What's In Your Wallet? (Update)

In this blog post that I wrote back in September 2006 I wrote what credit cards I had in my wallet at that time. The nature of credit card rewards is that the benefits don't last very long. Case in point: the two credit cards that I featured in the blog post are no longer in our wallets. Instead, this is what we carry now:

• Fidelity Investments 529 Mastercard - 2% cash back on all purchases, deposited directly into a designated Fidelity Investments 529 account.

• Chase Rewards Plus Visa - 5% cash back on gas, groceries, and pharmacies.

• Costco TrueEarnings American Express - 3% cash back on gas and dining out, 2% back on travel, and 1% back at Costco

• Citi Forward Visa - 5% cash back for dining out, entertainment, and most importantly bookstores (and Amazon.com - where any purchase is 5% back!)

• Starwood Preferred Guest American Express - 1 Starpoint for every purchase, double Starpoints for a stay at their hotel properties.

Five credit cards? Seems overkill, right? It's actually simple. For groceries, we use the Chase Visa. For gas, since Costco gas prices are usually 10 cents per gallon less than other stations, we use the Costco Amex. For dining out, movies, and Amazon.com, we use Citi Forward. For Costco purchases, we use the SPG Amex. It's the Swiss Army knife of travel cards. With it:

1. You can “top off” several different frequent flier accounts to get to that coveted reward ticket level.
2. You can convert just a few miles to keep your other miles from expiring.
3. You can get 1.25 miles per dollar spent, 25% more than most other airlines cards.
4. It’s a cheap way to get free nights at decent hotels.
5. You can redeem the starpoints for gift cards at a lot of popular merchants.

We also like to stay at Starwood properties (for our anniversary, we stayed at the US Grant in San Diego) and being a cardmember and an SPG member enabled us to be upgraded to a suite free of charge. To avoid unnecessary hits to our credit scores, I simply called Citibank to convert our old Dividend Platinum to the Forward and American Express to convert our old Delta SkyMiles to the SPG Amex.

Finally, for all other purchases that do not fall in the other categories, we use the 529 Mastercard. I've got it down pat, the problem is that Lediya still gets mixed up with her purchases. At least the worst she can do is get 2% cashback.

Note: Pay off balances in full every month otherwise the interest will wipe out any cashback you may earn.