It’s all about discipline. You can’t live off of them, you have to spend what you would have either way and pay the off immediately. You can even go online and pay every day or every week if you prefer.
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It seems like one of those “you have to learn the rules before you can break them” things. I think I’ve got the rules down after years of disciplined budgeting, so maybe it’s time to experiment. What were your favorite types of cards for points — airline cards, major credit companies?
Yeah that’s the one thing I disagree with Ramsey about. I guess for a large portion of his audience it’s best just to avoid them 100% but done correctly you can not spend anything you wouldn’t have spent anyways and get a ton of free travel out of it
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I totally agree with you — most people need to hear “DON’T USE CREDIT CARDS!” They’re foolish with money. But if you are disciplined and organized, you can probably really leverage the system.
Experience tells me there’s a strong overlap between guys who use TRT (not anabolics, necessarily, as that attracts a slightly different crowd) and guys who are on top of their finances.
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There are web sites dedicated to it, like “The Points Guy”. Chase points are the best overall, they convert at a favourable rate to just about anything from flights to hotels to rental cars, and for buying stuff at stores. That being said, it doesn’t matter much. You transfer airline miles to your central account before you cancel the card and it’s handy to have miles on different airlines because they don’t all fly to the same places. And sometimes the miles cost is radically different airline to airline anyway for no apparent reason. I literally used to write the minimum spend on the front of the card with a sharpie when it came in, and they sat in a drawer. I would get just over my minimum spend and drop the card into the discard drawer at the end of the day, and pull the next one from the draw pile.
Edit:
I still pay the property taxes on my rentals this way, as well as my income tax, but I’m essentially retired so I don’t cycle cards the same anymore.
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Well, I think my legs are much better. I think the strength I gained helps with size too. I can do accessories lifts with a lot more weight than when I was bodybuilding.
Ramsey’s advice is for the financial beginner usually. It is good for a majority of people, but not optimal IMO if you are disciplined. I think credit cards can be a good tool if one is disciplined, but statistics show that most are not. The reason you can get so much with them if used properly, is that most people pay far more in than they get.
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Are you able to establish decent credit without cards?
I stopped using cards probably 4 years ago when I discovered Dave. He helped me and the wife escape 100K plus in debt and start racking up savings and living more simply. Had to have a credit check recently and my score was 800. I think that’s considered a good number but honestly don’t know.
800 is a great number. But I wonder if you’d have that score if you hadn’t racked up the debt and paid it off. Its a fucked up system.
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Yeah 800 is super good, so kudos for getting there without credit cards. Mine is usually 780’s, I’ve gotten to 800 a few times but it still bounces around for some reason, you’ll get approved for pretty much anything you can pay the minimum payment on with a score that high 
. Go America.
1000%. Even for me it was tough to part with the cash when I started doing cards with $3-5K minimum spends each even though I had it and would have spent it anyways.
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Got that right, brother
And you’re happy you went down the credit route? You guys are convincing me to go down this road. Given how anti-credit I’ve been for a long time, the wife is shocked!
Something I’ve been wondering – what program, then, do you guys think is the “Dave Ramsey” of fitness? 531? 5x5? P90X?
I didn’t realize you could put taxes on credit cards! That is brilliant. How many rentals you got? I want to get into that hustle eventually. Plan is to buy our first place in a couple years, then start renting that out after we move on.
I have two rentals. One has my former shop space in the ground/below ground floor. The shop is ground level from one side, the rental is ground level from the other - it’s built into a hill (Used to be a community grocery store in the 40’s). You can pay any and all taxes online with a credit card these days. I don’t even have to be in the US to handle it.
How does the business rental vs. property rental landscape stack up for you? My in-laws have had a hard time lately with their business rentals. They’d much rather be in properties.
My rentals are intentionally all residential. The shop space is a mixed use property, the only one zoned like outside of the main street of the town. One property is free and clear mine, the other has a very tiny mortgage still on it. I could pay it off, but the numbers tell me that it’s better to just pay it from the rent and invest the money in something else. If I had tight margins it would be scary right now, especially with commercial. I think there will be some really sweet commercial property deals in the spring though. Some people are going to go under, and some properties are going to go into foreclosure if they are not already there. It will just be a matter of when the paperwork gets finished up - which could take a while the way things are. Rentals are going to be an opportunity on the rebound from Covid-19.
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I still get anxiety about it honestly, every time my wife is like I found this new card… I’m like ah shit is it really worth it? But I look back at all the traveling we’ve done and how little it cost us and yeah, def worth it in the end. And I got 130K Hilton points the other day from some new card she did.
This was in 2018 after we had already taken 3-4 trips to the west coast. Also went to Hawaii for 10 days for free for our honeymoon in 2019 but didn’t do a lot of other travel that year. I’ve canceled 4 or 5 trips already this year because of covid so we’ve been pretty boring
We had to cancel a trip to France, leaving from Spain to come back, that was supposed to happen in April. I was out about $50 I think plus whatever I spend on food and gas over there.
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