Better way to calculate 5/24

There are lot of banks which do not give bonus if you apply for the same card within 24 months or 48 months. There is also Chase which does not look into your application should you have got approved in your personal account at least 5 cards in the last 24 months.

Now Chase does have some good cards - notably the INK series or the Southwest cards. There are few other cards too which help accumulate Ultimate Rewards points. Amex, Citi, Barclay card, Capital One and many others also have similar rules though not officially codified. But the analysts do make a point of checking the number of open accounts (not applications rather the accounts that were opened and are in active state, the length of closed accounts among other things).

One way to look is old fashioned keep track of statements. But it is also super slow. Another is to keep a tracker open on start date of the card or month of the card when you open it. Yet another way popularized by blogs is to check credit reports sites such as Credit Sesame or Credit Karma among many others. You can also request free credit reports from all three bureaus and pour over it manually to establish the accounts opened in the rolling 24 months. Now many folks have more than 5 cards so it makes sense to stop once you go past 5 credit card opening. Further, if you use tracker it could fasten things. If you go the annual credit report route, then there is an aspect of timing as typically the reports are read at the end of the year.

If you do read in the middle or in randomly still you will get only half picture as you might not get picture of the rolling 24 months. Then there is the "apply and see what happens" route which is not advisable in general. Nor is the whole reconsideration line beyond a point. At start you do this but once you have been doing this for more than 5 or 10 years there reaches a point where you do not necessarily chase points but rather target bunch few cash back rewards or specific airline or hotel rewards.

So in these scenarios, I created a simple tracker which just keeps track of the last 3-4 or max 5 cards. 3-4 to be on the conservative side while 5 is to err. This tracker is simple excel where you note down each member of the family and the last 3 cards and year / month when you applied. A simple excel function will subtract current month/year from the last applied month/year which is the only calculation needed for the purpose of 5/24 tracker. Many times I see some family member is near 12 months or 18 months and rather than apply for the next high rewards credit card one might as well wait for 6 more months or at least 3 more months and then try chase credit cards and then apply for this card. The whole rolling period is well captured using this method and the tracker itself takes not more than 15 minutes of your time to develop.

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While on the topic of credit cards, the standard banks of Citi, Amex, Chase, Bank of America apart from main credit card issuing companies of Barclaycards and Capital One, continue to offer similar bonuses across few categories of cards. The award accumulation is harder but simpler than actually putting your butt on the seat or doing any mileage runs. So called spending or manufactured spending or churning is pretty much dead with the exception of the walmart money order route which is also not worth the return on investment. Money order route is practically gone. So the only spend is the valid spend. So if you have any big ticket spending coming up by all means go ahead and apply for a bunch of cards from the above banks and rake in some points and free enough vacation.

Reflecting back in 2018 and first quarter of 2019

Early on in 2017, this blog had predicted that there would be nothing much of exciting news in the credit card landscape. Looking back, pretty much most of the time that has passed till then has failed to yield a big bang bonus offer that was the norm in the early part of the decade.

Pretty much now, we have the standard 50k offers on some cards and once in a while 100k offers from some cards from Amex or Chase but with the annual fee not being waived. All said and done, with limited options to spend major league, there is little to do in the whole credit card space.

Add to this the constant devaluation from the hotels and now with airlines following suit, it is best to approach the whole bonus and free travel from a different angle. Check this out https://www.reddit.com/r/churning/comments/bb94hy/american_reportedly_working_on_plan_to_drop_award/ ..


It is just a matter of time that others will follow the same road and emphasize more on the likelihood of the loyalists planning things in advance. The butt-on-the-seat approach is pretty mundane and hardly the best way to accumulate points. A combo could be a good starter and accelerate. That said, the credit cards spend is the way to go.


