Some better bonuses in the horizon..

After a really long drought (! .. not like the california water one :D ), it seems some banks are finally rolling off their sleeves and giving some real bonuses to the new customers.

While Chase has the official Southwest card at 25k points, one can easily get referred by friends to snag a 50k bonus points. If you need me to send you an invite offer, just put your email in the comment section or subscribe or just message me privately and I would be glad to offer you the deal. Read my review of this card here.

Citi started with the Citi Prestige card. I was not a big fan of it to begin with but all said and done, it is not a great card nor a totally worthless card. If you have a travelling itinerary lined up, this card could be a good addition. Just when I was thinking about this, Citi came up with another surprise. They improved the bonus terms in the Citi Premier card.

Non affiliate link is here. I do not get paid or am affiliated with any marketing companies or Citi or any other banks for that matter. This card was pretty good back in the day until Citi decided to split its 50,000 bonus points to two different years by spending $3000 on each. Now this offer is a return to the old strategy and seems like this is pretty nice in terms of attracting customers. From a customer point of view, this is pretty neat as this card does not carry any annual bonus for the first year. So I would highly recommend to apply this card anyway.

As you might be aware, the best airline cards to apply these days are the Barclays US Airways and the Citi American who are slugging it out. Remaining all airline cards are on holding pattern at the moment. The hotel cards have not given much incentive and the Chase IHG card is the way to go for best points at this moment. Given that there is finally some rustle in the credit card landscape, it seems that finally some big companies like Amex or Bank of America might wake up to catch up to Citi or Chase and come up with a big offer.

Base Minimum Credit card and other accounts

Someone that I know who is not interested in anything related to the world of finance, asked me what is the base minimum of accounts and credit cards which also serve as quite optimal in terms of getting rewards and points. Obviously, this person is simply not interested or has time for the bonus points. She much rather prefers to earn cash and spend them as per need. Not interested in having to juggle with having a big stash of credit cards in wallets or for that matter having multiple accounts, she tasked me with designing a very basic package of accounts. Now she is also with Bank of America and has been disillusioned with their fees and banking account structures in general. This task is quite easy. No bank - regional or national - is going to come close to your good old friendly neighborhood credit union. So the best way to have a good checking and savings account would be to have a nice credit union. A simple online search or using the maps such as Bing or Google would give you the nearest credit union. There are also sites dedicated to finding the nearest credit union near you or your zip code. To have this basic account is a no brainer. Sometimes it is also good to have a national level checking or savings account mainly due to access to the customer service when you are involved in international travel or to have a global banking presence. Though bank of america is good, Chase is another bank that came to my mind. Mainly, due to the fact that having a good Chase banking relationship is often an entry way to their credit card world which is often the best out there in terms of the rewards along with American Express. So it was a no brainer to recommend Chase. For savings account, nothing is beating the online savings account. A quick check in bankrate.com gives a lot of results such as Synchrony, GE Capital Bank or the Ally Bank or Ever Bank etc. I prefer going with the two known names such as Discover Bank or the American Express Savings bank. Both have good customer service and are quite fast in terms of incorporating the latest technology in their banking sites. Not that the other banks such as Ally are any behind. The rate differences are almost minimal from 0.90% APR to about 1.05% APR. This is anyway for emergency funds parking only.

Now comes the big question of which credit card to choose. After going thru the list of credit cards in this site, which is pretty much a filtered and sorted list, I thought I would go with the below:

Barclays arrival+  card( 89 ): Good ongoing bonus with annual fee of $89 waived for the first year was the main thing other than the 2% bonus which is pretty much the maximum for all-purpose rewards card. Mainly, this card is hard to get once you have a good amount of credit history. So better to get it immediately. See my other post about the order in which to get the credit cards.

Close Second would be American express blue cash preferred: Simply one of the best cards around from an awesome customer service team, there is a 6% cash back for groceries and 3% gas which are among the highest out there. There is an annual fee of $75 which could also be offset by the high rewards structure. There is a blue cash counterpart as well as everyday card which is simply not the cup of tea for many users out there who do not want to be bothered with going to various stores and loading money.

Bottomline:

Credit card: Barclays Arrival+ and then the American Express Blue Cash Preferred.

As an aside, I would recommend to apply cards with Chase though no need to carry them in your wallet on day-to-day basis. Cards such as the Freedom card or the Southwest card are always good to have.

Savings account: American Express Savings

Credit Union: Find your local one using the online tool.

Checking Account: Chase Total Checking

Citi Prestige Card - worth the hype?

