2017 TALLY:

$465 Travel Rewards Cards (Capital One Venture,MH)
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$465 TOTAL *ONE-TIME REWARDS*

**In addition, various monthly rewards that I will tally at 12/31.

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In the end, I have already surpassed last year's credit card (one-time) bonus total. Maybe 2017 will be better than 2016?

For the travel rewards card, I have a few days left to apply the $465 to our hotel charge. We have 60 days from date of purchase. My plan today is to book our Paris excursion. I'd like to just cover that with the travel reward. But I am not completely sure it will count as a "travel" expense. This card seems pretty liberal with the travel category so I think it will work. But if "tours" don't count than we aren't planning to spend $462 on any other "travel" expenses this year. (Most our remaining expenses will just be food while we are abroad). In that case, will throw at the hotel. I realize for the most part it doesn't make any difference. If I apply it to the hotel right now I will receive a $462 credit to apply to travel tours (or to anything). But, the hotel is a refundable rate and so I wanted to use the free money to cover non-refundable purchases. Just for a worst case scenario if we have to cancel or change anything.

It's not the worst thing to get things nailed down. We leave in less than 3 months. So maybe this is extra motivation to nail down our itinerary. In our true fashion, we really belabored choosing a hotel, but for the most part rather figure out the rest when we get there. Over-prepare and then go with the flow. That's just how we roll. We plan for the BIG things but not for all the minutiae. But... we do realize we need to make reservations for tours and such. MH had wanted to lock those in a couple of months ago. Then we lost momentum, somewhere along the way.

I had decided to look for a smaller credit card reward when PS mentioned the $200 bonus she applied for. It was a Wells Fargo card. I did apply and it was weird. They got very detailed about employment (as PS mentioned). I finally decided to just put "homemaker" for MH and that he had access to household income. After belaboring if I should put that or all his employer info (for his like $8k income), they approved the card instantly. We will use this reward for another England tour.

When applying for the new card (a couple of days ago) I had wanted to close my prior one-time reward card. I only kept it open this long because we were still going through rewards. It took us like 9 months to get through $250 restaurant gift cards. Kept it open in case there were any problems with the gift cards. Anyway, I logged in to AmEx a couple of days ago and they had no contact info or chat link. ??? If I log into MH's AmEx account it's all there. I know it would have been faster to call versus all the time I spent poking around trying to find a chat option. !! But I gave up since they didn't even have a phone # to call and I don't know where the card is. I always do paper statements for these one-time bonus cards. As a reminder until I close the accounts. I finally decided to just call when I got the paper statement. Then I'd have the account info and any idea who to even call.

So today I logged on to MH's AmEx and it looks totally different than it did a couple of days ago. There's also a huge chat button at the bottom of the screen. I really didn't expect much because both logins were completely different the other day. But on a whim, I logged in to my AmEx account, and the same chat button was there. Woohoo! It was like a 1-minute chat to get that card closed. Glad to get that taken care of.