The go to algorithm or method to accumulate the said points is to start on Chase, Amex, Citi, Barclay cards, Bank of America in that order. Add to that US Bank, regional banks, credit unions and the rest. Pick an area and airport(s) nearby and your target locations. Pick hotels near target locations and airports near that. A quick search online will give you the airports and hotels that will take you there. Then accumulate points directly in that said airlines and hotels. Also convert points from programs such as Membership rewards or other credit card companies and plan the trip accordingly. Once you go thru this cycle, rinse and repeat based on time and luck. Many cards such as Amex will have only once a lifetime bonus points which pretty much removes it from this list after one pass. Others like Chase and Citi are all strict or are becoming more stringent. All this + limited avenues to so called "manufacture spend" and relying on your real spend puts even more dent on this once flourishing way to travel for less money.


A quick round up of fellow blogs will show that most have resorted to "daily deals" or "too much hustling". Some have become finance blogs or lifestyle blogs. Others branching to or merging towards their personal finance or money blog or just frugality or FIRE movement and so on. This blog itself is merged into the general finance and money related blog. And from 2017 till now there has been no change. And does not look like there would be major change going into future- save for few bonus deals that might come on and off. Nothing that one would miss out on.

Credit Cards and Spending for Rewards - December 2017

Best Credit Cards:
As the year winds down, the best credit cards list has got some exciting entrants as well as usual banks that are well known to the community.
The new exciting list of cards are:
Barclays Jetblue card
Citi AAdvantage card
Bank of America Premium Card
I would recommend only small amount of credit cards like above list. The reasons are multi fold. One is that the banks are becoming more stringent and not approving any new credit cards. Two is that the avenues have drastically fallen down.
One big death knell for those that spend credit cards fast was the Money Order option using USPS. After a long time, USPS early in november 2017 stopped issuing money order for non cash options or non bank debit cards. This was a very huge blow and probably the single most reason that will put an end to entire blogging industry around this activity. The blogs if you noticed have merged to finance blogs on a larger scale or a lifestyle blog or daily deals. Hence most of these blogs are going to run out of their primary or core option of noting interesting offers. That combined with Amex enforcing once in a life rewards, Chase having 5/24 rule and tight generation of new cards by the rest like Barclaycards or Bank of America or Citi means all the major players are have drawn rather stiff boundaries to this game.
Further, most way to spend high amount of money such as online transactions or Money orders or really anything else has gone into too much of trouble zone and return on investment is rather low. Honestly, the more profitable parts of this whole ecosystem would be rather writing a blog like this. And if the blogs have sustained readerships in at least 10k+ daily users that is good. But with dwindling content or rather real interesting content, how much more would these users be enticed to visit on a daily basis? I have switched to rss reader and it is much easier to follow the news that way.
Basically, there are lot of limitations from banks issuing the credits cards at both national and regional level, the rewards are on limited avenues, the mediums to rake up huge spend are rather limited, the ROI on the whole process is not worth the time. For me, it should be in at least generating few $100s of net profit to do something meaningful. Likewise with so many hustle offers - they are giving a sub 100 profits. The banks with $200 may not be feasible from credit management point of view. A few banks that offer $300 is hard to maintain and in the long run honestly I see that there is not much point in this. Which is why I had taken steps some years ago to merge this with my finance blog. By all accounts, the golden age of credit card spending and rewards using huge spends is behind us. There will still be some avenues in cards and spending in future that will come but it is not going to match the old era.

Best way to go about applying credit cards for a newbie - June 2017

Some time back, I had posted a strategy for newbie to navigate the credit card applications. It was an optimized strategy based on then prevalent rules.

You can read it here: https://creditcardsteroids.wordpress.com/2015/01/28/best-way-to-go-about-applying-credit-cards-for-a-newbie/

For instance one of the rules took into account rules of leading credit card issues such as Barclays Bank of Delaware. This bank was pretty strict and still is and would approve maximum one or two credit cards per year per user. Arrival+ and many other cards were hard to come by even for those with excellent credit. Soon Chase followed with a 5/24 rule which limits you to only 5 applications or approved credit in the past 24 months. That is pretty harsh for most people. Bank of America has tightened a lot of their processes along with another old bank Citi which is perhaps now one of the strictest when it comes to opening a new account. Further, there is also American Express which has limited its new credit issuance rates to focus more on reliable and profitable customers. All this has resulted in a huge amount of shutdowns and limited opportunities in ongoing credit card bonus accumulation as well as reduced steps to navigate for a newbie or dormant user. If you are newbie with no credit card history then you are of course better off signing up a secured credit card and building up a good history and reputation for about 5 solid years. If you are a dormant user or rather someone that has taken care of mortgages and other loans, and want to "redeem" some of your higher credit score; then there is a set way to go about this. This is a dated article as of June 2017 and is highly specific for this period. As such it is an upgrade to the above earlier mentioned article.

