February 16, 2007
I work hard, my credit cards should work hard for me, too! (Yup, I’m a deadbeat! Heehee) It’s time to evaluate which of the current credit cards should be switched out for cards that will yield more consistently useful rewards. I’d not intended to keep any of the new credit cards I got (solely for the points/miles bonuses) but I suppose they’re worth keeping during the fee-free year.
[Oh my lord, I hate trying to create a table in Blogger. I give up!]
Currently using ….
Card: Hilton Honors AMEX
Earning: 3-5 pts/$, for restaurants, cell phone
Primary Use: (wallet-worthy) Restaurants (5 pts), airfare (3 pts), cell phone bill (5 pts)
Rewards redemption: No redemptions yet, Total: 43,000 pts
Card: Chase Free Cash
Earning: 1 pt/$, for all purchases
Primary Use: (wallet-worthy) “Daily” use: phone bills, purchases, medical bills, etc.
Rewards redemption: Routinely $25 check for every 2500 pts
Card: Citi Driver’s Edge
Points: 3 pt/$, for gas, groceries, drugstores, 1 pt
Primary Use: (wallet-worthy) Gas, groceries, drugstores
Rewards redemption: Use for car maintenance as necessary
Card: Citi Dividend Select
Earning: 2 pt/$, for utilities
Primary Use: (stays home) Utilities: trash, water
Rewards redemption: None yet
Switching to ….
Card: Chase Cash Plus
Earning: 5 pts/$, for gas, groceries, drugstores; 1 pt/$ on regular purchases
Primary Use: (wallet-worthy) Gas, groceries, drugstores, regular purchases (medical bills, shopping)
Rewards redemption: $50 check/5000 pts
Card: Hilton AMEX
Earning: 5 pts/$, for restaurants, cell phone
Primary Use: (stays home) Restaurants (5 pts), cell phone bill (5 pts)
Rewards redemption: Eventually I’ll need a Hilton Hotel room. Until then ….
Card: Starwood AMEX (until 12/07)
Earning: 2 pts/$, for Starwood purchases, 1 pt/$ on all other purchases
Primary Use: (stays home) Large expenditures like auto insurance
Rewards redemption: 20k points can be converted to 25k miles, or 10k/night at Starwood hotels
Card: CitiBizPremierPass (until 01/08)
Earning: 1 pt/$ plus 1 pt/mile flown, for airfare purchased with this card
Primary Use: (stays home) Airfare
Rewards redemption: Just adds to the TY pts pool
I like the idea of pulling out all three cards that I carry normally and replacing them with one or two cards. The Hilton AMEX was going to be retired but I decided it can stay for the sake of the Autopay cell phone bill because I’ll need to use those Hilton points eventually. I may as well have a slow trickle feeding that pool of points until I’m ready to redeem.
The extra 1% I’m getting from the Citi Dividend isn’t really worth it, though, and while having an extra cushion of auto maintenance money from the Citi Driver’s Edge is nice, I can get 2% more and in cash from the Cash Plus card.
The Starwood card is good because it nets an extra 25% when you convert the points into miles so it may be worth keeping on just because that’s an extra 5k miles I can get on United. Depending on the saver fares available, that 25k miles can either equal one free flight (roughly equivalent to $220) or 1.66 free flights = $360.
I may just use that Starwood card for all regular and large purchases and keep the Chase card for my gas/grocery/drugstore card. I’m still reducing the cards from 3 to 2, and I wouldn’t want to carry just one credit card because it’s best to have a backup card when you charge everything like I do!
So, what’s in YOUR wallet? Do you *hustle* the credit card companies too? 😉
now that I’m home. I’ve pulled all the paperwork I need to settle the missing credits from Cardoffers.com. The Dish Network bill is in the to-do folder so that I can send in my rebate form with the first billing statement. My new CitiBusinessPremierPass card will earn me points both for the price of the two flights, as well as one point per mile flown (within 6-8 weeks after the first departure date) for my upcoming trip. The auto insurance and water/sewage/trash bills have been entered as manual accounts in Yodlee, and Dish is now in there as well.
Now? Now I can wrassle out the best credit card line-up for the year.
On the 13th, I realized that we should send a bouquet of flowers to one of the gals I work with who consistently does her best to accommodate our, sometimes insane, demanding requests everyday, including weekends, and does so cheerfully. I ordered a dozen roses for next-day delivery with a box of chocolates and paid the extra $10 to make sure that it was going to arrive on Feb. 14th.