Going contra is sometimes cool but going contra with logic is sometimes a solid perspective on the scheme of things that happen in the credit card world. Recently, Citi came up with the Citi Prestige card and upped the bonus to 50,000 Thank you points which are generally okay and if you redeem in American then you are supposed to get $800 worth of flights. Now travelling in American, getting flights and seats on them.. that itself is a pain. There is also $250 annual credit that can be used if you buy airfare and other incidentals such as baggage fees or inflight entertainment and meals. The $450 annual fee is offset by this is what the claim of many a blogger out there. Of course, the high referral fees is another hidden reason why all blogs are promoting this credit card left right and center. Do I think this is a good card? It is decent. It gives you access to American Express lounges. If you are like the majority of travellers like me, I would like to keep the transit time as short as possible and get home rather than sit near a juice bar and wilt away time in some lounge in some airport. There is a global entry permit of $100 or so. Again, a common feature with many cards and in the grand scheme of things, not really making too much of a difference. A few lines here and there is not going to break you. So it all boils down to $450 annual fee that gives you 50k Thank you points and $250 * 2 airline credit. If you have planned travel coming up, by all means go ahead and get a card but if not, is there a reason to invent travel and go just for the sake of miles and points?

Remember: 450 Annual fee. That is not waived for the year. You could close it on time before they bill you for next year. But still. 450. That is not chump change. In the world of regular 500 reloads, people become sensitized to 450 or anything under $500. Ha, I would recover that in a few reloads. But that is not the point. $450 is no chump change for a huge number of people. You are putting that as a fee. There are folks out there who are regular business travelers and get reimbursed by their companies. Many of course, do not have the time or necessity for such point accumulation. For the rest who do not have access to such travels and would rather prefer the short and sweet world of point accumulation, where does one draw the line? This does look highly commoditized and calculated. But more importantly, it is leading to real and perceivable change in consumer behavior of people like you and me. Remember the monkey is taught to do the tricks of buying stuff online and act in a certain way and after some time, it pretty much does that on its own. The whole credit card bonus points and cash back is just geared towards that. Make you use the credit cards more and  more so much that you don't even think about using cash and would rather just pay extra and return to your default of being "credit card nirvana" state. It is stunning to see how many otherwise reasonable bloggers are doing credit mile runs, going to china for a weekend just because of some few extra points or a $500 "mistake" fare while the capitalist producers simply laugh at the way the humans can be manipulated into relative action and minor changes in behavior. So maybe I might rethink my line on this particular card but I wanted to take a moment and recognize this aspect of having to simply pay huge fees so that there is an "offset" of some invented travel in future. Something that may well be avoided and instead, one can go visit the local library or local zoo or just sit in a beach or a park somewhere nearby!

Best Bonus credit cards for March 2015

Credit card landscape continues to move in the same vein as it was in the start of this year. The usual big banks like Amex, Citi, Chase, Barclays, Capital One are slugging it out by offering pretty much the same offers as during the holiday season of last year.

Some good ones right now to get into your wallet could be

US Bank Club Carlson: https://www.usbank.com/credit-cards/club-carlson-premier-rewards-visa-signature-credit-card.html

Chase IHG : https://creditcards.chase.com/credit-cards/ihg-credit-card1.aspx?CELL=63WS&F42G=FH24R8&I39J=Y71UH0&list=4,2,1&SP4R=FH24R8&

Note that they have increased the rewards recently to 60k points from previously issued 50k points. Both links are direct links to the bank sites. 

Bank of America and Amex continue to offer the same roster. Amex could be a surprise sometime before the end of this year, especially since their exclusive hold on Costco is set to expire early next year. While Citi is purchasing that set of portfolio from Amex, it also is not backing down with the American Airlines credit card where it is issuing and trying to corner users just like its close competition in that market - Barclays is doing. On a side note, Barclays will be converting all the existing US Airways card members into American Aviator Rewards members. Note that with this merger between American and US Airways, the annual fee issued by Citi and Barclays would be $95 and $89 while offering roughly similar perks as time goes by.

Threshold of this activity

On and off, I wonder what is the threshold of this activity? How low or high can one go before one sees one's own limits and threshold of such activities? I mean, the blog world is full of various view points and some say this is immoral, unethical, illegal to others saying that this is the money that they are anyway spending and they are as such being smarter in tapping out the rewards. Nothing wrong in such strategies as long as you are not going crazy over this. I heard a story about someone going full crazy on their local 7-11 by ordering about 25 grands worth of gift cards. 25 grand!. Thats bat shit cray. That pretty much killed the game for that 7-11 store, that guy as well as caught attention of both the gift card company, the 7-11 corporate honchos. The policies got promptly changed. 