First up, target Chase.

1. Chase bank: Due to the newly introduced 5/24 rule, overall tighter than expected screenings and lack of reconsideration for most cases now combined with the best rewards program in the industry along with Amex, this is a no brainer. First apply chase bank credit cards. For those with say a decent score, not much history, go with Chase Sapphire Preferred card, consider the pros and cons before Chase Sapphire Reserve, British Airways Visa Credit card, Marriott or Hyatt credit  card. Both IHG and Freedom cards - unlimited and regular version - one of those is definitely a long term hold. I consider them as "base" chase credit cards. Most people dont see value in the high fees card and rightfully so. In many cases the value tapers off and many people do not see it is a good idea to hold anything beyond 3-4 years at maximum. There are other hotel cards and airline cards with Chase which could be applied at this point. I would say apply 5 cards here and wrap this up completely. Because they are main users of 5/24 rule and though Citi might have something similar, it is pointless to consider them when there is such a varied option in Chase. The southwest airlines card is not that great currently with low sign up bonuses. But United is really good with many offers of 60k being targeted. Further, for business users, the sign up bonuses on Southwest and Ink cards are all time high so by all means go and apply for those.
2. Barclays - this is a notorious credit card issuer so like in the original link target arrival+ and then slowly work your way towards other cards.
3. US Bank- they have a good card with no annual fee waived which is the Altitude but chances of this card being approved is rather low.
4. Citi- Though not as exciting as last year, they still have some pretty good cards and nice rewards program. The AAdvantage card continues to be the best airline one. Costco users will by default have their cards issued from here no matter what.
5. Wells Fargo: Their propel is one of the best cards and has nice features in it. Apply this card next.
6. Bank of America/Amex and the rest: All goes here
7. Credit union banks: Alliant is pretty with their new card offering 3%. Details can be found here.

That rounds up the way for a newbie to go about applying for a credit card in June 2017.

Best Credit Cards for June 2017

Middle of 2017 is seeing some exciting news on the credit card front.

The personal credit card offers had US Bank Altitude Card. This is similar to Chase Sapphire Reserve Card or Amex Platinum card. Amex Platinum competes to lead the industry with newer features such as Uber tie-up which is a $200 value. Continuing tweaking is ongoing in many existing cards including sign on bonuses as well as rewards categories.

The business credit card offers saw Amex again leading with Simplycash as well as Platinum cards. Chase comes close second with improved sign on bonuses for the Ink brand cards.

Apart from this there is a whole host of cards which are regional such as credit union banks or online banks which also has good offers. Alliant CU rolled out a new 3% card which is the best in the industry right now. It is good for most people even with its settled 2% after an year. City National Bank which is mostly in CA has waived off annual fee for its Visa Signature cards which has a $250 fee refunded for airline costs annually. That is an instant $500 for an airline gift card. That is another industry leading feature and beats Chase Sapphire cards handily. There are some good hotel cards offers too in the form of American Express Hilton Surpass card with its free night after 1 year anniversary as well as the best 100,000 points ever.

