photo credit: hartlandmartin
Advantages Of Using Credit Cards
I posted an article here earlier this week to reveal how I get away with not paying credit cards any interest charges ever. I want to add further to that by describing a case where there was a clear example of the advantages of using credit cards, particularly the ones that reward you with airline frequent flier points.
Business Expenses On Credit Cards
Although some companies do not allow business expenses to be initially paid with personal credit cards, I was fortunate enough to work with a few that did allow this. Even though I had to be careful to sort out which charges were personal and which were business related each month, it was totally worth it.
This is because one of my Visa accounts rewards me with airline frequent flyer points on Air Canada. I try to rack up as many Aeroplan points as possible through this account including those larger business expenses. In one case, I had to pay a hotel something like $20,000 for a huge business event that I was organizing on behalf of the company. This amount was way over my allowed credit limit on my Visa.
So I arranged to have the hotel charge my Visa for half of the amount ($10,000) in advance and I put that through my company expenses right away. As soon as I was reimbursed by my company, I paid off my Visa balance right away and arranged to have the second half of the hotel cost charged on my credit card again. In the end, these two separate and fairly large transactions through my personal Visa account rewarded me with 20,000 airline points — nice!
This extra hassle of the two separate transactions gave me enough points for a free flight on Air Canada and my company’s finance department didn’t mind this at all.
Of course, this particular Visa card does have an annual fee but it is worth it in my mind since I charge as much as possible through this one account and end up really racking up some nice airline points each year. With the rising costs of air travel, anyway you can accumulate more airline points is a good thing.
I especially like saving my airline points for longer flights which cost a small fortune these days. Traveling to more interesting places will result in more interesting backdrops for my Motivational WebTV video series.
This is just another one of those great advantages of using credit cards as long as you don’t fall into any of the traps that get you into debt.