The payoff from this is anyway not too huge. Once you exhaust the list of credit card which offer huge sign on bonuses, there is hardly any thrill in going thru them again. Yeah, maybe you can do it all over again for others or yourself if you have a goal. But after a point, it is not a perpetual point machine. There is simply no routine strategy which will take the mental steps out of this and make it mundane and boring. This site was created with that goal in mind and lists out many strategies that will take you closer to your goals. I follow some blogs like Boarding area ones including Frequent Miler, Hustler Money blog which happens to be my favorite along with the My Money Blog; and a whole hosts of other blogs like a Travel Grant or Million Mile Secret and their content hugely varies over time. Some stay consistent to their theme and other diversify over to different things. Some of them seem to have a defined boundary while others keep pushing the envelope subtly. Leading you to wonder, how far do you go in this? There is always "apply for this online link", "open this account to get a $5 reward" and so on...there is no end to this.

There were certain blogs which posted about 10 different ways to use British Airways Avios or 20 different ways to get Delta points or use southwest points at 1800-flowers.com or similar posts. It is so much pressured and the writings in such blogs clearly indicate that the writer did not enjoy writing said pieces. A lot of blogs are also under the pressure to monetize. There are contracts and agreements making them write unwanted and unnecessary information daily at least two times. They have to have the two/three odd posts a day filled with images and big fonts so that they maintain the search rankings, SEO tracking strategies and keep up overall. But in this whole melee, the quality is greatly sacrificed. Back to this topic, this is really simple and like everything else in life, it is going to get only simple or complex that you want to make it. The truth is the credit card signup bonuses have dried up a little bit in the past couple months, reflecting in the lower blog posts in this blog as well as few other blogs who have the similar philosophy of posting news only when there is news to begin with. Simply informing each and every minute development as "Breaking News" makes this blog a CNN or Fox news.

Anyhow, I guess the people that run such blogs have financial compulsions due to which they have to act in a very forceful, aggressive manner. As for my overall philosophy, it pretty much remains the same and I want to do this as long as I enjoy it and not to just rake up few more points for a few days in a grand hotel and looking all weird in the process.

Personal Capital - Few Thoughts

Recently, I was exploring some tools similar to Mint, YNAB or any software which helps me give varied views of my financial landscape. The thing is I like to rotate them and put them in various sites for fear that if one site has all the data and for what-so-ever reasons the site security gets compromised, then you are in for a ride. That is one of the primary reasons why I created multiple accounts with the likes of mints/yoddlee or something that is preferably away from the big companies.

A new site which caught my eye is Person Capital. It is a San Fran based start-up and the site is pretty impressive and very easy to understand and operate. There are no unnecessary clutter and "tools" on the website. It is pretty neat and elegant design. I liked the speed of the site and the overall value it provides in terms of reminder emails as well as fresh articles in their blogroll.

Further, any such site will have their value measured by the database of third-party banks with which they integrate and how fast they do that. I hate PayPal for this particular reason that their integration features are from the last century. In that respect, Personal Capital integrated with many banks and financial institutions with elan and ease. I threw obscure credit unions, big banks, investment accounts, insurance companies, mortgage accounts and even an odd international bank to boot with not many local branches. So, having passed all the test, I have referred it to a few of my friend and colleagues, who gladly signed up for their services. In case, anyone here is interested, here is the link: http://refer.personalcapital.com/share/k3w6m
It is a slight departure from the usual credit card centric theme of this blog but oh well, it is just an odd post before I get my other blog running related to the money matters.

Best way to go about applying credit cards for a newbie

If you are just getting started, there is a sequence of credit card applications that would help while accumulating points. Generally speaking, the cards applications tends to drop over time and you focus on select few that has higher payoffs in terms of giving you points or has exception bonus offers. But at the back of your mind, you might have this pesky thought of this particular card that has been out of your grasp always. This post is a lesson learnt from my experience that can be used by others, especially new comers as they go about applying cards in a certain sequence. The first instinct is to go after the big hitters or the "50k points" cards. That is quite logical given that you can redeem them for higher points or cash back or miles and get the maximum payoff. Usually at the start, there is also lot of big-ticket items to spend on. Beginners have fees, rents, simple spending on items such as furniture or clothes or electronics including the usually expensive laptops/cameras among others.

Why is this important? Banks such as US Banks or Wells Fargo have very stringent credit card lending practices and policies and they scrutinize your credit history more stringently compared to a Bank of America. So it pays to sequence your application. Without much ado, if I had the opportunity to time travel and apply for a new set of credit cards on my as such unblemished credit score/history, I would go with the following order:

1. Barclays Bank: Arrival Plus here and then put some good spending and immediately apply for the US Airways card ( as it is being closed out of this bank entirely ) and hopefully apply for one another card here such as the Lufthansa card.