May 2017 stock update

The stock market continues to go up and act super wild ever since it started becoming markedly irrational since election night 2016. The main bellweather stocks that this blog follows such as Fedex or AXP or WMT and many others are very high. Tech stocks are particularly what led the rally with Amazon and Google and Apple at extreme highs. Same with Netflix and slew of other techs that are not doing enterprise services. Apple being a huge weight has not only moved up but its movement in the upward direction has lifted many an indexes way up. Banks are also on highs with some investment banks getting a quite rebound in this run up. Remaining sectors are stabilising the gains that they had got in the recent rally. Whether they are able to hold onto them is something that time will be only able to tell. One thing is clear when there is a fall and when the dust settles this is going to leave a lot on boom and dust induced coma. The excess right now is a clear parallel to 2007. It is hard to predict even beyond basic common sense on the direction and extent these days. I bet the quants and analysts in banks are just as much scratching their heads like any regular person is. Of course this being present you can make a choice to trade in it or just stay away from it. I think index funds with lesser weights or optimized weights and decent relative volume vs net market volume is the better tool as opposed to the individual stocks. I dont think we can rule out a spectacular fail something big sometime in near future. And this is not going to be one of those sucker banks stuff. Rather I am talking something big and established. If it were up to me that would be Tesla beating up the big three car manufacturers from detroit. Already they have been surprassed in both market cap and innovation. Revenue is just a function of this. We all saw what a Model S generated in terms of revenues and interest. Same with other industry which is why Tech attracts the most of Venture capital and startup funds.

That said, all sectors has scope in automation or partial automation or complete takeover by AI. Medical and insurance sector is already highly computerized and even further scope is not that hard.

How to spread the points accumulation ?

So a lot of blogs suggest: pick an airline, pick a hotel and stick with those programs. The downside of this approach is that you are tied to them. You are tied to their schedules and hotel availability. And that is no freedom. Or fun. You want to experience the real matrix of having the flexibility to book anytime or time of your convenience and choose to reside at a place of your comfort. This relates to a recent experience of my flying between NYC and LA. Often times with a fixed airline and hotel approach I found that there were moments of anxiety around availability. This got somewhat mitigated as I expanded to other hotels and flight programs. This not only allowed to get cards from different banks and try them out and accumulate points in different places, but it also builds up a steady balance of diversification across various brands and thus gives you the freedom to choose geography over the math of limited choices. Hence, my strategy is now revised to go all out in o(n) fashion in just accumulating points after points from various banks. Just going all out also gives you this satisfaction that you have really tried out all available options out there. Just like in a buffet. Having said that, there are some default programs that are and should be the basis of this activity. I would say in airlines that would be Southwest and United. These are two solid airlines that cover US and good parts of this world like Asia that one would want to visit often. Of course there is Delta and American and Jetblue and others. For reason unknown I tend to avoid Delta while American is fine or Jetblue is cool and same with say, Frontier. Dont get me wrong. I am not against them. But the base is Southwest for me. There are plenty of them alright and many other airlines which are rather really good to travel and experience. Etihad or Emirates or Singapore Airlines or Cathay Pacific among others are all solid and so are national carriers of many countries (except China and Chinese airlines, avoid them at all cost!) . Same goes with Hotels. I like Marriot or Starwood a lot. Hilton is not bad too. IHG is good and their branded card is really worth the $49 annual cost since you are not going to find a hotel room anywhere in the US in one of the IHG hotels like Holiday Inn for 49 bucks a night. I used mine in the Big Island Hawaii! :D .. one of the best night stay ever! So the revised strategy is really avoid rental cars loyalty programs, go all out and apply one by one to each hotel and air cards and keep some of those that you like even if they charge you annual like the southwest cards or the marriott cards or IHG cards. And apply Starwood or Amex cards once every couple years. 

Current Credit Card offers..

To keep up with the point of this blog, some good current offers are:

