22 February 2010
Credit Card Benefits Being Cut
In the past, I had heard that with the new credit card regulations being handed down from the government, benefits would start to disappear and potentially annual fees would start to come back. I rarely use a credit card now days and I never carry a balance, so many of the new regulations don’t affect me, but I still enjoyed a few of the benefits of my card.
Up until recently I hadn’t noticed any significant changes to my benefits, but Saturday, I received a notification from Chase that they were upgrading my Chase Freedom card to a new card (the name escapes me at the moment). Unfortunately with this upgrade came a loss of a few of the main features that I looked forward to with this card.
When doing remodeling work on our house, we often used this card since we were able to earn points that we could redeem for cash. If we reached 20,000 points, we could get the normal $200 reward, plus a $50 bonus for saving up that many points. We have taken advantage of this twice over the last few years. This option is now gone. The $50 bonus will no longer be available.
The second major benefit that has been removed is bonus points. It used to be that I would receive double points on my top three purchase categories. For example, if my highest expenses for the month were groceries, gas and dining out, then we would receive double points for purchases in those three categories.
I guess this is just another reason for me to move away from using credit cards altogether. As the benefits are reduced, their will be little motivation to continue to utilize this credit source (as long as you have cash). It’s hard to even imagine that a year or so ago, we used a credit card for virtually all of our purchases. It was not uncommon to receive a statement that had $2,000 – $3,000 worth of charges in a month while remodeling. Now that was a difficult balance to keep up with.
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3 Comments currently posted.
Chris Sumpter says:
Ken says:
We still use the CC for most of our purchases, never carrying a balance, and collecting the cash rewards every few months as they build up. I’m surprised they haven’t cancelled us yet. I guess they make enough off of the vendors to make it worth it for them.
Mining Distributors says:
On my CC, I can only collect the rewards once a year. Kinda sucks
I just cut up a card from Citibank, because they were getting ready to impose a $60 annual fee if I didn’t have $2,400 a year in activity. I hadn’t used the card since late 2008, so it wasn’t much of a loss.