Same here. The 2% back becomes my holiday Christmas account. We always spend over the typical budget and that account knocks it out. We've had a few fraudulent charges and charge backs due to vendor fuckery and it is taken care of with a phone call. Debit cards are functionally cash and there's little to no protections in place for you. I've only used mine at an ATM when I had to have cash.
I don’t have a cash back CC, but the Chase points are pretty good. Was able to use all the points accrued during the pandemic to get some free flights booked.
This kind of thing seems to happen to you a lot, Toytoy. Did you ever get that sweet payoff from that Nigerian prince?
amazon card is where it’s at. If you’re a whore for them like my wife is, with the 5% you get for every purchase made on there, you end up not having to “pay” for any of your kiddos Xmas gifts. we have one card we use for airline miles (southwest), a lowes card for that store specifically where it’s 5% on every purchase then either 5% or free financing on the big stuff, and an amazon card.
I don’t know, the Sapphire Reserve card is hard to give up. When they first issued it, you got 100K points for spending $3K in the first 3 months. It was so popular that Chase ran out of metal blanks to print the cards on.
Lots of cards have good signup bonuses, but many aren't worth keeping past that. I don't do too much churning but every time I have a big purchase on the horizon, I find a new card and snag the signup bonus for it. At this point I've probably gotten $5k over the last 7-8 years in signup bonuses. Any card that will give you 5% for a category is usually worth keeping if you shop a lot in that category, especially if it has no annual fee. I've been really happy with the Chase customer service, though. They've worked with me at length on two separate incidents where I felt like they went above and beyond what they had to do.
100%. Their customer service is really great. I’ve never had to wait more than a couple minutes to talk to an actual person and they’ve always been very helpful. I had to move a family vacation not too long ago and they very quickly got in touch with the airline and helped change our flights and everything. Zero complaints.
Why is that? Is it because the amount of money you need to spend in order to get anything is ridiculous? I have a United airlines rewards membership (Not CC) and even with flying to Florida five times in 12 months (two of those trips were first class) I didn't earn shit. We recently switched paint vendors at work and this company allows us to pay with CC if we'd like. We buy ~$8k a month in paint but I don't want to go through the hassle if at the end of the year I've earned dick.
Well, lots of cards with great signup bonuses also have a yearly fee, which may or may not be worthwhile. Most of them are not. The best card on an ongoing basis is the one that's getting you the most points or has awesome perks (e.g. insurance for trips, warranties, etc.). It's not that cards with great signup bonuses can't also be good for day-to-day use, just that there are plenty of cards with a good signup bonus to entice you, but nothing to offer past that. Just look for a card that earns you the most points in the places you spend the most. Sometimes that's a specific card, like a travel card. Other times it might just be one of those Capital One cards that earns you 2% on everything. I don't love airline cards because most of the perks are tied to a specific airline.
My sis is a deal doer. Long history of taking advantage of various rebates and perks. It's a lot of hassle I'm not personally up for. One of the things she does now is cycle through credit cards with signup bonuses. Points, cash bonuses, whatever. I guess closing out a credit card isn't that harmful to your credit as long as you keep your longest line open. They keep them open a minimum time and close them when the perks are no longer perky
I'm a pretty big fan of my AMEX Blue Cash Preferred card. 6% cash back at grocery stores and 3% cash back at gas stations is pretty cool, and it also gives me the option of being petty with stores that piss me off because I know that American Express charges higher fees to merchants than the other cards. I also have a Discover card with 5% cash back on categories that change every quarter. One of those quarters each year is always gas, and Q4 is almost always Amazon/Walmart/Target.
This is similar to me, the only difference being that I have the AMEX card that gives 3% back on groceries and 2% back at gas stations. I didn't want a card that charges a yearly fee to use it. The Discover card matched the cashback that I earned in the first year on it, so that was a plus. I mostly use my Citi card that gives 1% back at the time that you use it and an additional 1% back when you pay for that charge. I also have the Amazon card that gives 5% back.
