Life beyond Credit Card Rewards

We’re quite busy almost every day tracking 2x/5x/10x rewards and offers, so much so that we don’t have time to view the big picture of life.

While credit cards does give a very good return on spend, I often feel that the time spent by most on this game is too MUCH, for too LITTLE. This holds true for most, unless you’re running on high 7 digit annual spends.

Value of Time

Hence, it’s crucial for one to focus on other aspects of life that gives better return on “time” spent and not just blindly chase rewards day and night.

Here’s an example as to why I say that.

I recently did a rough calculation on the “total rewards” earned/saved on spends in last 10 years and compared it with the “net return on investment” in stocks.

I wasn’t surprised to see that my inv. in last ~2Yrs has given me a decent 7 figure return and is almost same as the rewards that I earned in last 10 years!

This means, I roughly spent 5x more time to get the same value and maybe another 5x more time to look at the complicated reward redemption system to extract little more value.

So the time spent on rewards vs stocks is 10:1

In other words, I could just spend one year with stocks and save 9 years of my life spent in optimising spends for rewards. That’s huge isn’t it? Indeed it is!

This however is more of a personal choice as I enjoy exploring rewards vs looking at the charts. But at the end of the day, money matters the most in the world we live in. Infact, rewards are also a type of money in a way.

Not to forget, I’m no expert in stocks either. I was almost running on no-return for the first 3 yrs or so when I got into stocks. That said, almost every Tom, Dick and Harry also gained well in stocks in last two years.

Infact, that’s a key takeaway too, as market gives a grand opportunity once in every ~10 years.

This reminds me of the old & kind gentleman with whom I flew on my first bussiness class flight , who was expecting a crash back then. No wonder he knows it as he had 9 figure investments.

I’m forever grateful to the universe for giving me an opportunity to talk to such an amazing person from whom I’ve acquired certain concepts of travel.

Coming back to the point, this doesn’t mean everyone has to get into stocks. In-fact that’s the worst idea if you don’t have a helping hand. It’s just an example.

You may work on other aspects of life with the time spent on rewards, like upgrading your skills for a “career” that gives you a better pay or improve your “business” that may increase your bottomline.

The idea is to make “best use of time”.

Final thoughts

All this doesn’t mean one has to ignore credit card benefits and rewards altogether. The key is to find a “balance” and moderate the time spent on optimising the rewards.

It’s “OKAY” to extract 90% value via credit card rewards if not 100% by being less active. That kind of time if spent right can bring you gains in very many ways, much more than what one could imagine.

And to extract 90% you don’t need to spend much time. If your annual spends are under 10L, you wouldn’t need more than few minutes every 3 months to optimise your strategy. All you need is this article

If your spends are on higher side and want to stay updated frequently, you may perhaps sign-up for the instant email alerts which will send all important updates right to your inbox.

Speaking about time, it reminds me of the Lucy’s statement,