Recieved an offer from American express a couple of days ago in the mail. Maybe because I had a card with them years ago, they will give $225.00 if you spend $2,000.00 in the first 6 months.
Yesterday, called up and was accepted to receive the card. 3% back at supermarkets, seems to be one of the higher rates. No Walmart or Target though.
If you want rewards at supermarkets, right now the Chase Freedom Card will give you 5% rewards up to $12,000 spent at supermarkets in the first year. They are also offering a sign-up bonus of $200 after you spend $500 in the first three months.
Edit: For a longer-term card, if you have Venmo you might look at the Venmo Visa. That gives you 3% rewards on the top send category, 2% on the next top spend, and 1% after. The catch is that the total for the 3% and 2% categories can not exceed $10,000 per year. However, if you just use that card for supermarkets, you can get 3% on supermarket expenses up to $10,000 in one year. And, the Venmo Visa includes warehouse clubs like Costco in their supermarket category.
Also, this past year they had an offer where they doubled the rewards for the first six months with no spending limit. I have gotten 6% on supermarket and Costco purchases and 4% on utilities. Sadly, my introductory period is about to end, but we will still use the Venmo Visa for supermarket and Costco purchases. You might see if you can get that card with that introductory bonus.
That’s the best I’ve seen for grocery stores, plus it beats the Costco Visa for dining out.
BTW with a rewards card you’re getting a higher return spending money vs putting it in a savings account. 
See my comment on the Venmo Visa. That is great for Costco purchases. They even give the higher reward on food court purchases, though not gas purchases. Those are counted as fuel purchases, so the card for gas purchases gets used there.
True. In between the 4% cash rewards that the Amazon Visa offered late last year through this past February and the Venmo Visa introductory offer, I did better than normal for cash rewards. I save them all up and then use them during the holidays. This year is turning out to be a good year.
Hmmm… This is very interesting, this card could replace my Costco Visa.
My wife says we have too many credit cards, but it is fun maximizing credit card rewards.
The Costco Visa is still good to have. Costco sometimes will offer a special price for using the Costco Visa, such as getting four tires for the price of three, and they will also sometimes double the warranty on an electronics purchase if you use it. Not to mention the 4% for gas purchases, if you don’t have a better rewards card for gas.
Also, from what I can see, the Chase Freedom and Costco Visa both give 3% rewards for dining, so I don’t see a difference there. The one difference seems to be the redemption. From what the site says you can redeem Chase Freedom rewards anytime without a limit whereas the Costco Visa sends you the certificate every February.
Edit: I recall once many years ago on the CHB when Fuzzbutt, who was the ultimate money saving savvy guru, said he had something like twenty-four credit cards. Even I am not anywhere near that yet.
That sounds like the Amex Blue Cash Everyday card. I was offered one when Costco switched to Visa from Amex. I got it and a $750 reward for spending some amount ($3K?) within the first 90 days. That was no problem.
We mostly use the Costco Visa and we each have a Visa in our own name that we use a couple times a year just to keep them active. My wife likes fewer cards, but I’ll have to do some research and convince her another card (Venmo) could be beneficial. The other thing is my wife doesn’t like online bill pay, I’ll have to show her the cash back we could get would add up.
By online bill pay does your wife mean paying through the credit card web site, or does she mean using a bank’s online bill pay system? I know a lot of people don’t like authorizing a company to pull money from your bank account, but many are comfortable pushing money from your bank, similar to writing a check. And, most credit card companies are set up to easily add them as payees to online bank payment systems.
For us, we have three credit cards with a 2% cash rebate, so that is the lowest we should get on a purchase. We also have cards that give higher rewards for certain types of purchases and use those when appropriate.
Both. Although we pay our AT&T and Direct TV bills online (to get my big discount) she would rather write checks and send them in. I’m going to show her how easy online bill pay is and how she still has control, I’ll have to explain it to her better.
Show your wife show much she would save on postage and new checks. Not to mention, it is a lot easier to pay bills online using the computer as opposed to writing checks by hand. I have an excel spreadsheet that I use to keep track of payments and to “balance the checkbook.” I don’t miss the old days of writing checks by hand at all.
I have been using Bill Pay since a local Bank offered touch-tone bill pay.
You sent in your vendors numbered. Then you entered the vendor Number, Amount and day to pay. Worked fine.
We made up an input sheet with Vendor Names and Number, so we called 2 to 3 times a month,
Yep, she made a spread sheet and balances to the penny, I can pull it up and tell you what my electric bill was 20 years ago. I think she likes writing checks and slapping stamps on envelopes. I’ll have to make it one of my New Years resolutions to get her into this century for paying bills. To me it just makes sense.
Also, tell your wife two other benefits of online bill pay:
There is no chance that the payment will be either delayed by or lost in the mail.
When you mail a check there is always the possibility that the check could somehow fall into the wrong hands and a bad person would have all of your bank account information. Another old CHB poster, Jeff Freeman, had a computer business and once talked about how he could have taken all of the information from checks that he had received and done bad things with it if he was a really bad person.
