Looking Beyond Welcome Offers | Maximizing Points & Cashback on Everyday Spend

Which stores sells those Disney cards?
15 cards is a lot but 50 cards 🤯

I hope one credit card company will make 1 card that offers everything. Like gas, dinner and travel in one card with 3 points of more and 2 points on everything. Hopefully Amex will do something like that when they make a new card

I love these type of videos! I also try to preach to my viewers that you want to think about credit cards for the long term. There are such easy ways to maximize your value from credit cards by sitting down and looking at your spending habits. Love the content!!!

After building a portfolio of AMEX Platinum. Gold, and Everyday Preferred; CSP, Freedom, and Ink Preferred; and Citi & Barclay's AAdvantage cards over the last several months I think I have most potential bonus categories fairly well covered. The sign up bonuses were pretty substantial also. Now the focus is on maximizing the return on everyday spending. I'll give the tracker a try and see how it works out.

Is buying merchant gift cards (non-Amex, non-visa) still considered manufactured spending?

Great video as always. Happy Valentine’s Day!

I started with everyday spending cards and now that I have a solid base of long term keeper cards I'm chasing SUBs. Someone starting out should make a budget to identify where (what categories) they spend most of their money in and get their first cards based on their long term value. Then they can use the non-category spending to meet the minimum spends for cards that may not be keeper cards. I wouldn't bother with cards like the Freedom Unlimited or Citi Doublecash because meeting a minimum spend is much more lucrative return than 2%.

It's the convenience vs. benefits debate. Let's say I am able to spend $35,000 per year via credit cards. If I use existing cards and average 4% "net" return on that, that's $1,400. Take out a couple annual fees, you're probably looking at around $1,000-$1,200. On the other hand, if I go after 6 new cards per year, with a signup bonus of $500 each, I'm getting $3,000 + the points earned thru spend, probably netting at least $2,700. So, the extra work of "chasing bonuses" gets me and extra $1,500 per year in value (if you milk the travel, likely more). Is that worth the extra effort? Well, that's a very subjective question. But, for an average person (someone who isn't paid to travel for work, or makes over $150K per year), you're NEVER going to get the returns from natural spend that you do from signup bonuses.

this is a fantastic review!!!! whats the changes of one getting the spread sheet you were showing? That's the best spread sheet I've seen!!!

Would be nice to have a column in your spreadsheet that shows when a card would be eligible for another signup bonus.

Can you explain a bit more about when it makes sense (from a credit card points perspective) to put your utilities on a credit card?

Thank you, Ernest. I really like these videos as I figure out what my next card(s) should be. A quick note though, at 7:48, although it's still a tempting card, that supposed 6% is quite literally impossible to reach. Once you factor in the $95 annual fee and the $6,000 spending cap, even if you hit the cap you'll be getting just about 4.4% once you offset the fee. You'll need to spend almost $1600 to overcome the fee (not a hard task) and almost $3200 to make it better than the no-fee version BCE. So there's certainly a sweet spot where this card is better than the 'Everyday' version, and the addition of the streaming services, transit, and gas makes this card tempting so long as you can stay between $3200-$6000. (disclaimer: my wife has the BCE and just received an offer to upgrade to the BCP, so I've been digging into this one quite a bit the passed few days). With how much we spend on groceries, streaming, gas/transit the BCP looks like it'll be slightly better for us than the BCE, but we just know not to expect that 6%. And there are other cards, if we can figure out how to maximize the when/where, we'd be getting 5%/5x rather than the peak 4.4% from BCP. But we're only getting 3% currently, so… there's that to consider too. It sounds like I need to schedule a free credit card consultation with you. lol

I love this spreadsheet and just nabbed it. I definitely agree that you need to think long term for your credit card placement. I also think too much point currency diversity can be a bad thing because you will lack the ability to mass points together to pay for certain trips. That is part of the reason why I haven't jumped over to the Citi Trifecta yet (plus they flushed the Prestige down the toilet)!