Credit Card Rewards: The Ultimate Guide

By Dr. Jeffrey Keimer

The following post contains affiliate links through with YFP or its team members may receive compensation. 

This is a guest post from Dr. Jeffrey Keimer. Dr. Keimer is a 2011 graduate of Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences and pharmacy manager for a regional drugstore chain in Vermont. He and his wife Alex have been pursuing financial independence since 2016. Check out Jeff’s book, FIRE Rx: The Pharmacist’s Guide to Financial Independence to learn how to create an actionable plan to reach financial independence.

When you buy something, would you rather pay full price or get it at a discount?

Well, unless you wear paying full retail as some sort of weird badge of honor, I’m willing to bet you’d rather go with the latter; and to be sure, there are many ways to get stuff for less.  You could shop the clearance rack, buy in bulk, and maybe even haggle.  

But what if, after you’ve tried all those things, you’d still like to pay less?  Enter the credit card reward point.  Ever since the concept was introduced back in the mid 1980s, consumers have been able to get reimbursed for bits of their purchases and do just that, get what’s effectively an additional discount.  And, if you play your cards right (pun fully intended), that discount can be incredible.  

In this post, I’ll teach you how to play the credit card rewards game, and make no mistake, it is a game and the prizes get better as you get more advanced.  At its basic level, credit card rewards can help you pay a bit less overall for the things you buy on a daily basis.  But at the game’s highest level of play, so-called travel hacking, you can exploit these programs to travel the world in luxury for free.

Interested?

Cool.  

In a nutshell, the rewards game comes down to two things: earning and redeeming.  For each, I’ll cover some of the common strategies, broken down by difficulty, that you can use to maximize rewards in a way that works for you.  Don’t want to go down the full travel hacking rabbit hole and start a Tik Tok about free first-class travel?  Then don’t.  The rewards game can be lucrative even at the beginner level with minimal effort.  

Before we get into all that though, we need to talk about the ways you can lose the game.

Ways to Lose

First and foremost, when dealing with credit cards and the reward programs surrounding them, don’t think for a second that the companies offering these benefits are losing money with them.  Just the opposite.  Credit cards represent one of, if not the, most profitable parts of the banking industry and rewards cards are no exception. And while rewards give us the opportunity to take back some of those profits for ourselves, the way you lose here is the same way everybody else loses.

How?  

First and foremost, credit cards charge people exorbitant interest when they carry a balance.  This is even more so with rewards cards since they generally charge higher APR’s and fees than non-rewards cards.  Because of that, it is extremely important that if you plan on playing the rewards game you’re in a position to pay your balance off in full each and every month.  

Have trouble with that or are you currently in credit card debt?  DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME!

Second, people tend to spend more when using credit cards than they do when using cash alone.  Why?  While the jury is still out on the exact cause, recent research suggests that the dopaminergic reward pathways in the brain are involved.  Yeah, those pathways!  Turns out the old phrase “shopaholic” might be pretty spot on.

Once you add in the prospect of other rewards to your shopping, it’s not hard to see why banks push rewards cards.  Rewards cards generally charge merchants a higher fee when you use them and finding ways to get you to spend more is insanely profitable.  Your job, if you decide to play the rewards game, is to resist.  Remember, the point here is to get a discount on your normal spending so you can free up money for other goals, not inflate your lifestyle.  Rewards can be great, but not if they come at the expense of blowing up your budget.

Finally, I wouldn’t recommend playing (at least not aggressively) if you plan on getting a serious loan, like a mortgage in the near future.  Opening up a number of credit cards in a short period of time, as many travel hackers do, might spook a loan officer resulting in a denial of your loan application.

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Earning Rewards

As I said before, the game involves two parts: earning and redeeming.  In this section, I’m going to talk about some of the most common ways people earn points, miles, cash back, even crypto (all of which I’ll refer to as “points” for simplicity’s sake for the rest of the article) and break down each strategy by its relative difficulty in practice.  What follows is by no means an exhaustive list, but should help you get started and decide how deep down the rabbit hole you want to go.

Beginner

Points/Cash Back on Purchases (One Card)

This is probably what most people who dip their toes into the realm of credit card rewards do.  You open a card that earns points on every purchase and put pretty much all your spending on that card.

Simple, right?

It is.  The only complexity here comes down to what card you choose to use.  First, you need to decide if you want your points to pay for travel or act as cash back (typically in the form of a statement credit).  In terms of overall redemption value, travel tends to come out on top here, but like anything, there can be nuance.  Sometimes going for the cash-back card can make more sense depending on your lifestyle.

Second, you need to decide whether or not you’re open to a card with an annual fee.  If your plan is to use the points for travel redemptions, it’s almost certain that you’re going to need one with an annual fee since many of the most lucrative redemption options will be closed off to you in the no-fee tier of cards.  If, on the other hand, you’re going to redeem your points for cash back then a no-fee card can work just fine.

Third, you need to decide what kind of points you’re looking for.  That’s going to depend on how you see yourself redeeming them.  Many points limit what you can do, only letting you use them for cash back or with a particular business.  On the other hand, some points, such as those issued by the various card issuers themselves, can offer a wider range of flexibility.  That flexibility often comes at the cost of an annual fee though, so bear that in mind.

Finally, you need to pick an individual card.  The choice here simply needs to line up the points you want and their earning rates with what you actually spend money on in your budget.  Like to eat out and order food?  Make sure to look for a high earning rate on dining expenses.  Fly a lot?  Find a card that offers a high rate on travel or consider a card with your favorite airline.  It’s not rocket science.  And if nothing in your budget really sticks out as a “bonus category” for you, then look for a card with a high base earnings rate.  These days, there are a number of cards that offer 1.5-2% back on all purchases, usually without an annual fee.

Once you’ve done all this and picked a card, you’re good to go.  You won’t be writing a travel hacking blog, but you’ve gone from zero to something in the rewards game.  And while you may decide to go no further (nothing wrong with that), following these steps to evaluate new cards is fundamental to the higher levels of play.

Sign-Up Bonus (SUB) Targeting

Out of all the point-earning opportunities, the most lucrative BY FAR is the SUB.

And just how lucrative can a SUB be? 

