Save & Earn
Do you use credit cards? Can you use them responsibly? Can they be beneficial? How can you save money with them?
#1 Rule! If you tend to run up balances on credit cards, don’t use them! Find some other means of paying for your bills and purchases so you can live within your means.
#2 Rule! If you use a credit card only buy what you normally would have anyway and pay off the balance in full every month, we can show you how to save some money with them! 
DON’T use credit cards to
Live Beyond Your Means!
Many credit cards today offer rebates every time you use them. One we have offers a 5% rebate on gas station, grocery and pharmacy purchases – 1% on everything else. Another one we have offers 5% rebates on certain purchases at certain times of the year.
Most offer cash rebates as well as gift cards or some method of additional purchases that sometimes extend the value of your rebate beyond its cash value. Just be careful you don’t spend that rebate on something you would otherwise not have purchased! We prefer to get the cash and either apply it right back to paying off our next credit card bill or depositing it directly into our checking account for other bills.
We watch our purchases very carefully to maximize our rebates. We have found it convenient to make a little tag showing where the card offers the largest rebate and taping it right on the back of that credit card. So we might have Gas, Grocery & Pharmacy 5% scotch-taped to the back of one card.
Another one may have Restaurants 5% 3rd Qtr scotch-taped to the back of it. And if that card does not have an offer that interests us after the 3rd quarter of the year, the tag comes off and the card goes back into the safe until another offer of interest comes along.
Even 5% may not sound like much. True, a nickel on each dollar seems kind of trivial, but how about a $5.00 bill on a $100.00? Or $50.00 on $1000.00 charged? If you use a tank of gas a week and get 5% back, your rebate will buy you an extra two and a half tanks a year. At today’s gasoline prices, that is nothing to sneeze at!
If you are really careful and make it a point to pay off those cards in full every month, you can even gain additional rebates by having your utilities charged to your credit card. Most gas, electric, cable and phone
companies today will allow you to set up automatic payments charged directly to your credit card. Then, in most cases, you can even earn a rebate on those charges.
Just make sure you don’t get yourself in trouble with all of those charges hitting your credit card every month! Your bill will end up being very sizable and you must keep in mind what your bill is going to be – And make sure you pay it off every month.
The rebates will be tiny compared to the finance charges if you don’t pay off your credit card bill every month! If you don’t have the ability to pay them off every month, Don’t Use Them!
Oh, and one more thing! Don’t pay an annual fee for a credit card. There are plenty of them available for free. If and when any of our card companies decide to start charging an annual fee, we will drop that one and go on to another one. If it gets to the point where there are none available with no annual fees, I guess we will be forced to go back to cash only transactions!