2. US Bank: Another stringent bank and it is better to apply their Flexperks card off-hand before you go about apping more cards with other banks

3. Wells Fargo: They scrutinize your credit history like nobody's business. Better to apply for their Propel family cards off-hand.

4. Chase/Bank of America/Citi/American Express: All in one go. In a single day, you can just go about apping them after you have sorted out their credit card bonuses

5. Credit unions like the local ones or the national ones - though they are not picky, some like the NASA Federal credit union do look at your credit history for even basic cards.

6. Rest of the gang such as PNC or prepaid cards or Citizens, Citadel, Union or what have you. They are generally eager to snatch your business and would be happy to approve you as long as you are a new customer to them. Sun Trust is one such bank. Though they are well-known for their terrible customer service, which yours truly has experience in several occasions, they are overall flexible with approving accounts. But good luck getting any decent rewards or points with them on an ongoing basis.

Any other ideas that you have or sequence or bank that I have missed?

Max number of credit cards issued by Bank

Is there any limit on the number of credit cards or any cards by Bank? Officially, many banks do not have any explicit policies related to this. Some banks do mention that they are not interested in more than x amount of cards. For instance, I have seen with Capital One and Barclays that they would not approve a third card unless your existing two cards have ample history with them. Some banks go with credit line usage rather than number of cards so they would allot a credit of say $5000 per customer and as long as you are under that limit, you could have 5 cards with $1000 on each. American Express is one of those banks. They deny that there is any limit on the number of cards allotted. They do accept that each customer has his account reviewed periodically and the credit line adjusted. This means they go thru your account history and determine if you need or might use more credit and just up the limit on these cards. Most banks such as Chase or Amex accept transfer credit line requests to another card. With chase, this is breeze. You could email them and voila, it is all set. With Amex and the rest, you have to submit a request and they sometimes make another inquiry into your credit history.

In Flyer talk forums, the Amex gets it limit as 4 - including both personal and business credit cards but excluding the charge cards. Most Amex charge cards are easy to get and they approve immediately but the main difference between charge card and credit card is that the former has been paid in full at the end of billing cycle while the latter, in theory, could be carried over. Of course, carrying balance over to next billing cycle is detrimental to your finance and should be done only if you are getting a 0% APR.

So in a nutshell, Amex has a 4 or 5 card limit depending on income, spending history, your cumulative card limit vs approved credit line among others.

For Chase, there appears no such limit. There are multiple cards that have been approved by Chase. Some daring FT folks claim they have almost all credit cards issued by Chase at one point or the other. I for one, am pretty close to that stage myself.

Barclays seem to have a hard limit of approximately 3. Anything more than that and you are given the dreaded "Your application is under review" page.

Capital One seems to have a hard limit of around 4. They are very region and market specific. So while there are reports to have gotten up to 4 cards if you are in Mid-Atlantic region, north-east users seem to have difficulty in even getting one approved. They seem to have a limit of one or two for west and down south. Which is understandable given they have limited footprint in those areas.

Most credit unions, smaller banks limit you to one or maximum two.

Bank of America, being a big one, seems to not have such limits. There are instances of 5 or 7 credit cards being approved. In general, Bank of America is also the most lenient - that is the consensus.

PNC/Principal/Citizens/Citadel - all seem to have a limit of about 2.

US Bank has about 3 as the maximum number. There are consistent reports where they ask you why you need so many credit cards. Which is ironic given they issue so many partner and co-branded credit cards.

The big bank, Citi, also has a hard limit of about 3. They were pretty generous once upon a time and I have had more than that at one point. But they have cracked down heavily and are issuing way less credit cards than in the past. They are also notorious to randomly close the accounts. So even if you are having multiple cards, I would tread this one with caution. Also, in terms of sign up rewards or redeemable points, both Citi and Bank of America are not really the cream. Though they do have pretty good daily usage cards or simple credit cards which are flexible with not much hassles.

Will cover more banks in future as they come.

Looking around for some cards ..

Sooner or later, you are going to reach a point where you have apped, been approved or rejected, maximized spending of at least one major card from each major bank. The thing is many cards, especially from Amex, come with a lifetime earning of just one time per card. Other cards have a mix luck of again getting approved once you have cancelled it. So make sure when you cancel a card, you do not bad mouth the card or the bank! These details are all captured these days ..so I was looking at what next card to apply. I saw a bunch of cards in this blog as well as other blogs which had the standard rooster. One thing that was lacking was a list of cards by bank. By which I mean, take a bank, and these are the available cards that are there. Of course you can go to the bank website and view them all there directly :) .. But I am not going to list all cards here. Rather just some cards that are relatively better compared to the rest.