Well, as I’m writing this, I’m finishing up one that offers 80,000 points on $4,000 worth of spending in the first 3 months.  Given my history with these points, I generally get around 2.5 cents worth of value from each of them bringing the total value of the SUB to $2,000.  That’s a 50% return on that spending!

When it comes to the rewards game, SUBs offer the greatest chance to generate value.  Therefore, any strategy approaching the rewards game should take them into account; even if you only plan on opening a single card.

At the beginner level, interacting with SUBs is a little different than the more advanced levels and, paradoxically, requires a lot more thought up front.  This is because you’ll be targeting a SUB on a card you plan to keep versus one you’ll likely close.  As such, when thinking about SUBs at this level, you want to target a specific type of card first, then target the best SUB within the list of cards meeting your criteria.

The benefit to approaching SUBs this way is that you don’t really have to worry about all the other little (and often unsaid) rules that come along with SUBs.  Just open the card you want, meet the SUB criteria (if there are any), then enjoy keeping and using the card. That’s it.

Intermediate

Got your feet wet with a new card and want more?  Cool.  Personally, this is the level where I operate for the most part.  If you like to travel, success at this level can help cover a significant portion of that part of your budget.

Before getting into that, a disclaimer.  At the intermediate level, we’re going to start getting into the weeds regarding some of the “rules” surrounding credit card openings.  I’m going to be a little vague here, and that’s intentional.  Many of these so-called rules are based on guidelines used by credit card companies (often not published publicly) to determine whether or not you’ve run afoul of their terms of service; prompting them to take away all your points and cease doing business with you.  Those terms of service (particularly in areas such as program misuse) tend to be intentionally vague themselves, so I’m going to follow suit here.

Multi-Card Optimization

Let’s say you started off your rewards journey with a single card.  Maybe that first card gave you a dope 6% back on groceries.  Sweet!  But when it comes to dining out, you get a measly 1% back.  Meanwhile, there are cards out there offering at least triple that in the category with no annual fee!  Using one card for all your spending certainly has the perk of simplicity, but I can guarantee you that you won’t be able to maximize your point earnings with just one card.  

Cards are typically good for covering one or two spending categories, but not much more than that.  This is where a strategy of using multiple cards to cover the gaps can come into play, especially if those additional cards don’t carry an annual fee.

In practice, this might mean you have four or so cards, each with a different role to play.  Going out to eat?  Use the card that gets triple points on dining.  Filling up the car?  Pull out the one that gets 5% back at the pump.  You get the picture.

Depending on what cards you use, there can also be some additional synergies here too.  For example, Chase Bank’s in-house reward point, the Ultimate Reward (UR) point, can be earned on a number of their no-fee Freedom cash back cards.  However, the UR point you’d earn with those is the same UR point you’d earn with their premium tier Sapphire cards.  When paired with one of the Sapphire cards, the value of those points can go up significantly.  Given the fact that those no-fee cards can earn significantly higher rates than the Sapphire card in certain places, the multi-card strategy can really bump up your earning potential.

The only real difficulty with a multi-card strategy (and my wife likes to remind me of this) is that it can be tough to juggle multiple cards and remember what to do with all of them at any given time.  This is especially true if you (like me) incorporate one of those cards that have quarterly rotating bonus categories into the mix.  If you are considering this strategy, make yourself a spreadsheet or get a label maker so that it’s easier to keep track of what card pays for what.

SUB Farming (2-4 per year)

In a nutshell, SUB farming is all about getting those sweet SUBs and then saying “thank u, next.”  This can be insanely lucrative for the level of work you’ve got to put in. Those people blogging about how they travel the world in luxury for free all the time?  Yeah, this is how they do it.  The only difference between this level and that one is the degree to which you’re farming bonuses.  At this level, we’re going relatively slow but still looking to cover the expense of flights and/or lodging for a few family vacations a year.

Once you’ve decided that you’d like to farm some SUBs, the first thing you need to do is start a spreadsheet that’s going to detail three things: the card you open, the date you opened it, and the date you received the SUB.  This is important because when it comes to SUBs, the different card issuers have different rules surrounding how often they’ll give you one for a given card or family of cards.  For example, American Express makes it easy, they’ll give you one SUB per card per lifetime.  On the other hand, a bank like Chase might let you get another SUB on a card you’ve previously had after a specified length of time.  How will you know when you’re up for round 2 on a card?  The spreadsheet!

In addition to telling you when you might be up for another go at a card, having a spreadsheet can also inform you when you might be reaching your limit with certain card issuers.  Going back to Chase (just because their rules are better known) you can only open up a certain number of cards in a given time period before they start rejecting your applications.  Currently (it can always change) they have a rule that if you’ve opened up 5 personal cards with any bank in the last 24 months, they’ll generally reject any new credit applications you make with them.  

And that’s just one of the more famous examples.  Each bank or card issuer is going to have its own rules that they generally don’t publish.  The only way to navigate the waters here is to keep tabs on what your activity’s been and use forums to keep up to date with what other people have discovered regarding the various limits issuers impose.

Finally, when SUB farming, you need to consider whether the card you’re opening for the SUB is a keeper or one that’ll become dead weight in your wallet.  This is all the more important when considering a card with an annual fee.  Some cards have cool ongoing benefits that can even make them worth the fee, others not so much.  Your job is to separate the wheat from the chaff and come up with an exit strategy for the ones that don’t make the cut.  

If you decide the card needs to go, there are a couple of ways to go about it.  The first, and obvious one, is to simply close the account, and, believe it or not, there’s a possible downside to this.  If the card is an old one, it can negatively impact your credit score by decreasing the average age of your lines of credit.  Dumb?  Yes, but it’s still a thing.  In addition, if you close that card “too soon” (which is not really defined) after you got the SUB, the card issuer might flag the account for misuse and claw back the SUB.  

On the upside though, if this is a card you’ve had for a while you might be able to milk another bonus out of it called a “retention bonus.”  You will need to actually talk to a human being about this, but it’s possible that in lieu of closing the account, you can get offered the chance for some extra points, a fee waiver, or a statement credit.

What else can you do?  Downgrade it!  Oftentimes, cards are offered in different tiers, some with an annual fee and perks, others with no fee and fewer perks.  Sometimes the better move is to keep the line of credit open with a card that doesn’t have a fee than shutter the account entirely.