1. American Express Platinum and Enchanced Business Platinum Card: This card has an annual fee of $450 so be careful. However, they also reimburse the portion should you cancel it earlier unlike Citi and Chase who do not. The funny thing is both Citi and Chase seem to hold a grudge should you cancel their paid credit cards as if you owe them that and that impacts your future credit cards applications in those banks. Amex is overall a bit cooler in that respect. I would say one platinum card per 2 years is not that bad to your relationship with Amex or your overall credit score health. This remains the best $450 card and the best in its league. Apart from the always dependable Customer service experience with Amex, the best thing is the $200 annual rebates, the unparalleled lounge access and the best offers floating around this time of the year. There is an unprecedented 100k offer here, visible right on the American Express website. The spending requirement is steep however at $15k. There are also offers of 75k points with $5k spend.
2. Chase  Sapphire Reserve:  The splashy card and a much hyped one for the last month or two, this is another $450 card but with same 100k offer as the Amex platinum card. A big plus is the $300 annual travel credit on any airline. Now that is a big benefit. However, the big downside is the strict rules in applying, the so called 5/24 rule which makes Chase deny any applications if you had applied for 5 credit cards anywhere in the last 24 months, rendering it useless to most people. That said, again $450 annual fee? That is too much. It is a decent card nevertheless. There are questionable lounge access features and does not seem to carry the same weight if you are looking for prestige or if you are into all that.
3. Citi Prestige card: Well, this card is dead. They downgraded the offer to 20k points. And with this, this card is simply not attractive enough. At the point of the release of this card last year, I had penned a post about how really silly it is to spend $450 on a credit card which one would normally not do even if it justifies some value in giving you back points. I still stand by the same and would expand on that briefly.

Most other cards did not top the above and were giving out anywhere in the equivalent of $100 to $400 - the latter being Barclays Arrival+ card. Amex and Chase are clearly duking it out in 2016 with Citi contended to sit back after the hit in Prestige from last year. For most of this year, Citi and the rest have been at the back. Amex and Chase upped their hotel game with Ritz card changes and Hilton Card changes. Amex went with a Delta platinum version which based on comments on Reddit and other online sites, seems to be a big hit with the Delta travellers. Mind you, a good chunk of Delta fliers are either Government workers or regular consultants who commute Monday - Thursday. 

The perils of an annual fee card: This is not for sub 100 annual fee card which still even if more is not as insane as the $450-$500 that the big "reserve" or "platinum" cards charge. Admittedly, I had applied for few of those in the past. With platinum, I always close after some period, ideally within 30-60 days. Chase Reserve also has a grace period of 60 days if that is something that they grudgingly will record against you. But the point that the other bloggers push is the value that you get out it. What value ??? Most likely you were not even thinking of travelling or taking that hotel or air fare in first place. If at all you do there is still generic branded cards ? You could always find and make money or points with your normal spend in no fee to sub-100 fee cards. So is it really some sort of high or this rush that is there with the sudden 50k or 100k bonuses? Obviously, if there is no 50k+ offer, no one is going to look twice at these cards. But even with that, are they really worth it?? I would say no. I regret paying and holding Citi prestige for a year and cancelled it despite their various offers and attempt to shell 450 for another year. I did get the 200 * 2 credit and 50k points. I took trips to Hawaii and got rentals based on that. I would deny that. But it is essentially the 450 that I paid from my pocket which contributed to a part of it. Bear in mind, that many also have a steep spending requirements. Chase Reserve has the 5k spend but they tend to have all these useless categories where they keep inducing you to spend more. I would not have really gone to that restaurant but hey, some one is giving me 5% cashback so why not try it .. really that is just 5 bucks on a 100 bucks bill. Anyhow, if I were to recommend, I would say no to Citi for sure. Maybe once give it a try to get a feeling of it and get some rewards but no point in doing it again. For chase, maybe no unless like citi you plan to keep it a whole year. For Amex, see if you are a good client with their regular cards and if you do this once every 2/3/4 years I would doubt they would seriously mind that much. In the past I have had the mercedes benz as well as the platinum card and both were closed soon. Given that Amex is the best credit card issuer and has been for quite some time, make sure that the bridges are not burned. Chase though good is a clear distant second and not to mention the rules there are getting stricter. The Citis and Bank of Americas or the rest are there but better to stick with the best. 

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. 

New Credit Cards

So the current list of credit cards which are with good bonus points:

1. Chase Marriott - Business and then Personal
2. American Express Delta
3. American Express Starwood - try to get this asap before the Mariott-SPG Merger
4. Chase Continental - back to 50k points
5. Chase Ink+ Business Card

That is pretty much it.

I have been trying to gather more info about City National Bank. This is a regional bank credit card for mostly people in the Hollywood region - so that is SoCal with ties to entertainment industry. They seem to have a pretty nice card with great features and bonuses. More on this later!