October updates

Phew!  After a long time !! There was barely any excitement in the credit card space to merit a writing these days. First off, the days of limited time deals are gone as most offers are only with big banks who offer a rather huge window to apply. Further, the rules of the game have been tightened so far that now only legitimate spenders are applying for cards since the avenues to spend artificially has reduced exponentially. So some general updates:

1. Many prepaid accounts such as Amex Serve or Bluebird or from other companies are practically gone or dead. The ones remaining are used for their primary purposes and are being viewed with hawkeyes.
2. Most gift card methods are hence a dead game now. There are some vanilla gift cards and other cards which can be used to meet those high spending requirements but overall, many are gone. Paypal and the big ones were anyway dead so now they are not all being used by anyone in the spending community.
3. The spending threshold is increasing and many banks are not afraid to ask you to spend upward of 10 grand, yes 10 grand!, before you see some good long term benefits.
4. This is not a very long term strategy if you could call that .. rather it is something that one does on the side, as a hustle maybe? as long as the expectation is set that it is something that gives yo some play money rather than anything concrete. 

The current big bonus cards are all having steep annual fees which are not waivable. Take for instance, Chase Sapphire Reserve card. At $450 annual fee that is not waived, it is by no means a cheap card. The argument that you can recoup this fee in rewards is extremely silly. I want to travel then I travel and not the other way round that you have some $300 gift card and hence you travel anyway to New York or some big city. That is really silly. In a way, one can clearly see that it induces spending. Had there been no rewards, would you really spend $450 on a credit card ? I mean seriously, for fuck's sake, how many can sanely think that you are going to spend $450 on a credit card ?? Anyways.

So in all, I see that this space is shrinking which reflects in lesser blog entries for this blog. Now, if you really follow the main blogs in this space, you would notice that they are all moving away from just credit card blog to broader "financial" blog and also advertise any amount of things .. they could say it is travel blog but they also cover a whole lot of ground other than travel tips or credit card tips. They do generate a lot of hype since they are anyways affiliates of big banks unlike this blog.

The downside of all this is that the banks have now realized that they can up the game and really come up with products that have high  premiums and fees and dole out some points for air travel or hotel points. For the regular customer anyways, this is a far cry from anything that they use the credit card for.