2-Player Mode

Do you know what’s better than scoring a nice SUB on a new card?  Having your spouse open the same card under their name and scoring yet another SUB.  Even better than that?  Getting a referral bonus for referring your spouse to the card.  That’s 2-player mode.

If you’re married or otherwise financially entwined with another human being, 2-player mode can be a great way to rack up points while keeping either one of you out of trouble from a card opening point of view.  Incorporating the rewards game into your financial plan can be great, but only if you steer clear of the dangers listed above and craft a strategy that’s sustainable.  2-player mode helps a lot with the latter.

In addition to helping you keep the party going, 2-player mode also has its own opportunity.  Namely, the opportunity to easily take advantage of cardmember referral programs.  Most cards offer these.  Basically, they give you a link to share with others and if others use that link to open up the card themselves, you get paid.  How much you get paid varies, but if the card in question is one of the more premium varieties, the payout is generally larger.  For instance, with that SUB I’m finishing out now, my wife referred me to the card and got an extra 15,000 points (which we’ll use for ~$375 in travel expenses) just for emailing me a link.  Not bad for a little cut and paste.

You can screw this up though.  Ever hear of an “authorized user?”  It’s when you add someone to your account, they get their own card to use, and all their purchases go on your bill.  Heck, you might even get charged an additional fee every year for having them there.  

Don’t do it.

There’s a time and place for making someone an authorized user on your account, but this isn’t it.  When you make someone an authorized user on a card, you generally shut them out of getting SUBs on that card.  Need to have the card in two places at once?  Use a mobile wallet.

Stacking

When you make a purchase, are credit card points the only incentive out there to encourage your spending?  

No!  

Welcome to the wonderful world of stacking!

Aside from store loyalty programs (which can be part of the stack), there’s a whole cottage industry of commission-sharing companies whose business model is all about getting you to shop places in return for some additional cash or points back on your purchase.  Online, these are typically known as shopping portals.  Your card issuer might even have its own.  

Points or cash back you earn through these sites always earn on top of whatever points your card earns, hence the term stacking.  One level of earning through your card might be nice, but add in another (or maybe multiple as we’ll cover later on) and the total rebate you get on your purchases can approach SUB territory.

The way it works is simple.  You go to the shopping portal site you have an account with, link to the store you want to shop at through their site, do your shopping, and a few days later some extra cash or points are deposited in your account with the shopping portal.  All you have to do is pick the best portal you wish to do business with.  And if you think that’s hard, don’t.  The interweb has made it easy as a number of sites aggregate the top portals and you can search by store.  Personally, I’m a fan of the site Cashback Monitor.

Advanced

Now we get to the more difficult ways to earn points.  At this level, your rewards game is more of a side hustle than a hobby.  To be successful here, you’ll need to consistently put in the effort to stay on top of new developments in the rewards space and have strong organizational skills.

SUB Farming (5+ Per Year)

While the overall process is pretty much the same as at the intermediate level, SUB farming at the advanced level requires some different considerations and an even greater need to keep tabs on your cards.  Personally, I’m not a big fan of SUB farming at this level.  But, if you’re wondering how those people with travel-hacking YouTube channels seem to score five-figure plane tickets for free, this is mainly how it’s done.

First off, as you get more aggressive with SUB farming, the closer you get to your business becoming a liability versus an asset for the credit card companies.  And, as it turns out, they don’t care to do business with people who want to eat into their bottom line.  While there’s no red line where your level of SUB farming activity will get you into trouble, it’s always a concern at this level.  Being active in various forums, learning from other people’s experiences, and getting to know intuitively where those lines might have to be central to your strategy here.

Second, this level of SUB farming presents the challenge of picking good cards to target.  More than likely, you’ll burn through the most desirable cards early on, leaving you with second and third-tier choices.  At that point, you really need to think about what kind of redemption strategy you can use (more on that later) to squeeze value from cards you would’ve passed on otherwise.

Third, many cards (including most of the ones with juicy SUBs) require that you spend a certain amount of money in the first few months in order to qualify for the SUB.  This usually isn’t a problem at the intermediate level but can be challenging at the advanced level, especially if you’re making it a point to not inflate your lifestyle.  So what do you do once you’ve exhausted the parts of your budget you’d normally put on a card?  Look into paying for things like your rent or mortgage with a card.  Typically, those types of expenses don’t allow card payments, but there are services that will let you use a card to pay them, usually charging an extra fee to do so.  Under normal circumstances, it’s totally not a good idea to pay bills this way.  But in this instance, the “return on investment” you get from the SUB might make the juice worth the squeeze.

Finally, just like you need to consider at the intermediate level, determining exit strategies for the various cards you open is super important.  If you don’t you’ll soon find yourself buried in annual fees charged by dozens of cards sitting in a drawer.  In addition, those retention bonuses I mentioned earlier can play a much bigger role at this level of play as you may find that they’re the only way to squeeze any type of bonus out of a card past a certain point.

Multi-Stacking

How can you earn SUB level rebates on your purchases without having to farm another SUB?  Stack a bunch of smaller reward rates and discounts on top of one another!  Multi-stacking is kind of like the extreme couponing of the rewards game but you can get similar results without holding up the line at the grocery store.  

In addition, multi-stacking doesn’t share many of the same types of risks that SUB farming can have.  The primary risk here has to do with your data, as that’s what’s generally paying for all the rewards.  Don’t want to share your data with third parties?  Don’t play around with stacking.

So how does it work?  Generally speaking, there are multiple avenues for stacking discounts outside actual coupons.  They are:

  • Credit Card Offers
  • Shopping Portals
    • Active
    • Passive
  • Gift Card Marketplace
  • Brand Loyalty Programs

Each of these things can form part of your stack so let’s talk about each a little more in-depth and then put it together in an example.

When speaking about credit card offers in this context, I’m not talking about the ones that might promise a SUB.  Offers in this context refer to various smaller promos you can take advantage of either with specific retailers or spending categories.  In general, these offers are found on your credit card account’s online dashboard and you need to opt into them.  If used, many of them will give you additional points or a percentage back as a statement credit.

