Chase Archives - Your Mileage May Vary

How To Avoid Extra Credit Card Fees During International Travel

Going on an international trip is very exciting but it can also be very expensive. Using a credit card to pay for purchases when traveling internationally is often the best way to get a good exchange rate and the rate your bank gets will be better than the one you’ll get on your own if you exchange cash. Using a card also means that you don’t have to carry around a bunch of cash with you. However, many cards will add on a “foreign transaction fee” to any transactions made with anything except your home currency. Here’s an easy way to keep from paying that extra 2-3 percent on all of your purchases while away.

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What Credit Cards Are In Our Wallets (September 2019)

Every once in a while, I like to go over which cards Sharon and I are carrying in our wallets. Doing so gives you a look behind the scenes of how to put a plan of earning points and miles in practice. We each have a different approach to earning miles and points. I try to earn the maximum points for each transaction without too much effort, and her desire to exert the least amount of thought into the process (Note from Sharon: Hell yeah! LOLOL!), the cards we carry are different.

There’s a method to my madness, as I manage to balance the two approaches and come to a plan where we maximize earning while minimizing effort (and still keep our marriage together). (Note from Sharon: Again. Hell yeah!)

Writing this post also forces me to evaluate if I’m actually doing what I say I’m going to do or seeing that I’ve gotten a little lazy (which I had). After some shuffling, here are the cards that now reside in our wallets.

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How to Donate Your Miles and Points to Support Hurricane Dorian Victims

I know watching the news stories about the devastation in the Bahamas caused by Hurricane Dorian can make you feel helpless. After a while, you just feel numb and you want to do something, do anything, but don’t know how you can help.

Luckily, most of the airline and hotel programs are making it easy to contribute in any way you can. Even if you don’t have the cash to spare, you can donate those random points you have here and there to the recovery effort. Even better, you can donate points if you have more of them than you know what to do with. Face it, it’s better to donate them than redeem them for some magazines that you’ll never read, overpriced luggage or an Amazon InstaPot. Continue reading “How to Donate Your Miles and Points to Support Hurricane Dorian Victims”

Want A Business Credit Card? Here’s How To Prove You’re A Real Business

Signing up for credit cards and getting the sign-up bonuses is one of the easiest ways to earn a nice stack of points and miles with very little effort. As long as you have good credit and can pay off your bills in full, this is a great place to start. You’ll soon see that besides all of the personal credit cards available, there are almost as many business credit cards. You’ll have twice as many sign up bonuses to choose from. That is, if you have a business.

There’s no shortage of websites that tell you the many ways you can have a business. It all sounds so easy and apparently, everyone has a business and can apply for a business credit card. Here are some examples I’ve seen:

Do you sell anything?
Do you provide any services you get paid for?
Do you rent a property?
Do you have a side job?
Do you run a lemonade stand?
Do you sell brownies at the local market?

Congratulations, you’re a business. Now go and sign up for a business card with this referral link!!!

Sometimes it might be that easy. However, other times it’s not. For instance, I had to prove to Chase that I do run a real business and it’s not as easy as it looks.

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New Advice for PreCheck & Global Entry, Warnings Countries Give About USA, Airports with Longest/Shortest TSA Lines, & More!

And in the blink of an eye, we’re already well into the first week of September. Time goes by so quickly! Anyway, here are our most popular posts for August 2019. Some of them were actually written before August (heads up that rules and offers change and we can’t guarantee that those older posts are still accurate), so take a look to make sure you didn’t miss any of the good stuff:

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