A credit card churning spreadsheet may one day save you up to $1000. How you may ask?
Well, this post will explain the reasons why it's important to use a credit card tracking spreadsheet especially if you plan on churning credit cards for longer than a year.
How a credit card churning spreadsheet will save you money
It sounds silly, but it's true. I learned this the hard way on two occasions.
The first time was when I applied for a credit card I had closed less than 12 months ago. As the terms and conditions for nearly all credit cards state, you will not receive the rewards if you have owned the same credit card within a 12 month period. I missed out on all the bonus points and it cost me almost $800 of reward value.
The second time I didn't meet the minimum spend by $200, within a three month period and also missed out on $600 worth of value.
If I had been tracking my credit card usage I would have picked up on these issues and not made those mistakes.
How to use a credit card churning spreadsheet
Using a credit card churning spreadsheets is easy. As I have created my own, I will explain how I use mine.
You can download my credit card churning or tracking spreadsheet from my resources section.
There are three main sections to the spreadsheet
Card Details Overview: This section allows you to prefill all the details of the card you are currently using. This includes everything from the day it was activated, the bank issuer, the type of card, the last 4 digits, the card limit, and the annual fee. These are just purely administrative details.
Credit Card Rewards Tracking: Here you will be tracking all your rewards and bonuses earned.
It will hold information such as what type of rewards program the card is utilising, the signup bonus, any cashback or lounge passes, the date the bonus was received and the minimum spend to receive the bonus rewards.
Cancelling Details: This is a small section but an important one. It will allow you to put in the dates of cancellation and ask you if you were able to receive a refund on the annual fee.
Reward Tracking: The last section is the totals of all your credit card churning.
This section will track how much annual fee, points, and cashback you have earned as you credit card churn. This will help you track your credit card rewards and help keep you motivated to keep churning those credit cards.
My favourite section is the total monetary value section, which basically adds all your bonuses up into a $AUD figure.
This makes an assumption that the average value of 1 Qantas point is one cent. This way you are able to see how much profit you have made through the years.
This number will guarantee to surprise you in a good way.
This credit card churning spreadsheet is very easy to use and is open source. This allows you to modify it how you like to meet your personal preferences.
By using this spreadsheet you will have a much better understanding of how your credit card churning journey is going and the money you can potentially earn throughout this time.
Hopefully, it will also save you a lot of time and money, by avoiding making mistakes like I did before I started using this spreadsheet.
Like always, if you have any questions, please comment below or contact me. If you don't want to miss out on any new content, then follow me on Instagram or Reddit for more information about everything to do with credit card churning and point collecting.
Comments