Five ways to get the most from your credit card

Credit card companies are using incentives to keep customers using their plastic. Here are five incentives you can use to get the most out of your credit card:

2. Travel perks

Business Wire/File
Chefs Chris Cosentino and Elizabeth Falkner (2nd and 3rd from left) pose with officials of Meals on Wheels of San Francisco after winning a $20,000 donation to the organization in 2011 from Chase Sapphire. The company's Preferred card is one of the best travel rewards cards, offering a $500 bonus to new customers who charge at least $3,000 on the card in the first three months.

Many credit cards offer free car rental insurance, concierge services, discounts on airline purchases, and reduced rate hotel rooms. If you travel extensively, these rewards can compound with those you ordinarily receive from individual vendors, giving you double savings. Consider the Chase Sapphire Preferred card as one of the best travel rewards credit cards. If you spend $3,000 within three months of opening your card, you can receive a bonus good for $500 worth of travel rewards.

2 of 5

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.