Next, we come back to shopping portals, but this time, I want to break them down into what I call active and passive.  Active portals are like the ones described earlier.  You have to click a link and shop through that link in order to get the bonus.  Passive portals don’t require that.  With a passive portal, you supply the portal with read-only access to your card transaction data and when you make a purchase with an affiliate, the bonus gets deposited automatically.  Make a purchase through an active portal with a passive affiliate?  Yeah, you get both bonuses.  And if you use multiple passive portals that don’t share the same network infrastructure, it’s possible to double, triple, or even quadruple dip on the rebates.

Online gift card marketplaces present yet another opportunity to shave some extra percent off your purchases.  The premise is simple.  People get gift cards that they don’t want all the time and need a place to offload them.  However, a gift card is just a form of currency that can only be used in limited settings.  Because of that, the market value for gift cards is always lower than that of actual, legal tender currency.  So, if someone wants to sell a gift card for, say, dollars, they have to price it at a discount.  And depending on the popularity of that gift card’s issuer, that discount might be small, or incredibly steep.  In addition, many of these marketplaces often take on the role of new gift card retailers as well, offering cash back on their platforms as an incentive.

Finally, we have the individual retailer’s loyalty program.  While many of these might not be worth your time (and data), especially if you don’t shop with them often, it never hurts to consider them.  Sometimes, you might even get a welcome bonus just for signing up.

Here’s a personal example of this using a gas station near me, as I write this in July 2022, and how my thought process went.

Putting it all together, we get this as a total discount (expressed as a percentage) per gallon:

Not bad, right?  That’s the power of multi-stacking.

Redeeming Rewards

Now that we’ve earned a crap ton of points, it’s time to do something with them.  Mercifully, redeeming rewards tends to be a lot less complicated than earning them and it’s not difficult to extract a reasonable amount of value from them.  Still, there are some things to look out for and some techniques you can use to amp up that value.

Beginner

Cash Back

Redeeming your points for cash back is the absolute easiest way to extract value from them, and depending on your card, it might be the only thing you can do with them.  Typically, points redeem at a 1 cent per point value when cashing them out, which isn’t bad; but not great if you can possibly redeem them for travel expenses.

One word of warning here though.  Oftentimes, retailers affiliated with card issuers will give you the option to “pay with points” which sounds nice, but it’s usually a trap meant for people who don’t bother to do the math.  For example, a very popular online retailer will let me do this with my Chase UR points.  But, when you do the math, you find that redeeming them in this way results in a per-point value of $0.008, 20% less than the value I’d get if I just cashed them out!  

In addition, that same retailer offers a card giving 5 points back on purchases made with them and the option to pay for future purchases with those points.  Sounds reasonable.  But, if you pay with the points, you no longer get the 5 points per dollar from the card.  Better to redeem those points for actual cash or a statement credit than pay with them once again.

Book Travel With Points

This is typically the only option available to you if you have a card earning airline miles or hotel points and a potential option if you carry one of the bank-issued (Chase, American Express, Citi, etc.) premium cards.  For this section, I’m going to focus on the bank cards since there can be more advanced considerations with miles and hotel points.

Nowadays, most of the major card issuers operate their own online travel agencies, and to entice you to use those agencies, they tend to give you a guaranteed bump in the value of your points (typically in the 0.25-0.5 cent per point range) if you use your points to pay for your vacation.  Unlike my previous warning about paying with points, in this context, it can be worth it, especially if you’re looking to keep things simple.

Intermediate

Transferring Points

One of the biggest benefits of having a card that earns bank points such as the Chase UR points or American Express Membership Rewards points is the ability to transfer those points to their travel partners.  And while each bank has its own list of airlines and hotels that they partner with, the ability to transfer lets you shop around within that list to find the best redemption value when booking a trip.  

For example, say you’re looking to book a trip and you don’t really care what airline or hotel you’re going to use.  Once you find out how much it’ll cost in points and/or money from each of the options available to you as a transfer partner, you transfer the points to the partner offering the highest value and cost reduction for your trip.  Oftentimes, the value you’ll be able to squeeze out of a point will be quite a bit more than the 1 cent per point you’d get from just cashing them out.  For my family, we’ve gotten a lot of value from transferring our points out to hotels where we’ve averaged about 2.5 cents per point in value.

One word of warning here.  When you transfer points, the process is typically irreversible.  Found a better redemption after you transferred a bunch of points to that hotel chain?  Guess what?  You’re using the points at the hotel.  Only transfer points once you are absolutely sure that you’re cool with redeeming them with a given travel partner.

Advanced

Gaming Award Charts

Finally, the last thing we’re going to talk about regarding the rewards game is how some of the pros actually land those ridiculous airline redemptions that seem to pepper social media.  While yes, those people accumulate an ungodly amount of points through aggressive SUB farming and the like, they’re also incredibly conscious about squeezing every last cent of value from those points.  To do that, they have to think out of the box when it comes to where points get sent.

For example, why might a travel hacker living in New York, with absolutely no interest in traveling to Europe, transfer their hard-earned points to British Airways?  

Two reasons: airline alliances and award charts.

Most major airlines today operate in partnerships with other airlines known as alliances.  If you’ve done any air travel at all, you’ve probably heard of the big three: Star Alliance, Skyteam, and Oneworld, each founded in part by a major US airline (United, Delta, and American respectively).  Within each alliance, partner airlines share resources to help travelers get to their destinations and allow travelers with loyalty benefits on one partner, such as miles and elite status, to enjoy them across the alliance.  That last bit is incredibly important to the discussion here.  

Within an alliance, it’s possible to book award travel on airlines that you have no award miles with.

But why would you do that?  First, maybe the airline you have the miles with just doesn’t go where you’re looking to go.  That’s the obvious reason.  The less obvious, and more interesting, reason is, maybe the airline you want to use has a crappy award chart.  

What’s an award chart?  It’s basically the pricing scheme an airline has when you’re looking to book award travel with them.  Many of them use a pretty straightforward algorithm where the amount of miles you need to pay is based on the normal cost of the fare.  Others are…well, complicated.  But that’s where the value tends to be.

For instance, some airlines’ award charts charge a flat rate within a geographic area (like the lower 48 states) while others have a tiered scheme based on distance.  Here, an opportunity might exist for the traveler flying from New York to Los Angeles when using the geographic chart.  But, if the traveler isn’t going very far, say New York to Baltimore, then using the carrier with the distance-based chart might be the better bet.  What’s more, the airline with the better award chart might have nothing to do with the actual flights involved, as long as they’re in an alliance with the carriers that are.  

