@Anonymous wrote:Obviously a key benefit to slimming down the portfolio is ease of maintenance. In general, as you add more and more cards, you are likely to hit diminishing returns: a slight increase in rewards on a very narrow slice of spend. As a nasty exercise, it might be worth calculating the cost/benefit of a serious credit card hobby! I am thinking of those with complex spreadsheets that record every detail of each card. Increased rewards - value of Time spend vs using a flat 2% might be interesting!
I have run the numbers and it always comes down to personal value of time.
I am happy with two 3% cash-back cards.
Have been cutting back, closing all 4%-5% cards. (Closed the last one this month, "Cash+")
The extra 1.5%-1.75% is not worth managing and splitting rewards across 16-24 extra cards.
Some numbers for the fun of it.
@Kforce wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:Obviously a key benefit to slimming down the portfolio is ease of maintenance. In general, as you add more and more cards, you are likely to hit diminishing returns: a slight increase in rewards on a very narrow slice of spend. As a nasty exercise, it might be worth calculating the cost/benefit of a serious credit card hobby! I am thinking of those with complex spreadsheets that record every detail of each card. Increased rewards - value of Time spend vs using a flat 2% might be interesting!
I have run the numbers and it always comes down to personal value of time.
I am happy with two 3% cash-back cards.
Have been cutting back, closing all 4%-5% cards. (Closed the last one this month, "Cash+")
The extra 1.5%-1.75% is not worth managing and splitting rewards across 16-24 extra cards.
Some numbers for the fun of it.
You did the serious math here lol mine is very rudamentary A(x)B=C(x)12=$$ for Christmas lol
I like the analysis, too. I've been thinking of cutting some cards a lot lately. I wrote this in another thread that was related to this because they both had me look at my own spend and numbers. Kind of interesting when you look at it now:
I am liking the idea of using less cards, but am at a level that I am OK with managing. I have 9 cards, but only 6 lenders. I think this is what is different for each person, the amount of time they want to or are willing to spend managing their cards. For me, it made a lot more sense to juggle more cards when the non-category norm was 2%, but lately when I look at the raw numbers from my spend it is getting harder to justify.
I want to point out that when it comes to rewards and cards I think for most people it will be a sharp exponential curve in the number of cards added and their actual return in relation to overall spend. If you can just use one 3% card you get a lot of cash back from just one card. If you consider total CC spend and total rewards, any card you add after that will only add maybe .1% or .2%, and maybe not even that if your total CC spend is high enough and/or category spend not high enough.
I've thought about which I would keep of the ones I have and it would rank them in the order of which I would keep first:
Altitude Reserve
USAlliance
Vantage West
The rest of them really don't save me that much money. The math is just really tough for the other cards/categories if you are up against either 4.5% with Altitude Reserve if I can use Samsung Pay, 3% with USAlliance if I can't, or 5% if it is restaurant/fast food/bars. Those 3 account for close to 90% of my total CC spend.
These are the ones I've been thinking of dropping, but also the reason I keep it around:
SDFCU is solid and hard to get so I keep around as backup, USAA is oldest and 5% gas but that only really saves me $20/year, Cash+ is kind of pain to use for utilities and I don't even bother so it just does streaming/internet and only saves me $20/year, Lowe's is kind of fun to have but maybe saves $100/year, Amazon is easy to get/use and pretty much pays for Prime subscription each year, Delta is for companion pass/free checked bags and I use them a lot anyway.
On Deck: No Plans Currently