A fun little update: 15 hours after calling Wal Mart and telling them about the fraudulent order, I got an e-mail from them: Good News! Your order is on it's way! It pissed me off so bad that I had to go through all this shit today to get things straightened out, and some shit head criminal is going to receive a nice big parcel full of free shit, that I called Wal Mart back to ask them WTF. Of course I got someone who had very little to no grasp of the English language. Probably because they're giving away so much merchandise they can't pay people that speak English to work for them. In the end, the lesson is this: walmart.com has zero fraud oversight and no investigation department. The order was placed at 4AM, I caught it and notified them by 6:30 AM and at 9:30 PM they shipped it. Now we all get to pay higher prices because Wal Mart gives zero fucks. I'm just about pissed enough to drive down to LA and wait for the delivery truck so I can beat the living fuck out of the asshole that did this.
This is really common at huge companies. I'm not saying it's right exactly, but the hoops necessary to actually intercept an order that has been sent to the warehouse for fulfillment are often manual (i.e. phone calls to the warehouse, getting people to run around and find things). Hell, depending on their processing, that order may have been picked and in a shipping box by the time you talked to them. So now one box is in a giant pile of other boxes (or in a truck full of boxes on its way to the shipping facility), and if you want to track it down, it's going to mean delaying every other order they are working on. That 12 hour lag time only means that the shipment didn't get scanned at the outgoing shipping facility until then, not that they had 12 hours before the item was picked. It's amazing how ancient and crufty these fulfillment systems are even in modern companies. Everything that faces the customer gets streamlined and optimized to death and then once the order is processed it gets fired into a black hole of fulfillment where they count on the slave labor and spiked whips to ship it quickly. But because fulfillment is done by (mostly) humans, making exceptions to that process is really, really disruptive.
I hope everyone can enjoy this restaurant review as much as I did. I think the website with the original post crashed because it couldn't handle the traffic, so it was re-posted here: https://medium.com/@everywhereist/b...michelin-starred-restaurant-ever-3466c98cdbdf
I think that it's actually the opposite. Fulfillment at places like Amazon and Walmart is hyper-optimized to the point that they've optimized out quality control. They've done the math and decided that placating the occasional dissatisfied customer is cheaper than the time it takes to check their work or be able to identify and stop problems during the process. There's no organizational system in the warehouses. Fresh product just gets put on whatever shelf is available, because the pickers don't need to know where the Stanley screwdrivers are, they just go to get whatever is in box 9 on shelf 3 of aisle 11 because the computer voice in their ear told them to. Even things that don't make sense like receiving your order on the same day in two boxes from the same distribution center are because the computer decided that it was more efficient for two pickers to fill two boxes than for one guy to put everything together. The humans only exist in the system because they're able to easily do things that are incredibly difficult for robots, like pick up and manipulate millions of differently shaped objects and intuitively come up with a reasonably good way to place the objects in the box.
GTE, I've found specific airline rewards only rack up and worthwhile if you're flying weekly if not daily. The same for hotel rewards, you need to stay in a hotel at least 5 or 6 nights a week, otherwise you never use it frequently enough where you start getting the better benefits. I have a Capital One card that gives me 2 reward miles for every dollar I put on the card. You need to rack up a lot of reward miles to maximize the benefit, but I had enough to get our honeymoon flights to Easter Island for free. I'd have to look again at what they charge for transaction fees today, but if you're putting $8k+ on the card each month, you'd likely cover your flights with the rewards
I actually meant to say "ancient OR crufty" but that's probably poor phrasing anyway. At some companies, fulfillment is ancient, but at others... well obviously Amazon's picking process isn't unsophisticated. It is objectively hard to interrupt once it's started, though. The actual technological part of disrupting an order is super easy, but it's basically impossible to actually accomplish because there are just no hooks built into it, and because it primarily runs on abusing human beings with ultra-lean staffing that gets continually optimized by computers until you have people moving at a trot for 12 hours/day with zero bathroom breaks for $10/hour. And so the "fire and forget" method of initiating a shipment is perfectly viable since it's cheap and their fulfillment is so lean that small disruptions have huge impacts. "Crufty" is probably the wrong word to describe that, but it is incredibly clunky to interject any change at all once it's been sent to the warehouse. So they don't.
I used to fly 2-4x per week for work. The miles didn’t really start to rack up until you hit 25 flight legs. You have to always fly the same airline. You have to book with the airline credit card to multiply the miles. when it was all said and done I went close to three years without paying for a commercial flight after I quit traveling. I had a similar scheme with hotels. I miss traveling for work.