In my experience, gaming the award chart system can be lucrative, but wins weren’t frequent enough for it to be a major part of my rewards game.  If you live in/near a major city or airline hub and plan on international or luxury travel, it can produce a lot of return.  But, if you live in the country like me, or if your travel is more run-of-the-mill, I wouldn’t expect a ton of value here.

Conclusion

Overall, the rewards game can be well worth playing, as long as you play it responsibly.  Play it right, and you can significantly offset parts of your budget.  Play it wrong, and there are legit consequences.  After all, getting some free flights or vacations means nothing if it means getting yourself in credit card debt or derailing your financial plan with excessive spending.

But if you do think the rewards game can benefit you, I encourage you to try it out.  Even at the beginner levels of play, it can help make a dent in your expenses.  And, sure, as Dave Ramsey likes to point out “no one ever says they got rich off credit card points” (and he’s 100% correct on that), that’s not really what we’re getting at here either.  The rewards game isn’t something that’s ever going to play the lead in your financial plan.  But it can play a fun supporting role.

Interested in checking out some credit cards that offer rewards? Click on the links below!

Featured 2023 Credit Card Offers

Cash Back Credit Cards

Travel Rewards Credit Cards

Airline and Miles Credit Cards

Rewards Credit Cards

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The following is a guest post from Dr. Jeffrey Keimer. Dr. Keimer is a 2011 graduate of Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences and pharmacy manager for a regional drugstore chain in Vermont. He and his wife Alex have been pursuing financial independence since 2016. Check out Jeff’s book, FIRE Rx: The Pharmacist’s Guide to Financial Independence to learn how to create an actionable plan so you can retire early as a pharmacist.

 

By now, you’ve probably heard that it’s possible to retire not just early, but incredibly early; like in your 30s or 40s instead of in your 60s or 70s. As evidenced by the financial independence, retire early (FIRE) movement, many people are doing just that. Now while that sounds awesome, the big question (as with most things) is always “how do you do it?”

In an earlier post, “The FIRE Prescription: How to Retire Early as a Pharmacist,” I gave a really broad overview of some of the basic tenets of the FIRE movement: the four percent rule, reducing expenses, investing, and drawdown of those investments. Having a good understanding of those concepts is crucial if you ever want to reach financial independence, but I didn’t go into much detail on any one of them in particular. Time to remedy that. So for this post, I wanted to take a deeper dive into that first concept: the four percent rule.

Why that one? Because it was the first one I listed. Duh.

On a more serious note though, the four percent rule (and by extension the concept of a safe withdrawal rate) should be the first thing to understand when drawing up a game plan for FIRE as a pharmacist. This is because it can help define the ever-elusive concept of “enough.” After all, what kind of journey do you set out on without a destination?

What is the Four Percent Rule?

When people in the FIRE community talk about the “four percent rule” what they’re referring to is a concept known as a safe withdrawal rate for early retirement. A safe withdrawal rate (SWR) can be defined as the annual amount (as a percentage) you can expect to withdraw from an investment portfolio without having to worry about the portfolio running out of money in the future; even as you adjust the initial amount for inflation year over year. Basically, you can look at your portfolio balance and figure out how much yearly income you can draw from it without worrying about the portfolio going to zero by assuming a safe withdrawal rate.

The “four percent” part comes in when we’re making assumptions about what kind of safe withdrawal rate our portfolio might support and it comes from a very important study published by financial planner, William Bengen, back in the early 1990s. In a nutshell, Bengen found that a diversified portfolio of US stocks and bonds could support at least a 4% safe withdrawal rate for retirees looking to tap their investments for retirement income over 30 years (more on that a little later).

Why it Matters

For those looking to join the FIRE movement, the four percent rule is probably the first major concept you get exposed to. Why? Because the whole idea of early retirement and the four percent rule do something incredibly important: it tells you where the endzone is. If you know how much you spend per year, you can use the four percent rule to define how much you need to save so that you can cover those expenses. Once you reach that number, sometimes called your FI number, you can probably declare yourself financially independent and consider early retirement.

So how do you calculate a FI number? Well, to borrow a phrase, it’s shockingly simple. Just take the inverse of 4% which is 25 and multiply your annual expenses by it.

For example, say your annual expenses (taxes included!) are $80,000. What’s your FI number?

$80,000 x 25 = $2,000,000

By using the four percent rule to help determine the amount you need to reach FI, not only do you set yourself apart from most Americans who frankly have no clue how much they need to retire, you give yourself a real number to work toward. With that in hand, you can measure your progress toward what many consider to be the ultimate goal in personal finance.

Given that, it’s no wonder that the four percent rule has become a chief cornerstone of the FIRE movement. What’s more, not only does it give you a concrete goal to work towards, it also puts that goal more firmly under your control.

Think about this for a second.

Many of us have been exposed to the advice that you need to save some multiple of your income by retirement to retire comfortably. But how much control do you really have over your income? As pharmacists, the answer to that question has to be “less than we’d like.” Many of us are all too aware of how much the market forces of supply and demand affect what we can expect in compensation.

That said, the four percent rule does something pretty spectacular. Instead of basing your retirement number on your income, it bases it off your expenses; something much, much more under your control. Cut out $500 a month from your budget? That translates to $150,000 less you’ll need to retire. The math is simple but incredibly powerful. What the four percent rule does, and I really can’t emphasize this enough, is that it gives you the knowledge to take control of your financial destiny!

Where Did it Come From?

Here’s where we’re going to get a little more technical and go over some of the research the four percent rule was born from, so buckle up. The four percent rule, as it’s come to be known, originally came out of the study “Determining Withdrawal Rates Using Historical Data” published in the Journal of Financial Planning by William Bengen in 1994. Bengen’s goal with the study was to shed some light on what kind of income a retiree could safely live on given a standard portfolio of stocks and bonds where the income produced came from the portfolio’s total return. And what did he find? By using historical return data on US stocks and US treasury notes, Bengen was able to conclude that the worst possible scenario for a retiree using a 50/50 stock and bond portfolio was that their money ran out after 33 years following a consistent 4% initial withdrawal strategy, indexing the withdrawal each year to inflation; a level Bengen referred to as SAFEMAX, and the rest of the world came to know as the four percent rule.

