I live in a city (Los Angeles) where lots of people are independently wealthy. Unfortunately, I’m not one of these people. I do things like hustling miles to help my budget work. Most of you, as readers of this blog, are not insanely rich either. So it blows my mind how much some of you spend on annual fees. When you keep paying annual fees on a card, it kind of defeats the purpose of doing all this. And the most common reason is, “It’s so hard to keep track of all these credit cards.”
Is it really? Not for me. I spend 5 minutes a day with my spreadsheet and know exactly when an annual fee is coming. I also know when it’s time to apply for a new batch of cards. I plug in the basic information (the date I apply for a card, name of card, amount I need to spend, how fast I need to spend it, and amount of bonus miles). Then I color-code it:
- Yellow means I’ve earned the bonus miles, but the card is still open.
- Green means I’ve closed the account.
- Blue means there’s no annual fee, so I don’t have to worry about closing it.
- No color means I haven’t earned the bonus miles yet.
