Why this blog?

So, onto the second post!

In this post, I would start with what is this blog? What does it do? 

I would reflect a bit about why there is a need for such a blog.

What value does it provide to the reader and myself? What are the different topics and boundaries that we will navigate?

Well, this blog is about strategizing credit card spend. A lot of credit card sign ups offer heavy sign on bonuses, good on-going rewards in the form of cash back, bonus points, travel points or myraid other choices such as fee waivers, services and ancillory benefits. How to go about getting those credit cards? To be sure, there is no clear cut way before one decides to apply for credit cards. Most people apply for one or two credit cards, if at all, and that is for convenience of not carrying cash or preventing debit card transactions. There are pros and cons of using credit cards and it is upto each individual to decide whether to apply for one, how many to apply or how long to keep them. How to manage the fees and weigh the cost benefit associated with each of them. Most of these are fairly simple yes/no individual level subjective questions. There are lot of websites and financial sites which educates a reader on these choices and many of these are quite common sensical and readers can always take a "trial and error" approach for these. 

This site for a large part assumes that you are a credit card user who likes to rake in the points. Again, there are tons of websites and forums dealing with this topic. There are forums and sites such as flyertalk and many other secretive minded commentors who try to keep the good deals under radar for as long as possible. In the internet driven world, of course, there are also lot of bloggers who can smell these and make this content go viral. The credit card companies often target their best customers or potential customers. But in this now-complex environment, there are simply too many deals and offers out there that one can get easily blinded. Some of the blogs are essentially higher level news sites that wade through all this info and try to get you the deals. Many times they are late, and it is just a matter of time before the general (or significant number of ) public catches up to it and then the deals are taken down by the companies.

The trends before 2005 is out there in the web in old posts. Post 2005, there were periods of time when there were good sign up bonus offered by large credit card companies for limited period of time. The teaser continued and evidently large customer base was formed as can be seen by the continued popularity of these mechanisms. A ton of bloggosphere was devoted to these content. The emergence of quick communication tools and social services further gave the marketers powerful tools to reach the critical mass in a given market. The big question is - Are you one of the lucky people who could be in the "critical mass" segment? You would have to be on top of the game , be reactive and follow the social media services that were embedded in the 2009-2012 period. The emergence of offers and coupons by various restaurants and retail outlets - online and offline means that many limited time offers are going to go viral like they did in 2013/2014 and few folks would be able to get wind of it. 

Where does this blog fit in? The main purpose of this blog would be go provide tools for finding those deals with special focus on the credit card spending strategies as well as few quick hustles. The quick ones would be mostly just reposts or links to other tweets or blogs. Honestly, those ones are the low hanging fruits. The big ones are the strategies that one has the option of repeatedly using over time. 

As mentioned earlier, to maintain the uniqueness and originality of this site, we wont emphasize on reposts. Those would be just secondary links or plain texts information. Many such information can be easily gleamed via social media sites and alerts and simply by keeping tabs on the brand websites that you like. The main value this site would add is to provide up to date, accurate information on the spending strategies. For instance, in early 2014, Citi came up with 100k sign up bonus on 10k spend. This was a good deal by any measure - be it the past decade, late 90s or in general the way American Airlines and Citi target their HNI clients or very frequent fliers. These deals with limited numbers on them make to the market and the hope is that well to do folks will sign up. With the power of tools that the internet provides as well as mechanisms such as "reloads" it is fairly easy to achieve those targets without sweating. I know a bunch of people met the target spend of 10k of this particular card within a month without breaking a sweat. A lot of folks also have a main job and dont want to spend their time and mental energy in such activities. It would be nice if a computer algorithm does this on its own. Of course, we would have to rely on a robot to get to CVS or 7-11 stores. But thats not the hard part. The hard part is which card and tools to chose and how to strategize them and manage them. How not to get lost in deals, informations and keeping tab of the various cards that have filled up your wallet by this time. 

I promise that the first few posts would be voluminous writing but soon this would devolve to easy to understand images and few texts .. which is what is my aim for this blog. There is no point in creating more links and information overload in the internet. There is no point in redistribution, content formatting or presentation and get a few ad impressions and clicks on the way. I see this blog as something that I am going to do in the coming days and essentially this is a central strategy for me too when it comes to manufactured spending as some call it or strategizing credit card spend in a way that is less taxing to your mind, as I call it.