So how did that withdrawal strategy work? Like this. Say you have a $1,000,000 portfolio at the start of retirement. The first year, you’d draw $40,000 from it (4% of the initial balance). Next year, assuming a 3% rate of inflation, you’d increase the previous amount by 3% ($40,000 x 1.03 = $41,200) and that would be the amount withdrawn. In the years that come, just rinse and repeat. Slightly more complicated math than the FI number math, but still not too bad.

Bengen’s study was a watershed moment in the financial planning world. Before his study on withdrawal rates, retirement income planning either followed something akin to a reverse mortgage on the portfolio, reliance on pension income, or the old-school rentier model of only factoring in the income generated by the portfolio (i.e. not touching the principal). With Bengen, now the concept of a safe withdrawal rate could be incorporated into a retiree’s financial plan. His was just the first of many on the subject though.

Another piece of research that gets a lot of traction in the FIRE movement is one conducted by three finance professors from Trinity University dubbed, creatively, “The Trinity Study.” The Trinity Study more or less supported Bengen’s initial findings in that a 4% withdrawal rate tended to coincide with minimal risk of portfolio failure (i.e. going to zero) over a 30 year withdrawal period. The only real difference with the Trinity Study vs. Bengen’s was that the Trinity researchers presented their findings primarily in terms of probability of failure rather than just focusing on the lower bound results as Bengen did.

This was important to the whole safe withdrawal rate discussion because when making forecasts (as you do in the planning process) viewing things through the lens of probability is essential. In this case, the authors of the Trinity study placed the odds of success with a 4% withdrawal rate after 30 years at 95% using a 50/50 mix of stocks and bonds; a conclusion very much in line with Bengen’s and the notion of a 4% safe withdrawal rate.

So What’s the Catch?

So…despite the presence of studies and journals, finance isn’t what you’d call a hard science. Many would dispute the idea that it’s even a science at all. So here’s the tl;dr on how we should view the four percent rule: like the pirate’s code, it’s more of a guideline, not a rule.

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Why is that?

First, let’s talk a bit about the works that gave us the four percent rule. Just like any of the drug studies you get to look at in your professional life, there are limitations; the most obvious of which is the sample size. For the vast majority of studies that look at historical withdrawal rates, sample sizes are quite small. Take, for instance, Bengen’s study where he looked at the experience of retirees from 1926-1976. Now that sounds like a big time period, but it’s really not. Each year studied assumed a January 1st retirement, so that gives us only 50 data sets. Try bringing a blood pressure med to market with a 50 subject phase III trial. Not gonna happen. To add insult to injury, many of the data sets he used included extrapolated (i.e. made up) data to get to their 50-year endpoints.

Now while the Trinity Study suffered from the same problem as well, some subsequent research has tried to increase the sample size to what you’d expect from a large-scale drug trial. For instance, in a 2017 paper titled “Safe Withdrawal Rates: A Guide for Early Retirees” published for the Social Science Research Network, Dr. Karsten Jeske (who runs the incredible blog Early Retirement Now) was able to expand the data set to 6.5 million retiree scenarios going back to 1871 and retirement periods of up to 60 years! To date, I’m pretty sure that his study is the most comprehensive and one that specifically targets a safe withdrawal rate for early retirement. Surely with that in hand, we can settle on some withdrawal rate as law right?

Nope!

Even such an incredible sample size is still too small. This is because Karsten’s study, like much of the popular research surrounding the four percent rule, is somewhat myopic in scope regarding asset allocation. Very few studies look at the impact of including international stocks (a very common diversification recommendation) in the portfolio, let alone alternatives such as real estate or precious metals.

Secondly, the studies in question didn’t consider investment fees and expenses (like taxes) whatsoever when drawing their conclusions. Kind of like the scenarios you find on a Physics 101 exam where you get to ignore friction, the scenarios described by the aforementioned studies may lack real-world applicability.

The third problem, and in my opinion the biggest one, is that, unlike a drug where we can reliably predict an average response given enough past data, markets don’t work that way. The only thing predictable about markets is that they’re unpredictable. The next 140 years may look like the last 140 years, or completely different. Who knows? Past data can certainly give you an idea of how they may behave, but they tell you nothing about how they will behave.

Perhaps a better approach here as suggested by Dr. Wade Pfau, a professor at the American College of Financial Services, would be to take the past data and use Monte Carlo simulations (remember those from stats?) to present the idea of an SWR in a more probabilistic fashion. I find this approach to be more useful as it can help you picture the relative odds of success based on how a portfolio tends to behave.

Should We Still Use the Four Percent Rule?

Absolutely, but not in the absolute sense. As I said earlier, it needs to be viewed more as a guideline instead of a rule. What I like about it in this way is that you don’t need to be precise with your math. If you can ballpark your yearly expenses using the four percent rule you can: set a savings goal for yourself, track your progress as you go, and, if you reach it, you can probably declare yourself financially independent.

Once there, should you quit your job, lock yourself into an automated withdrawal scheme, and move to the beach?

I wouldn’t.

Can you take some serious liberties with your career at that point?

Oh yes!

Despite its shortcomings, the four percent rule is all about giving you that goalpost where you can take those liberties. And the best part is that you don’t even need to get to that magical number to enjoy the perks! Just knowing where you are on the path can be incredibly powerful and open the door to new options in life.

For instance, when our son was born and my wife Alex wanted to stay home to raise him, we knew that we could do that from an income standpoint. But what about our goal of FI, how would the decision affect that? Thanks to the four percent rule, we could safely say that it wouldn’t matter that much. We knew where we were relative to our goal and we could go down to one income without really setting us back.

Or you could use it the way Cory and Cassie Jenks from Episode 134 of the YFP podcast are, in the pursuit of Coast FI. The four percent rule tells them how much they eventually need to be financially independent, but they’re not in a hurry to get there. Instead, they can take a look at their current savings and, using an assumed rate of return, determine the point at which they no longer need to contribute to their retirement savings. Once there, the money that would’ve gone to savings can go elsewhere…or not be needed at all! They can scale back work and not worry about sinking their eventual retirement.

