Thinking About Money

As you can probably tell, I’m a big fan of cash rebate cards that have no fees. True, a 1%-3% discount on everything you buy isn’t that big a deal, but when you add in everything from groceries, to gas, to travel, it can easily add up to hundreds of dollars a year. And that’s for the negligible effort of choosing which card to use and paying on time.

So far my main two cards are a Chase card from Amazon (3% on Amazon purchases, 1% on everything else), and a Capital One Visa (2% on groceries & gas, 1% on everything else).

I also have an American Express rebate card by way of Costco, that has a strange tiered system of .25% for the first $2,000, .5% for the next $3,000, and 1.5% for everything over $5000/year. For those of you who are wondering, this card doesn’t start beating a 1% rebate card until you’ve spent $11,000. Not very exciting.

Except that Costco and American Express have sweetened the deal. They have a second card called their “True Rewards card” that not only starts at 1%, but goes to 2% for travel and 3% for eating out. That gets interesting.

So I decided to switch, which brings me to today’s story, an experience that was absolutely astonishing.

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