Sat down recently and tried to figure out why my rewards balance never really moves despite me being consistent with the card. All my small everyday stuff goes on the card and all my big fixed expenses go straight from my bank account into a void.
I'm talking about rent, car insurance and a couple of bills that only do bank transfers. That's a most of my income every month earning me nothing back.
Started asking around and nobody seems to have a answer. Someone has figured this out by now right?
There has to be a way around this right
byu/No-Brain-1501 inpersonalfinance
Posted by No-Brain-1501
6 Comments
What are you asking? How to receive more cash back on your credit card? Spend more on your credit card, would be the answer — but that will defeat the purpose of trying to save money.
A lot of people run into this. The issue is most big expenses rent/insurance don’t accept cards directly so you miss out on rewards. There are services that let you pay those kinds of bills with a card (for a small fee) which can make the points/cashback add up
What are you looking for? or trying to fix?
If i’m understanding your post correctly, you want to earn “points” on spending like car insurance, rent, payments, etc?
On rent there’s a card offered by BILT, but the way the points/cash back works seems complicated and I’m not sure if its worth it…so I never bothered. The reason why you “fixed costs” things don’t accept credit cards is because retailers pay something like 2% per transaction…saves you money that they use ACH.
Have you checked which types of transactions count for your card rewards? For example, some say 3% on entertainment, 2% on restaurants, 1% on everything else (or something of that nature). All you can do is confirm that you know what you should be earning.
Some people use multiple cards to get the best benefits of each, but card “hacking” is time consuming and involves some risk if you don’t know what you’re doing.
If you are using your bank account for transactions, yeah those don’t get card rewards. No way around it. Nobody can put rent on a card for points because of fees (except for the recent Bilt card situation, which is a whole separate story lol).
Credit card rewards are a very negligible source of “saving” money. You have to spend thousands of dollars before you get $100 back. In the long run, it’s just pennies if you don’t have a high amount of disposable spending money.
It’s just a small incentive credit card companies use to get people to sign up for their card instead of competitors. You may be suffering from wishful thinking, unfortunately. You aren’t entitled to a rebate on life.
Credit cards charge the business a fee, and your rewards come out of that. To replace your checks and back drafts with credit cards, the business would raise prices 3% for you to get your %1 cash back.
Some auto insurances allow debit card payments, which could net you points if your bank offers rewards on debit. (Many credit unions do.) Otherwise, yeah that’s normal and there isn’t anything to figure out. You can’t use credit cards for everything.