But what if early retirement or stepping back from work isn’t your thing? No worries, the four percent rule has something for you too. Knowledge is power, and that power can present itself in many ways. One of which is knowing whether you’re in a position of financial strength or not when considering a job change, entrepreneurship, or some other calculated risk with your career. If you’ve done the math and you’re nowhere near FI, you may want to take a more defensive posture. But if you’re well on your way to FI or close to it, that calculus can change dramatically. It may even give you the license to pursue work that can better advance the profession even if it doesn’t pay much (yet!).

Conclusion

The four percent rule, despite its flaws, is a tremendously important tool in the FI toolbox. It allows you to create a concrete financial goal to strive for and one that you can track your progress towards. Once you have that, you can start down the path to FI.

On the path to FI, the four percent rule is just one of many concepts that you’ll want to learn to be successful. The four percent rule just tells you the destination, not how to actually get there; or perhaps equally important, what to do when you arrive. If you’d like to learn more about those things, I invite you to check out my new book FIRE Rx: The Pharmacist’s Guide to Financial Independence.

 

 

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How To Prepare Financially When Expecting

How To Prepare Financially When Expecting

The following is a guest post by Karen Berger, PharmD. Karen is a pharmacist and medical writer in Fair Lawn, NJ. Her husband has been trying unsuccessfully to put her on a budget for many years.

Congratulations – you’re expecting! In just a few short months, your life will change in a way you could never imagine. A precious baby will smile and coo at you all day, as you feel a powerful love like you never imagined. You will also never sleep, you will be up to your elbows in diapers, and you will have tons of new expenses.

If you are like me, you will also use one-click ordering to have Amazon packages delivered to your door daily, and you will have your credit card number memorized for all other websites. Having a baby can be a major life change and a financial wake-up call. Learning how to prepare financially when expecting is essential.

My husband and I had our kids pretty much back to back – 3 kids in 4 years. It all feels like a blur. Having a baby is like having your entire life as you know it turned upside down. At many times, you will feel that you have no control over this baby, who basically rules your life for the next 18 years. Although you cannot control your newborn, you can control your finances and take the steps of getting your finances in order when expecting.

According to Nerdwallet, raising a child costs at a minimum $260,000 from ages 0-18. This price includes basic (less expensive clothes and groceries) needs and does not include extras such as electronics, birthday parties, and vacations. Taking into account more expensive essentials plus all the extras, you are now looking at over $745,000 from birth to 18, and that is per child, and all before college.

When I was in high school, anytime I was asked what I wanted to be when I “grew up,” my answer of “a pharmacist” was frequently met with the same reply. “What a great career for a woman,” people would nod approvingly. At the age of 17, this made absolutely no sense to me. However, it makes a lot of sense now. A stable income with flexible options is a perfect job for a parent. A pharmacist salary puts you in a great place as you take on the task of financial planning for a baby.

Getting Your Finances in Order

When planning for a baby, there is a lot to do – you have to decorate the nursery, pick the perfect stroller – the list is endless. However, the biggest favor you can do for your family is to get your finances in order while expecting.

Knowledge and clarity about your current financial situation are of utmost importance. That means knowing exactly what it costs to run your household and your spending habits on nonessential items.

While the idea of having a monthly budget is not sexy or fun for most people, it’s a great way to help you organize your spending, eliminate or cut unnecessary expenses, and make adjustments to help you pay off debt and reach your other financial goals. You can learn more about budgeting by checking out this post.

Besides budgeting, knowing and tracking your net worth is a great way to get clarity on your current financial status. In short, your net worth is your total assets minus any outstanding debt. Many pharmacists, especially those starting out, will begin pretty far in the negative considering student loans. However, your progress and trajectory of your net worth is what’s really important.

Hopefully, you are making decisions to help grow your net worth in order to secure your financial future and achieve freedom from debt. But if that’s something you are struggling with, going back to the budget and optimizing is a great idea. If you want to determine and track your net worth we have a great tool through Right Capital you can use.

Besides getting clarity on your finances, it is really important to be on the same page as your spouse when it comes to budgeting and spending. There will be enough to argue about, such as who gets up with the baby and who does the laundry and cleaning (spoiler alert: it’s usually mom). If you can figure out money ahead of time, you are winning the game.

Insurance and Benefits

Now is the time to really understand your insurance benefits for your prenatal care, labor, and delivery. What is covered? Is there a maximum? Do you have a deductible or copays? What if your baby ends up in the NICU – how much will you have to pay? One of our children was in the NICU and the hospital billed over $100,000 – fortunately, we only had to pay a few hundred dollars.

It is also important to plan your leave; check with your company’s HR about sick pay and understand your state laws with disability/FMLA. You will want to predict how much money will be coming in while you (and possibly your spouse) are out of work.

Now is a great time to start an emergency fund, if you do not have one yet. You will want to save 3 to 6 months of expenses (not income), in a separate, accessible account such as a money market or savings account.

Once you establish your budget, taking into account newborn expenses, you want to ensure you have enough savings to cover any missing wages, in addition to the emergency fund. Depending on how tight your budget is, you may have to temporarily scale back on making extra debt payments or contributions to savings/investing accounts to build this up.

Take the time to research your benefits online, or call your insurance for more personalized service, and ask all your questions and write down the information because when you have a baby, you won’t even remember your own name.

Trust me. While on the topic of insurance, research pediatricians (and interview them!) and pick one that is in network, if possible. After the baby is born, be sure to call your insurance to notify them of your newest addition, so he/she can be added to your plan as quickly as possible.

Newborn Expenses

Last but certainly not least, you’ll want to have an idea of monthly costs after the baby is born. Diapers, diapers, and more diapers add up quickly. Also: pediatrician copays, formula if you choose to bottle feed, clothing, diaper bags, carriers, carseats, baby monitor, crib, strollers, baby swings, toys, books, and all of the adorable accessories at the baby store that you absolutely must have such as a squeaky giraffe, a pacifier attached to a stuffed animal, and those soft Muslin blankets. You may do a lot more take-out than cooking those first few months, which can really add up.

how to prepare financially when expecting, getting your finances in order when expecting, financial planning for a baby

*These costs do not include insurance or medical expenses.

