In October 2018, American Express made some rather drastic changes to its flagship Gold card. With those changes, the Gold card became a real contender in the premium credit card arena. With the re-launch, Amex made changes to help the card compete directly with the Chase Sapphire Reserve card, but at a much lower price.…
As I’ve discussed several times on this blog before, the Chase Freedom is among my favorite credit cards available today. Still, with that being said, it’s not a card I actually use all that often. In fact, in a given year I’ll typically only put a total of $6,000 of spend on the card. The…
For anyone new to personal finance and credit, credit scores can be incredibly confusing. On the surface, FICO credit scores seem like a fairly easy thing to understand. If you have an income and pay your bills, you should have a pretty good credit score. However, it doesn’t exactly work that way. Instead, credit scores…
While sitting at home and not flying, many of us are noticing that our airline mileage balances aren’t growing as quickly as we’d like. Instead of flying 1,000’s of miles a month and earning valuable airline miles, we’re stuck at home earning no miles at all. Thankfully, all hope is not lost. American Airlines, and…
American Airlines and SimpliSafe have teamed up to offer new SimpliSafe customers 14,000 AAdvantage miles when buying a home security system. While the offer alone isn’t enough to convince me to buy a home security system, it is a great incentive for anyone who is already looking into a SimpliSafe security system. What Is SimpliSafe?…
A friend of mine (let’s call him Joe) recently took his car to a mechanic and, as expected, got some bad news. His car was in need of some fairly extensive repairs which ended up being quite expensive. After the mechanic provided a repair quote, he had to make a difficult decision to make. How…
The Apple Watch is one of those things I’ve never really understood. Don’t get me wrong, I see why people would love it, but I just didn’t think it was for me. I don’t use a fitness tracker, I don’t want to be more connected, and I already wear an analog watch. For those reasons,…
A few days ago I wrote about how I missed a credit card payment for the first time. In that post, linked here, I explained the series of events that resulted in my first missed credit card payment. However, from that experience I learned that I didn’t have payment reminder emails setup on my Citi…
I opened my first credit card account in 2010 while I was still in college. Prior to that, I paid for everything with either cash or a debit card. Looking back, I always get frustrated thinking about all of the points and miles I missed out on back then. Anyway, since opening that first credit…
Starbucks was one of the first global restaurant chains to roll out a loyalty program a few years ago and I think they’ve done a great job with it over the years. Sure, it used to be a lot easier to earn rewards (“Stars”) and sure they watered down their coffee rewards, but overall the…
