of entering it as an asset and manually updating it. It's not ideal, but at least it allows me to still track all my assets in one place.
But other than those small things, mint's served my needs quite well. One of the things I used to use Quicken for was the ability to schedule transactions ahead of time. Like a lot of people these days, I don't "balance a checkbook" in the traditional sense since we hardly write any checks. But I still have a need to ensure that there's the appropriate amount of money in my account to pay scheduled bills. I have most of our bills on ACH withdraw with the respective companies, and have our mortgage on a bi-weekly schedule to coincide with both me and my wife's pay schedule (we work for the same company).
About 2 months ago, my wife was complaining about how she didn't know when bills were due and how much money was left in our joint account, so I decided to create a new Google Calendar called "Bill Calendar" that I'd share with her. I've used Google Calendar for several years, and stepped up my use about 2 years ago when I got a smart-phone that could sync to it via exchange. My wife has also become a regular user of it and we use it to coordinate schedules quite regularly, so it was a good option for me to share this information.
The calendar I created for Bills also helps me to better track our upcoming expenses at a quick glance. It's really simple - I simply put the bill name and amount as an "all day event". It looks like this when it's done:
I do this for all of my bills as well as any regular post-paycheck investments, of which we have several. For the investments and some of the recurring bills that are always the same amount, same due date, I make it a recurring event.
It's working very well for me and is a simple way at a glance to plan expenditures. It also helps me to not forget one time things that I pay for and do a better job of managing our balances.
I did this up until a couple of years ago when it started getting more complicated, and also around the same time that Mint came on the scene and I started loading everything into that. I've never really had any issues using Mint to store info that's available everywhere else anyway.
Mint has slowly evolved to be an online competitor to Quicken. It's still not as full featured, but it's got basically everything I need - namely budgeting and trending tools with the ability to categorize transactions.
Mint works more seamlessly than anything in quicken ever did. I do have to review transactions periodically to ensure they are in the proper categories - it has a tendency to mis-categorize certain things, though you can give it rules to fix that stuff. For example, I bank with USAA and also use them as an insurance company. I tend to get emails that I exceeded my spending on Auto Insurance for the month when really I just made a big transfer to my USAA savings account that it classified as Auto Insurance when really it was just a Transfer. The only other issue currently an issue with my 401k provider not able to be accessed by mint after it was available for a while due to a provider change. Hopefully they'll fix that. In the meantime, there's not really a good way to track that info short of entering it as an asset and manually updating it. It's not ideal, but at least it allows me to still track all my assets in one place.
But other than those small things, mint's served my needs quite well. One of the things I used to use Quicken for was the ability to schedule transactions ahead of time. Like a lot of people these days, I don't "balance a checkbook" in the traditional sense since we hardly write any checks. But I still have a need to ensure that there's the appropriate amount of money in my account to pay scheduled bills. I have most of our bills on ACH withdraw with the respective companies, and have our mortgage on a bi-weekly schedule to coincide with both me and my wife's pay schedule (we work for the same company).
About 2 months ago, my wife was complaining about how she didn't know when bills were due and how much money was left in our joint account, so I decided to create a new Google Calendar called "Bill Calendar" that I'd share with her. I've used Google Calendar for several years, and stepped up my use about 2 years ago when I got a smart-phone that could sync to it via exchange. My wife has also become a regular user of it and we use it to coordinate schedules quite regularly, so it was a good option for me to share this information.
The calendar I created for Bills also helps me to better track our upcoming expenses at a quick glance. It's really simple - I simply put the bill name and amount as an "all day event". It looks like this when it's done:
I do this for all of my bills as well as any regular post-paycheck investments, of which we have several. For the investments and some of the recurring bills that are always the same amount, same due date, I make it a recurring event.
It's working very well for me and is a simple way at a glance to plan expenditures. It also helps me to not forget one time things that I pay for and do a better job of managing our balances.
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