**Expect to need a new convertible car seat when baby is around one year old at an average cost of $80-$250 per carseat.

Pro Tip: Create a registry so that your friends and family can buy things that you need, rather than guessing what you want!

Childcare is another big cost. How long do you plan to take off? Are you going back to work part-time, full-time, or not quite yet? If you are going to work, do you have family to watch your little one or will you use daycare or a nanny? All have varying costs and they all have their own positives and negatives to explore, and now is a good time to interview possible candidates to care for your little one.

In our next segment, we will tackle some more must-do’s for after baby arrives, such as life and disability insurance, retirement planning, wills, and saving for college.

Financial planning for a baby, and in general, life events, can be overwhelming. Often it is best to bring in an experienced financial planner to help you plan and prepare. If you are looking for some extra help, you can book a free call with the YFP financial planning team.

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Baby Stepping Your Financial Plan – The 2 Things to Focus on First

By Tim Baker, CFP
YFP Team Member & Owner, Script Financial

 

For many, knowing where to begin in order to get their finances in order is half the battle. There is much to consider and putting together a financial plan can definitely be overwhelming. However, whenever I examine a client’s financial health, the first two things I review are their emergency fund and their consumer debt level. Let’s look at both of these in detail.

Emergency Fund

It might seem obvious to some why an emergency fund is important, but that might not be readily apparent to everyone. This fund is important for a variety of reasons. First, having cash in an account gives you peace of mind. You know in the event of an emergency, you can easily access it and use the money as needed. Second, an emergency fund allows you to avoid credit card debt, which can be extremely costly. We’ll get into greater detail in a bit. Finally, the emergency fund buffers your investments, so you can take intelligent risk in the market and keep that money working for you. So, now we know why an emergency fund is important, but how much do you need? Great question!

The answer is…well, it depends, which might very well be the worst answer ever. Hold your horses. The amount of your emergency fund depends on two things: your non-discretionary monthly expenses (heh?) and how many income earners there are in your household. Let’s break down each of these. First, what the heck are non-discretionary monthly expenses? Basically, these are expenses you pay in order to live or to keep the lights on, so to speak. These expenses go out the door whether you are employed or not. Examples include a rent or mortgage payment, utilities, food, debt service payments, etc. The second factor is the amount of income earners in your household. If you are a single income earner, you’ll want to save 6 months of your non-discretionary expense. If your household is dual income, you can lower that to 3 months of non-discretionary expenses. Why the difference? Well, if you have two incomes, it’s unlikely that both you and your partner would lose their job at the exact same time and the still-earning partner will help offset your loss of income.

If you are a single income earner, you could be up a creek for a while, so the 6-month reserve makes more sense. And you may be thinking, “Wow, Tim, I need $25,000 in my emergency fund. You want me to keep that in a savings account earning almost no interest?” My answer to that question is in the affirmative because we need to remember the purpose of our emergency fund. It’s for emergencies, not to make bank on investment returns or interest. Now we know the why and the how much, but what about the where? There are a few things to consider when deciding where you should house your emergency fund. It important that the fund be both liquid and be redeemable at a known price. Cash is the best example of this, but other examples include check and savings accounts, money markets, and CDs. If you’re using your brokerage account invested in common stock or mutual funds as your emergency, pump your breaks. You’re leaving yourself open to the possibility that you may need to redeem those shares at an inopportune time. Also, if you’re thinking your 401(k) or IRA is a good place to hold your emergency fund, think again. If you are under 59 ½ years old, you’ll pay a 10% on top of any taxes you may owe. Ouch.

Consumer Debt

Many Americans today live by the plastic. An age of consumerism, coupled with the need for instant gratifications does not bode well for the American saver. Plus, interest rates offer next to zero (literally!) help with regard to the amount of interest you earn, so there’s no incentive in that regard. As a society we spend first and ask questions later. I remember back in the day when I wanted the latest, greatest Nintendo game, I had to scrimp and save and do extra chores to get those precious $60 together. The prospect of not having Super Mario Brothers 3 was just something I could not handle (do you remember the raccoon and the frog you could turn into? So dope.). Today, for some, it is merely a swipe of the card with the promise to pay it back later. That’s cool and all…if you actually pay it back without accruing significant (or any) interest. Unfortunately, many people use their credit card as their emergency fund [insert horrified emoji here]! To put it mildly, this is a less than ideal emergency fund strategy. The cost of credit, particularly credit card credit, is off the charts. The average American household carries $15,762 in credit card debt (I recently heard it’s closer to $17,000) and pays $6,658 in interest. “Hey, I could really go for the latest iPhone, but I don’t really have any money saved to purchase it. Oh hello, Mr. Visa Card…you look lonely…let’s take you out for a spin.” If that sounds like you, re-think it. That $300 you spent on your new phone will be much more bloated if you’re carrying balances on your card. As an example, take a look at this chart below. This situation assumes you’re carrying a $2,000 balance and making the minimum payment. At 16% APR, you’ll pay close to $3,000 in interest alone before you pay it back. Have bad credit or miss a payment (causing that APR to jump to 29%)? The interest you pay back more than doubles compared to the 16% APR.

So what can you do? There are a few techniques that you can practice that wade into the realm of budgeting, but specifically with credit cards there are a few things you can try. First, don’t use credit cards and pay with cash instead. Some people feel that returning to the ol’ paper money system instead of using plastic is better for your spending habits. I personally feel that if I have cash in my pocket, I’ll spend it, but I know it works for some. If you’re like me, and plastic is more your style, then retire your credit card and reach for the debit card. The prospect of overdrafting your checking account may stymie spending more than running up your credit limit. Next, examine your credit card bill. It’s amazing the self-reflection that goes on after looking at all those transactions. You may even have recurring billings for things you don’t even use or forgot about. Been there. The idea here is that you can’t fix it if you don’t know about it, so inform yo’self and get to work.

The emergency fund and a healthy consumer debt level are cornerstones of a sound financial plan. The emergency fund provides that much needed buffer for the unexpected events in life and having one in place shields you from acting financially desperate (i.e. using a credit card) in a desperate situation. Consumer debt, aside from the cost of credit, is a behavioral indication that portrays your ability or inability to live within your means. If you are ready to take the steps to begin building your financial plan, start with these two areas and square them away.

 

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