I’ve been so busy this week that I didn’t remember to check on the delivery, and didn’t know if she received them. The tracking showed that the flowers were never delivered, and were sitting at a FedEx delivery facility as of yesterday. Chris at Proflowers checked into the situation and not only did he NOT fall back on the (perfectly valid) excuse of bad weather, he assured me that we would receive a 50% refund on our order, more than making up for the expedited delivery fee and he would order a fresh bouquet so that she doesn’t get a wilted bunch. And he’ll upgrade the vase to the nice red vase that I originally liked best. AND he’s upgrading the bouquet to something that’s in stock so that we don’t have to wait until the 26th-28th.
They’ve had my business since college, but now they’ve got my business for good.
They may be slavedrivers around here, but they sure do pick nice Valentine’s Day flowers! I’d forgotten how much I like receiving flowers. BoyDucky’s not allowed to waste his money on them anymore, but the office is welcome to regale me with gifts and such 🙂
February 15, 2007
I done did it. I booked our tickets last night in a terribly convoluted process. BoyDucky and I had once vaguely discussed flying together, but the coldly practical side of me initially dismissed that as a silly notion since we’re coming from SoCal and NorCal. MaDucky weighed in and it later made more sense to me to fly up north, meet up with BoyDucky and fly out together. Well, hey, if I’m going to be needy, I may as well go all out! 🙂 Nah, it’ll be far easier on MaDucky to pick up and drop me off at the local airport than to go to LAX for a midnight flight.
That and his “flawless” Vietnamese is limited to … uh, “hello” and “pho.” I don’t want to lose him either in Hong Kong or in the Saigon airport. I haven’t been there in eleven years, and I only have a vague memory of the humidity slapping me upside the head stepping off the plane way back when. Trying to find him in that mess does NOT sound appealing.
But here’s why I thought using a travel agency would make my life easier:
I’d give them my trip parameters and they would get my visa in order, get my tickets, and I’d give them some money. Bing, bang, boom. They weren’t charging that much, either. The prices they were charging totaled less than the pricing I was finding for just the fares online.
They got the visa part down, an emergency visa at that, but they apparently couldn’t access the same online fares that I could find so they couldn’t get me back home any earlier than the 12th! I wanted to stay no longer than a week because I just can’t take THAT much time off. But no way was I going to wait much longer to go, G’ma’s waitin’ on me!!
So I booked myself an award ticket to go up north, thank goodness for the extra miles from my recent App-o-rama, then tried to book the two flights from SFO to SGN. Would you believe those dirty rats?! I had gotten the right flights going there and coming back, and then they snatched that fare out from under my nose!! I had selected the flights and entered all our information, only for them to say “Sorry, that fare you selected is no longer available.” Whaaaaah? I had taken an extra five minutes to read through their fare rules and that literally nearly cost me another 2 grand! I had to cut the trip short by two days, in order to keep the two tickets under $3000. They wanted $5300 for the two tickets that were only (“only” — psh!) $2800! I’m still outraged.
The upshot is I’ve got 6 days in Vietnam, and 3 days in SF because I can’t change the dates of my award ticket without penalty.
Costs thus far:
Visas (2), emergency: 170
Ticket to SF: 5
Tickets to Vietnam: 2732
——————
2907
My only planned expenses will be to have a traditional dress (ao dai) made. It’ll save me a lot of time and hassle to get it done while I’m back there. It’s far less expensive in general to have things tailor-made there because it’s kind of a normal thing for every girl to have one. I may let PaDucky pick the fabric and just have it done in time for me to get fitted when I get back.
The other major expense is the New Year season. I have to bring a wad of cash for gifting to my cousins which will run about 100k “dong” per cousin. And holy cow, do I have a lot of cousins. I think the exchange rate is around 15-16k dong to the dollar. Time to pay my dues for all those red envelopes I got when I was a kid.
Watch out, I’m getting submerged in culture here!
February 14, 2007
My emergency visa is being processed and should be ready for pick-up tomorrow from the travel agency. Normally it would cost $35, but since I need this to be pushed through NOW it’ll be $85. One benefit to using a travel agency this time is that not only do they usually cover the cost of the visa, they’ll $35 off the entire price when they find my ticket. Another is that they’ll find me the
I totally forgot that it was Wednesday and that it’s payday. Yay payday!
I like that my paychecks are easily split up but I always forget to include a check, cut from the office every two weeks instead of payroll, to reimburse me for my train pass into my calculations.
