So you want to get free airline tickets: Should you get a travel reward or cash back credit card?Written by Nick Lian
Travel or Cash Back Credit Cards?
If you want to use a reward credit card for getting free airline tickets, you have a choice of choosing a dedicated airline credit card, a travel reward credit card or a cash back credit card. A dedicated airline credit credit card has hefty annual fees and may not be worth it if you are not a very frequent traveller or spend enough on your credit card.
So should you get a no annual fee travel reward or cash back credit card to earn your free airline ticket? This articles explains how you should go about making this decision.
Let is assume we now have one reward credit card and one cash back credit card to choose from. The reward credit card pays one point for every dollar you spend on purchases. The cash back credit card pays a 1% rebate. Essentially, they both have identical payout formula of 1%. Let us assume both have no annual fee (very realistic) and both have identical apr. Would there be any difference between two credit cards? Should we be indifferent? How do we decide which is better?
How much does your typical vacation airline ticket cost?
The most important factor that in this decision is actually average cost of your airline ticket when you take your vacation. Why? Because most travel reward program (in fact, most frequent flyer program) require that you earn 25,000 miles or points to redeem a roundtrip restricted economy ticket within continental US. You are required to purchase ticket either through specific airline directly (in case of a specific frequent flyer program) or through reward program's agent. If you have a cash back credit card, 25,000 points will get you a $250 cash rebate (assuming a 1% formula).
But we all know that a domestic economy ticket cost can vary anywhere from about $99.00 to $350.00. If you are flying short haul, you can get a $99.00 ticket from a low cost discount carrier. If you fly from coast to coast, you are likely to have to folk out over $300 for a ticket. If you use get a special deal from expedia or priceline, you may get it cheaper.
| | Keep Your Investment ProfitsWritten by Al Thomas
KEEP YOUR INVESTMENT PROFITS Have you had one of those huge investment winners – a stock that went from $2.00 to $80.00? Or any other numbers you want that gave you a gigantic percent profit? Did you take profit or did you watch equity drop back down to what you paid for it? I hope you sold and kept money. That’s what it is all about. So many times when I was a broker I have seen customers make large profits and then think they were omniscient about trading and within a short period give back what they had made. As a brokerage company owner I had seasoned brokers do sane thing. One of my men made $150,000 in a short time. I called to congratulate his performance and suggested he take a vacation from trading for a while. He said, “No, Al, I know what I am doing”. The very next month he lost $155,000. What happened? Listen carefully as I am going to tell you one of great truisms not found in trading training manuals. If you are doing any trading whether in stocks, mutual funds, real estate, currencies, whatever, this applies. Print this out, frame it and put it up on your office wall. “Making a lot of money is just as upsetting to your mind as losing a lot of money”.
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