One issue that comes up when you start churning credit cards is how to keep track of them all.
What do you need to keep track of?
1. When to pay the bills to avoid late fees.
2. Your progress towards meeting all of your minimum spend requirements in order to get your sign-up bonus.
3. Upcoming yearly fees that will be charged if you don’t cancel your cards on time.
So I thought I would share my approach to keeping track of all this information.
But first a confession: I am the farthest thing from organized. Anyone who has ever roomed with me, or worked with me, or even seen my desk at work, knows this to be true. So if I can keep track of it all, anyone can.
Miles Dividend MD Filing System
My method for keeping track of bill payments is simple. I do not subscribe to electronic billing. I check the mail every day. And I pay bills electronically on the day they arrive, writing down the amount, and the account from which I paid the bill on my paperwork before filing it away. It is also helpful to sign up for automatic payments on all your credit cards so that if something goes wrong you will never be tagged with a late fee.
In terms of keeping track of the progress on my spending, I check all rewards accounts electronically at least once a week to see what my spend totals are. Once I have hit the target spend on a particular card, I remove it from my wallet and focus on the next card. If I ever have a question about miles not posting then I call the credit card company and confirm that I’ve indeed hit my target spend goal and that the rewards posting is pending.
In terms of the yearly fee issue: once a card is removed from my wallet, it is filed in a stack with all of my other cards. (See title photo.) You’ll notice that your credit card is always imprinted with an expiration date. What is not so obvious, is that the expiration date’s month is always the month when the yearly fee is charged. So my stack is always topped with the card whose expiration date is closest to the current month. (i.e. if the current month is October then the top of the stack will have a November expiration date or whichever month is soonest after November.) The rest of the cards are similarly ordered by date. Then three months prior to the next batch of expiration dates, I to call the credit card companies, and tell them that I want either to cancel my card, or downgrade it to a fee free card. This gives me the opportunity to hear about any retention bonuses that they may have to offer prior to canceling.
And that’s about it. Using this method has been quite simple. And I believe it’s easily doable for anyone who is motivated to get into the miles game.