So this post will just detail few banks and some of the cards that are good/flagship products and are ideal candidates for you to churn periodically.

Citi:

AAdvantage card

I would argue that this is the best card that Citi has .. compared to their flagship "Thank you"
flavors such as Premier or Preferred cards. Their 2% Cash back card is also pretty good if you are interested in no hassle, just 2% return on all purchases.

American Express:

Their prepaid cards such as Target Redcard ( wait till atleast 2015 end), Bluebird, Serve card are must have cards.

Charge cards here are pretty good including the Platinum cards and Gold cards.

Credit cards here are the best for SPG card, Jetblue card and the Blue Preferred card.

Chase:

IHG Rewards 80k points offer - The 60k points offer is in chase.com

Marriott has a 50k points offer too. Those are handy for Towne Suites or Residence Inn where you will get more bang for your points.

All Cards - No harm in applying most of their cards .. it is useful one way or the another but cards such as Amazon or IHG/Disney/Marriott are highly specific to those brands. Are they really that useful apart from your one time usage, I would tend to say No.

The best card here is the Southwest card which can be directly found in Chase website. There is Simply no better offer outside. Though it has a $99 annual fee, it is much worth more if you travel southwest frequently. They pretty much fly the whole of US to all the major cities.

US Bank:

Flexperks card and the Select card are pretty good. This bank is notorious to look at more than the three major credit bureaus before deciding whether you their credit worthy. They do have many airlines card but no stand outs. The best card here would be the Club Carlson Cards. They come in two flavors of $75 and $50 each in annual fees.

Barclays:

US Airways : Last few days to apply this card as soon Citi would be managing this one.

Arrival Card

All Cards : Some of the cards like LL Bean or Apple cards are really not that worth applying unless you frequent those places.

Wells Fargo:

They have  good customer service. I would be inclined to look at the propel card family for their a) Amex brand b) decent features and points

Bank of America:

Cash rewards card is the best here. I would definitely give a look to their airlines card such as the Alaska Air card or the Virgin Atlantic card.

Best Cards of 2015 as of January

Hey all! Here we are in the new year! A new beginning in our journey to collect points and travel. 2015 seems to be a good year based on the positive buzz being generated around various credit cards/checking accounts and generally any kind of banking relationships. There is increased focus on consumer activities and generous targeted bonuses are doing the rounds. The marketing teams in big financial firms are creating their strategies in attracting more customers with bigger incentives than ever.

Some examples: Barclayscards US, which has been issuing the US Airways card for US Airways has increased the sign up bonus to attract new customers before this business is handled by Citi post merger of US Airways with American. Barclays will still continue to maintain the existing accounts and hence there are a lot of initiatives to target customers.

Barclays card here: http://www.worldgotbigger.com/us-airways-credit-card/?campaignId=2062&cellNumber=8&referrerid=PTRBAEMWELG

Note that Citi gives a similar card for American but that also has a $99 annual fee.

Chase, as usual has some exciting cards, primarily:

Chase Southwest card: Again started with the 50k points offer after 2k spend.

Chase Slate Card: I have not tried this card yet but it seems a standout primarily because there is a 0% APR and ZERO FEE BALANCE TRANSFER .. balance transfer fee is the transaction fee that is typically 3% or 4% of the transaction amount and makes a significant change. Chase Slate waiving of this fee makes it the only card, apart from the Navy Fed CU GO card which waive the balance transfer fees. That is a huge savings there if you want to transfer over the balances. I am planning on doing this sometime this month. Fingers crossed on getting approved.

https://creditcards.chase.com/credit-card-search.aspx?F42G=Y71UH0&CELL=63WS&jp_ltg=leftnav&list=4,2,1

There are reconsideration lines which are rather soul draining and honestly not worth that much given that there are so many offers available that are not limited to just one bank these days.

Over the course of this year, this blog will start having posts that are not just limited to credit cards but also other kind of financial services as well as evolving into a money blog. Not that we are going to post stock tips here but would post different strategies that are out there and try to split the wheat from chaff. A lot of noise in financial world and jargons are very difficult to lay man as well professionals to comprehend completely. On top of that there is often subliminal data to convince people that a particular strategy or solution is the best one. This blog would try to distill some of these thoughts and ideas and have actionable items that would make this whole exercise less stressful. Same way, managing credit cards offers and spending is one of the prime goals of this blog.