Almost every credit card company offers reward programs to their customers. Some programs may be more rewarding than others. Therefore you should carefully read the fine prints and see how the reward program works. You should also have a fair idea of how to select a credit card that suits to your lifecycle. Credit card companies are there in the market to increase their profit margin, so they will keep a close eye on customers who don’t keep a close eye on every detail about the reward program. As an informed customer, you should be aware about some of the traps and don’t lose out any good deals.

Credit card companies will introduce new offers including rewards and bonuses that sound very enticing in the beginning. But at the end, it turns out to be very complicated and hard to follow. One of the complicated reward programs is the rotating rewards categories. In this program, the credit card company changes the types of purchases which qualify for the rewards every quarter, and the consumer has to sign up for them in each quarter. If he does not sign up, then does not earn any rewards on those purchases. Credit card companies assume that people will usually forget to sign up on time.

Another way the credit card companies try to catch new customers is by offering savings, but they make the redemption process very complicated. For example, a gas card is offered at a 25 cent discount on up to 20 gallons of gas at their proprietary stations, but the catch is that the customer has to spend $100 every month on the card. This way they are forcing the customers to buy their products in order to get discounts on their items. The rebate was automatically applied at the pump when it became eligible to use, but the remaining discount did not carry over to the next visit to the pump. So if someone needed only 10 gallons of gas, the discount on the remaining 10 gallons got wasted.

Things get more complicated when you do not know how many reward points are available or how many points have expired. And there were cases where points were not applied in the correct ratio on the specific category of goods or services offered. Therefore it is very important to read the fine print very carefully and get the full benefits of the reward program.

There are some program where the rewards or bonuses don’t start until a specific amount of money is spent on the card and the credit card companies allot a very high amount, making it tougher for the customers to get the benefits. For example, if you want to avail 15000 reward points or flight miles, your spending on the card in a year has to be above $40000. This type of offers can tempt the customers to do excessive spending, without realizing that they can later get into deeper debts, if they are not able to pay back the money to the credit card company on time.

Sometimes, a credit card company offers higher bonus incentive on some purchases, and the additional percentage is capped off after a certain dollar amount is spent on that card.

There is another clause by the credit card company regarding redeeming the points. There has to be a minimum number of points available in your account before they can be redeemed. Many people fall into this trap and they start overspending to get more points, and the credit card companies are counting on this.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 28th, 2014 at 4:23 pm and is filed under Credit, Credit Card. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.