Share Your Success Tuesday

Photo credit: John Fowler, CC BY 2.0.

It’s Tuesday, which means it’s time to share our recent financial successes.

I have two successes to share this week:

First, I bought another Vanguard ETF share after yesterday’s market drop, making it the lowest price I’ve paid for this particular ETF. (As you might remember, I put a percentage of my freelance income into my individual brokerage account every Friday, which means I generally have cash available to make Vanguard purchases — and I’ve been trying to pay attention to the market without stressing about it. But it is fun to read the news and think “okay, I need to invest now.”)

Second, I decided not to apply for either the Chase Sapphire Reserve or the Citi AAdvantage Platinum Select World Elite Mastercard. I’m planning some summer travel, and I thought about whether it would be worth it to get a special travel credit card since I’m no longer able to rely on my Alaska Airlines Visa Signature card (Alaska does not service the Cedar Rapids airport).

So I sat down and calculated:

• the annual fees
• minus the amount I might save in checked bag costs
• times the trips I plan to take for the rest of the year
• plus the cost of thawing and re-freezing all of my credit reports
• plus the hassle of having to make a few thousand dollars in purchases on the credit card to get the mile bonus, which will have to include a lot of business purchases since those’ll be my major expenses this quarter, and I really want to keep business purchases separate

…and I decided it was the smarter choice to sign up for the AAdvantage loyalty program without getting the credit card. I’ll still earn miles, and I’ll get the advantage — pun intended — of being able to put business travel on my business credit card and personal travel on my personal credit card while earning cash back on all of those purchases. (Yes, I know I could get a Citi AAdvantage business credit card and a Citi AAdvantage personal credit card if I really wanted to… but I don’t.)

Those are my successes for this week — what about you?

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