Wednesday, February 21, 2007

American Express Cash Back Rebate

Today I got my American Express Cash back rebate of $36.65 for the year. Which is pretty awesome. This was just for spending money on the CC. I know you'll say that I spent more on the CC rather than cash, which is doubtful. I never pay interest and having been tracking our spending, I don't think we really overspend.

I've looked at our CC statement for the year and we didn't buy anything we didn't need. Did we spend money we shouldn't? Yes but even if we had been on a cash-based system we would have spent it. Why? Because mainly our vice is eating out. And whether we ate out on the CC or in cash we would have gone out to eat. Our thing is that we don't buy stuff like normal people.

People talk about going to the mall, we don't. We don't shop even online. I don't buy stuff, but we enjoy eating out. But I limit that to $400/month both on the CC or cash. I track how much we've gone out to eat and put a stop limit on eating out. So we don't really overspend on CC. I'll put stuff back and say if I want it, I'll come back next week. If you have been reading our spending for the month of february, we bought 1 shirt for DH and the rest has been eating out and groceries.

Thus curbing our spending would not be helped by cash because I unfortunately enjoy good food. Whether in cash or CC, I would buy beer, buy meat, seafood, or cheese. I would go out to eat, in fact this month we've only eaten out $100 which is really low for us. Typically I'd say abou$250 easily but we've been sick and busy. I expect march we'll spend a lot more eating out, for sure because we're taking some friends to dinner.

That being said I'm estatic that I earned $36 from my CC, and in 1 week DH should be getting his rebate check of $47. Which is a great amount considering this is not our primary CC, we mostly use it for costco. Earlier in November I wrote about how much cash back last year we earned and it was a ton.

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