A Rewarding Experience

I like finding out that I have lots of free money coming to me. It makes my day.

And no, I have not filed my tax returns yet for this year. So there may be more free money coming in a while (although it is equally probable that my wife and I may owe a little bit in taxes -- it's hard to guage because this is the first year that we have earned any significant amount of income). My free money has come from a different, and unexpected, source.

I do my banking with a certain large bank. Let's just say that if the U.S. were to have a national bank, it might get confused with this bank. I've had a checking account there since I started college. In fact, I think my account is still considered a student checking account, even though I'm now almost 2 years out of law school. But I'm cool with no monthly fees, as well as a credit card with a decent limit.

I'm really responsible with my credit. I almost never carry a balance on my card, paying it off in full each month. I never even come close to hitting my credit limit, and I rarely get above 20% of it. And now it is finally paying off.

Apparently, I was automatically enrolled in some sort of free rewards program through my bank (which issues my credit card). For every dollar that got charged and paid off, I got one reward point. Although they have been sending me advertisements about their rewards program for the last couple of years, I usually ignored them because I assumed that they just wanted me to sign up for some service that was going to end up costing me $12.99 a month or something. Well, that ignorance actually ended up paying off.

I must have charged about $58 thousand worth of stuff to my account over the last few years. (Don't worry, I paid it all off on time, for the most part.) Which translates to 58 thousand points. That's a lot of freakin' points. I can trade them in for all sorts of free stuff. Gift cards, discounts, and even cash back. If you save up enough points (at least 25,000) the cash back rewards pay off at a rate of 1 dollar for every 100 points. Well, for those of you that haven't already done the math, I have over $500 coming to me. Cool beans. The check should arrive in a couple of weeks.

It's kind of nice to log on to your bank account, and suddenly realize that you have a decent chunk of unexpected income coming your way.

But now that I realize the rewards that I can get, I'm gonna start using my credit card more often. Since I never carry a balance, I am trying to figure out a way to get some of my regular fixed expenses paid through credit. For example, my wife and I are looking at moving into a new apartment in a few months, and we are hoping that we can get into one that allows us to pay our bill via card. Also, I'm going to see if there is a way to have my monthly student loan payment charged to my card. Since I currently pay these by check each month, there's no worries about carrying a balance. Think of the points I can rack up. I can probably get at least a couple hundred bucks in rewards per year.

This is totally gonna change my life.