Simplifying My Financial Setup and Giving Up Value
Introduction
This is NOT Financial Advice
I’ve decided to give myself new financial rules to try and simplify my setup and reduce the amount of fiddling I have to do.
Credit Cards
This is still NOT Financial Advice
This is the category that I want to simplify the most. Back in 2021-2023 I churned a lot of credit cards. This community is pretty popular now but, churning is basically when you sign up for a card that gives you a sign up bonus and then only use it when it gives you maximum value after completing that bonus. Usually to get a sign up bonus you have to hit a spend limit within a few months so you only sign up if you absolutely know you will reach it. Any card with fees can be cancelled after 1 year when the fee hits so you can refund the fee and be in good standing with the issuing bank.
Here are all the cards that I’ve churned and use infrequently. There are some not shown here because I’ve already cancelled them.
- Amazon Prime Visa - Card you can only get with Amazon Prime. I plan to cancel Prime anyways because I always choose the slower speed.
- Hyatt Personal - Easy to use card but I don’t use it consistently enough
- Freedom Flex #1 (Used to be old Freedom Unlimited) - My oldest card and I’ll probably just leave it open
- Freedom Flex #2 (Used to be old Sapphire Preferred) - Not really used anymore
- Instacart Card - Don’t really use this service anymore and the card was nerfed
- Ink Business Cash - Only used for internet and phone bills
- Altitude Go - Used to be my old food card but was nerfed
- Navy Federal Flagship - Used to pay for Amazon Prime, Flights, Hotels
- Navy Federal More Rewards - Used for Groceries and Ride Share
A while ago I thought about getting 5% back on all fixed costs in my daily life. It’s definitely possible with some weirder cards like the AAA cards but, I’m giving up this value for the simplicity of using only a couple of cards and never having to transfer points ever again.
Cards I Plan to Actually Use
- Fidelity Credit Card (Catch All)
- Atmos Summit (Dining, Alaska/Hawaiian Flights, Foreign Spend)
I plan to consolidate everything in just these 2 cards. Something that these cards have in common is that there is no need to manually move or transfer points anywhere. The Fidelity card will auto transfer cash to a Fidelity Brokerage account. There is no auto invest feature which is being requested more and more but, until that feature comes out I’m happy just keeping SPAXX and using it to partially fund the Roth IRA when I backdoor every January. The Atmos Card will automatically send points to your Atmos/Alaska membership so there is no need to do anything until you actually want to buy flights with your points.
Even if Atmos gets nerfed and I want to replace it I’m only getting a card where I don’t have to manually transfer points. Chase and Navy Federal in particular are painful to do every month.
Checking Account
This is still NOT Financial Advice
Up until this point I’ve used a regular Navy Federal Checking account. I already use a Fidelity Cash Management account as my savings account and I want to use this one account as my daily “cash” account. I also use the budgeting application YNAB so it doesn’t really make a difference that I only have 1 cash account instead of a separate savings account. I had to add the Fidelity Cash Management account as a direct deposit account at work and auto pay for my existing credit cards. I’ve also had to change my recurring investment for my taxable brokerage. Frustratingly you can’t select a Fidelity Cash Management account as a source account for auto investing in a separate brokerage account. I also see this being requested more. Some people a long time ago got around this by adding the Cash Management account as an external account but, I don’t think you can do this anymore. Until then I just have a recurring transfer on the same day as the recurring investment. Some users have said that even though you can’t pick the order or time of these events it does still work. I’ll know in October if there are any problems.
Conclusion
I’ll make another post to update on how things went after making all these changes but I hope that this reduces the amount that I have to manually do things in all these accounts and let me focus on reading my silly novels.