Thanks for reading Finesssing Finance. Your support is recognized for fueling my journey to help people with free, accessible personal finance content.
Credit Card Ground Rules
As our wedding comes up, my fiancée and I agreed we wanted to travel to Italy for our honeymoon. We imagined ourselves on the Mediterranean beaches and touring the Colosseum on a romantic getaway. We looked each other in the eye and asked how we’d fund our lavish escape and agreed that applying for a travel credit card would be in our best interest given how often we fly internationally and domestically.
Let’s lay down some credit card rules. Credit cards are a tool for building your credit score and tracking debt while enjoying some special perks at the same time. If used correctly, credit cards can be one of your greatest financial allies. Here are my rules on credit cards:
Never spend more than you make
Never spend more than 30% of your credit line
Redeem benefits as often as you can and never leave money on the table
Pay your credit card in full automatically every month
Selecting a Credit Card
With our card perk chosen, our first step was to select the highest-reviewed credit card for travel.
Bankrate is my favorite website (credit to Ramit Sethi’s book) for comparing credit cards along with other financial decisions. After navigating the site to travel credit cards, we saw a few options like the CapitalOne Venture, American Express, and the Chase Sapphire card.
At the end of the day, Bankrate recommended the Chase Sapphire card for beginners but Elizabeth and I had to sit down and evaluate our intentions with each card to determine the best one.
The next step after compiling your potential list is research. We each did our research through TikTok, Reddit, and YouTube to evaluate which credit card would best suit our travel needs. A few criteria for us is that we would like to use the card for our honeymoon and domestic travel between our home state of Texas every holiday season.
Using that research to select a credit card best depends on your needs. We don’t foresee ourselves as future globetrotters which heavily impacted our decision to go with the Chase Sapphire Preferred rather than other luxury credit cards.
In Conclusion
We’re satisfied with the decision we made on this card. We plan on using it to combat rising airline costs and overall travel expenses including ground transportation, dining, and hotel reimbursement. A few additional perks we enjoyed about the card were the baggage compensation should anything happen to our luggage on an airline and VISA Concierge Services.
This post isn’t sponsored by Chase and was intended to describe my logical decision-making process for selecting something specific to me. Everyone has different needs and it’s important to assess what yours are before you open a credit card and have that impact your credit score!
Have a great week and bon voyage!
Jordan