Our 2024 Credit Card Rewards

I’ve written a few times previously about credit card rewards. While not the most important thing in your personal finances by any means, they can be a nice add-on. Some folks really get into this for travel hacking, but we just dabble in it. But I realized I’d never really looked at exactly how much we were getting back each year and thought it might be interesting to do so.

Important Caveat: You should only use credit cards if you can use them responsibly. My definition of “responsibly” includes two parts. First, that you only use credit cards to purchase items you were already going to purchase (as opposed to credit cards “encouraging” you to buy more stuff). Second, that for every credit card you connect your checking account and have them automatically pay off in full, every month from your checking account. If you can’t commit to that, or if you will be “encouraged” to spend more, then you shouldn’t use credit cards.

There are three main ways that we earn credit card rewards.

• Cash back/points on purchases
• Sign up bonuses for new cards
• Referral credits (occasionally someone will click on a link on a blog post)

This year we signed up for three new cards between the two of us: Chase Ink Unlimited*, Capital One Venture*, and the Fidelity Visa Signature card.

Note: Any credit card links with an * next to them are referral links, which means that if you use the link and end up signing up for the card, I will get some additional points. If that bothers you, you can always just google the name of the card and get to it that way to avoid me getting the referral points.

Some people worry that playing the “credit card game” takes a lot of time but, for us, it really doesn’t. For each of those three credit cards, the entire signup process took less than 15 minutes. That includes the time to apply for the card and then, once we receive the card, the time to connect our checking account and setup automatic payments in full each month. We also downgraded one of our Chase Sapphire Preferred* cards to a no-annual-fee Chase card, which took about 5 minutes on the phone. Since most of our bills are already auto-paid by existing credit cards, those didn’t take any more time.

About the only additional time, and “cognitive load”, that credit cards took for us was using cards in-person at the grocery store. Our two American Express Blue Cash Preferred* cards both give 6% cash back at the grocery store, but they each max out at $6,000 in grocery store purchases each year. Since we spend a bit more than that, we use some of our Chase cards which have 5% cash back (plus an at least 1.25x multiplier) on the first $1,500 in groceries during the first quarter of the year (January – March). So I have calendar reminders on January 1st, February 1st, and March 1st, to put the appropriate Chase card in my wallet for groceries, then additional calendar reminders on April 1st and August 15th for each of the American Express cards. When you add all of that up, that’s about an hours worth of work in 2024.

While 2024 still has a few more days in it, we’ve received our last credit card bills for 2024 so our rewards are complete (rewards for purchases are generally credited when you pay the bill for those purchases). Here is a summary of the rewards we earned this year. Note that for any of the cards with an annual fee, that fee has already been subtracted from the totals below.

• American Express Blue Cash Preferred* x 2: $1,330 (includes some referral credits)
• Chase Amazon Prime Visa: $353
• Chase Travel Ecosystem (Chase Sapphire Preferred*, Chase Freedom Unlimited*, Chase Ink Unlimited*, Chase Freedom Flex* x 2, Chase Freedom*): $1,370
  (which equals at least $1,713 in value as they are worth 1.25x in the Chase Travel portal and about 1.6x if we transfer them to Southwest Airlines; I’m using the 1.25x here).
• U.S. Bank (Altitude Go, Cash Plus): $196
• Capital One Venture*: $818
• Fidelity Visa Signature Reward: $235

That totals $4,645 for the year.

For some folks that may not be a significant amount but, for others, that would go a long way toward paying off some debt or having additional money to invest. Everyone needs to decide for themselves if they are (or can be) a responsible credit card user and, if so, if it’s worth their time to take advantage of some of these rewards. While our total may not be $4,645 every year (a good chunk of that was signup bonuses, and we may or may not continue to pursue those), that still seems like a pretty reasonable return on investment for the approximately one hour of work we put into it.