Credit Cards with Rewards

Why would you want to check your credit card rewards balance periodically?
In our quest to inventory all our debt we logged into all our credit-card accounts to get the current information. We confirmed that yes, we are more in debt than we want to be. But additionally we feel good about taking the first steps to deal with that.

We hadn’t used one of our credit-card accounts for a number of years, but there still were a good number of reward points sitting there. These points would have the best payoff if we used them towards statement credit for travel, but we aren’t really using that card anymore, and we have many other good travel-hacking credit cards so every time we had seen this in the past we would say ‘We really should use it for a bit to get that travel credit!’ and then would go on with our lives without ever following through.

How to Use the Rewards

This time was different. We realized that instead of travel credit we could get Amazon gift cards. No, the pay-off wasn’t as high as using it for travel credit, but we could do it NOW instead of at some unspecified future money. The website was having some issues, so we ended up calling. Luckily, it didn’t take long before we had cashed in our points for three $100 Amazon gift cards!

Wow! What a happy find! It’s not really income, but it is money we won’t have to spend when we order stuff on Amazon, which we do pretty regularly.

As and added bonus: Our awesome friend Iliana found a penny between my feet when we were out in the freezing cold! One more coin for our change jar! 😀 Making it a total of $300,01 profits for this episode.

Conclusion

Check your credit card rewards balance occasionally and use it for what works for YOU, even if it isn’t the highest bang for your money. Do you use credit cards which give you rewards? What is your favorite one? Leave a comment and tell us.