Rant n Rave: Credit Edition

Today’s Rant n Rave theme is cred­it. There’s all kinds of cred­it avail­able in the world: cred­it cards, ser­vice cred­it.…. even cred­it earned in the kar­ma bank.  Things are a bit more ambigu­ous on the rant and rav­ing side, because I have rants and raves about both cred­it cards and ser­vice cred­its, the top­ics de jour.

Credit Cards

I won­dered if this should be it’s own post or not, but I have a decid­ed­ly rant‑y feel to it so I decid­ed to put it here. Yes­ter­day, I spent a good chunk of my free time in the morn­ing ago­niz­ing over what new cred­it card to apply for. [Rave] I have excel­lent cred­it, so I knew I’d be able to get basi­cal­ly what­ev­er card I want­ed. With­in rea­son, any­ways. No way was I going to try to apply for the Amex Black or even the Citi/AAdvantage Exec­u­tive World Élite Mas­ter­Card. It want­ed me to spend $5k in the first three months (uhh no), $40k in one cal­en­dar year (Heck no) and charge me a $450 annu­al fee (HELL NO).

After play­ing around with the Mad Fien­tist’s new Mad Trav­el Cards appli­ca­tion, I nar­rowed it down to the Chase Sap­phire Pre­ferred card or the South­west Air­lines Rapid Rewards Pre­mier card. If you’re look­ing for a new trav­el rewards card, Bran­don’s app is price­less. One of the big draws of the South­west card was the com­pan­ion pass. Get 100k points, and get a com­pan­ion pass for the rest of the year and the next year as well. How­ev­er, since I am sin­gle and often trav­el alone, I felt this card would be wast­ed on me right now.

From my time spent look­ing around var­i­ous forums (shout out to red­dit’s /r/churning sub­red­dit!), I know Chase is pick­i­er about who they accept with regards to recent cred­it card appli­ca­tions. I decid­ed to go with the CSP first, as the 50k bonus could go to mul­ti­ple dif­fer­ent rewards pro­grams instead of just South­west. Now I can apply points to hotels AND flights! Woot!

[Rant] The only thing I have a prob­lem with is the cred­it lim­it I received. It’s not too low. Oh no, quite the oppo­site in fact. It’s incred­i­bly high! My cred­it lim­it is $13,800 on this card alone! I can­not afford to run up a bal­ance that high. That’s almost as much as I gross in two months! Which, I might note, is pre­cise­ly what the cred­it card com­pa­nies are hop­ing I do. With an APR of 16.24%, I’d have an incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult time get­ting back to zero if I over­spent. Cred­it cards are great, but ONLY if you are aware of the dan­gers and active­ly avoid them!

On the oth­er hand, the more cred­it I have avail­able, the low­er my cred­it uti­liza­tion num­ber goes which is help­ful in the long run. I guess I should­n’t com­plain so much 🙂 Now I just need to fig­ure out how I’m going to spend $4k in 3 months!

Service Credit

Today marks my 3 year anniver­sary with Mega­Corp! This pic­ture on my badge is 3 years old today. Clear­ly, I’ve changed a whole bunch in the inter­ven­ing years.….…. not. The eter­nal baby face strikes again! No won­der I get card­ed all the time haha.

Three good things result from my 3^rd anniversary.

1. My 401k is tru­ly vest­ed now. It mys­te­ri­ous­ly vest­ed months ago, but now it’s real­ly mine and I can relax a bit about leav­ing the com­pa­ny (not that I real­ly want to).

2. My cowork­ers con­grat­u­lat­ed me and one even gave me a pat on the back. I’m not sure if it was a “good job” pat or a “poor thing has no idea what’s com­ing” pat, but I’ll take it all the same!

3. [RAVE] MY VACATION RESET! I can take a day off now that does­n’t involve me being sick! Woo! I also got bumped up from 10 to 13 days this year! [Rant] Still a pid­dly lit­tle amount, but bet­ter than 10 days so I’ll take that as well. I’ll still prob­a­bly need to buy vaca­tion days this year, but now I can take 18 days off instead of just 15. These extra 3 days are let­ting me stay an addi­tion­al 5 days in Europe this fall, which means I get to cel­e­brate my birth­day on anoth­er con­ti­nent for the first time.

Some things to look for­ward to now that I have 3 years of ser­vice under my belt:

-Know­ing I’m not the absolute bot­tom of the totem pole anymore!

-Only two more years until I hit 5 years, at which point I will get a nice gift, my name on the dis­play board for awhile, and at which point I’ll be ful­ly vest­ed in the pension!

It’s been an inter­est­ing 3 years with my com­pa­ny so far. I’ve had 3 dif­fer­ent posi­tions with them: one intern­ship, and two full-time posi­tions after I grad­u­at­ed as part of an ear­ly devel­op­ment pro­gram. I’ve learned a lot about the com­pa­ny, myself, and the dif­fer­ent tech­nolo­gies in these 3 years. I can’t say I’ve been thrilled with the way I’ve been treat­ed recent­ly, but over­all Mega­Corp has treat­ed me incred­i­bly well. I get a great salary for some­one my age, for what I’m doing, and for where I’m locat­ed. Not to men­tion, this is a glob­al cor­po­ra­tion with name recog­ni­tion out the wazoo. It feels good to work for a com­pa­ny that’s doing so much good in the world. Hope­ful­ly things turn around soon in the hap­pi­ness and per­son­al sat­is­fac­tion realm, but over­all my life could be way worse, and I’m for­tu­nate to be in such a good spot in life.

Do you have some­thing to rant or rave about this week? How’s your life been going?