Phew, it felt good to clear up all those credit card misconceptions yesterday. If you didn’t get to read that post, you can find it here. Now on to the good stuff of how we funded our vacation using credit card rewards.
Rewards programs offered by credit cards such as the Discover It, Chase Freedom, and American Express Blue Cash cards are awesome. We have had the most experience with Discover, so I’ll give you more information on it.
Discover’s 5% cash back rewards are great. They rotate the categories every quarter of the year from things like, gas stations, restaurants and movies, home repair, and online shopping. You have to actually sign up for each category, which is as easy as one click on an email.
Once you’ve accumulated a fair amount of rewards cash in your account, you have several choices for pay out. It can be applied to your statement as credit, used for online payments at stores like Amazon, or buy gift cards with it. We love the gift cards option because most of them give you extra money on top of your rewards. For instance, we gave them $20 for Bed, Bath & Beyond gift cards, but received $25 cards. That’s $5 for free! This gave us a huge boost for funding our trip.
Our Little Secret:
I’m going to let you in on a little secret on how we play the system. Discover only offers certain gift cards, and, I’ll be honest, they aren’t all very useful for us. So, here’s what we did: buy $200.00 worth of B,B,&B gift cards which results in $250.00 with the extra bonus. Take those to the store and with them buy a Visa gift card for that amount (they will charge you about $4 to activate the card, but that’s worth it when you consider the $46 you earned with this method). We have had clerks that don’t want to allow this, so we just bought one small item that we needed anyway and that seemed to appease them. I looked up their policies on gift cards and no where does it say that you can’t buy another gift card with their gift card, you just can’t receive cash for it.
Gas to drive down to the bottom of Alabama is estimated to be about $190.00 from where we live. That gives us even a little extra to spend once we’re down there. We also have a change jar that’s accumulated quite a bit and money saved up in our slush fund (read about slush funds here), so basically we are going on a beach vacation for free. That makes for one happy mama!
If you are thinking of giving this whole Discover rewards thing a try (and I really think you should), click on this link to apply and you and I will get $50.00 rewards to start you off.
Speak Your Mind