Personal Finance and Investing

After years of struggling with the Demon Debt, my wife and I are debt free, excluding the house (and THAT is paid off in a little more than 3 years).

I travel a lot for work, and have a credit card I use for that travel, and pay it off when the company reimburses me in a couple weeks.

I went on a trip with my boss who travels a LOT more than me, and he noticed I was paying with a crappy 1% cash back card, and he was like... "if you have to travel, you might as well benefit from it" So he introduced me to the using travel credit cards in a system.

You can really benefit from getting new cards because they often offer crazy rewards. If you like to travel, you can take a trip on almost all points every couple of years, apparently. My wife and I are doing our first "points trip" this summer.

Opening new cards isn't a problem, so long as you understand the rules of the individual companies and how the credit scores work.

For credit score, the hit comes from "hard enquiries." This is the hard credit check companies make when you open the card. These affect your score by 3-10 points per enquiry. But the effect is relatively short. It pretty much fades after 6 months. If you otherwise have good-excellent credit, ine of these every few months isn;t an issue.

But getting a new credit card can actually LOWER your debt usage ratio, which will boost your score over time, so long as you don;t load up the new card. Other cards can sit idle without hurting your scredit. Some companies will let credit sit idle forever. Some (like Chase) will close accounts that are idle after a couple of years, so keep en eye on that. That can suddenly lower your available credit and increase usage rates. That can ping you.

Some individual comanies have rules too... Chase is the most "infamouse" with their 5/24 rules. If you've opened 5 or more credit cards in the last 24 months, they will automatically deny your application regardless of your credit score or income. Amex is pretty generous with accepting applications, but have their own limits for cards, etc.

Of course the key to doing all this effectively is to not pay the credit card companies interest! Use the CC like a debit card... only buy what you could afford with cash (emergencies aside... but even then, an emergency fund is better)