Are credit cards still worth using with all the fees being passed on to consumers? In this episode, Tommy and John dive into a hot topic on their minds lately: the real pros and cons of credit cards, debit cards, and cash. They share their personal credit card habits, how many cards they each use, and the strategy behind maximizing rewards without falling into the trap of overspending.
You’ll also learn about use rate, the underrated value of a home equity line of credit, and when to be cautious versus when to leverage fees and credit to your advantage. Whether you’re a frequent traveler, a rewards chaser, or someone trying to keep your budget tight, this episode will help you think more critically about how and why you use different payment methods.
Listen to the full episode here:
What you will learn:
- How to use credit cards efficiently. (03:15)
- The benefit of having a home equity line of credit. (07:00)
- The importance of being strategic with which credit card you use. (11:00)
- Why credit cards are great for frequent travellers. (14:30)
- Why we don’t have to be afraid of fees, but we should be aware of them. (19:00)
- The importance of using the form of payment that is most efficient. (24:00)
Ideas Worth Sharing:
- “A home equity line of credit makes you look better from a debt perspective for interest rates, etc.” – Mason & Associates
- “You never want to spend money that you don’t have to just to qualify for points on a credit card.” – Mason & Associates
- “If you’re not responsible, do not get a credit card.” – Mason & Associates
Resources from this episode:
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Read the Transcript Below:
Congratulations for taking ownership of your financial plan by tuning into the Federal Employee Financial Planning Podcast, hosted by Mason & Associates, financial advisors with over three decades of experience serving you.
John Mason: Welcome to the Federal Employee Financial Planning Podcast. In this episode, Tommy and I are going to be discussing something a little bit different. So it’s Federal Employee Financial Planning, but we’re not talking federal benefits in this episode. We’re talking about things that are top of our mind right now, and it’s going to be credit cards, credit card rewards, credit card points, miles, but also fees, convenience fees.
We’re starting to see these pop up more and more where every time we go to get our oil change, or we’re going out to eat at a restaurant, we’re getting tacked on three, four, or 5% or whatever the percent is in fees, and it’s starting to irritate us as financial planners. So what we wanna do today is we want to discuss credit cards, how we use them, as well as what seems to now be more prevalent, which is the passing on of additional fees to the consumer who is choosing to use a credit card. So we wanna respond to all of this today. So again, no federal benefits, but it’s top of our mind, credit cards and convenience fees. Tommy, welcome to the Federal Employee Financial Planning Podcast.
Tommy Blackburn: Thank you, John. Always enjoy it. This should be a fun topic for us and in disclosure to our audience, I don’t believe either of us feel that we are the experts on credit cards, but we are certainly heavy users, and fairly knowledgeable. A little sophisticated, but I don’t think, there are certainly folks out there who are far more knowledgeable in credit card strategies than us. Something we enjoy, and of course, now are irritated.
How things, but this is life, things change. And so we’ll see if they continue to change and how we adapt, and how the public in general adapts. But yeah, looking forward to the topic,
John Mason: It should be a fun topic, and I guarantee you that there’s people on this podcast listening who are really good at getting a new business or getting a new checking account every 90 days and getting rewards, bonuses, and there’s people listening to this podcast that know how to maximize points better than we do. So we are venturing out of our comfort zone, where we are acknowledging that we are experiencing credentialed, but we fully acknowledge that there are some people listening to this who do not have a CFP designation who could absolutely school us in how to maximize credit card points. So we are going out on a limb, audience, but we just thought this dialogue would be a lot of fun. Remember, unlike many content creators, we’re financial planners first, we do this second, and like we say, we wanna share real-life experiences from decades of helping federal employees.
Now we’re going to share some real-life experiences of our 37 years on this planet and how it’s impacting some of our spending decisions in our personal life. So Tommy, how many credit cards do you have?
Tommy Blackburn: Yeah, I couldn’t honestly tell you, it’s a lie, and disclosure to the, I don’t know if you’ve sent me up there or not.
John Mason: I was.
Tommy Blackburn: But hopefully the audience will appreciate, I’m very responsible with my credit cards. I have used them historically, either to take advantage of the different features that a card has from one to the other, to take advantage of welcome bonuses. There’s been various reasons and reasons I’ve kept them open typically are the more credit you have available to you, the better you look from a credit rating perspective. So my thoughts have usually been it’s not hurting me to keep these credit cards open. In fact, it should be making me look better. With that being said, I believe too that they look out over your credit availability over a period of time, so you could close cards and still get the benefit.
Eventually, it will roll off of that credit report. But that’s why I have so many cards, not ’cause I’m racking up balances right and left. It’s trying to be strategic.
John Mason: And I think you mentioned a couple good things there. So I have over an 800 credit score for whatever that is worth. One app will tell me 830, the other will say 870 or something. And so it’s high. It’s good.
Tommy Blackburn: It’s excellent. It’s excellent. It’s in the excellent range.
John Mason: But the negative that I have, ’cause you can always zoom in and see what’s the negative, and they say your oldest account isn’t that old. And it’s like my oldest account was open in 2010. So it’s 15 years old that I’ve had this credit card, and every year I get pinged, and it’s like, “If you don’t swipe me, I’m gonna close myself.”
So I always have to swipe it at least once a year to keep it open. But out of all the negatives, that’s one that pops up, Tommy, every year. Is your oldest account isn’t that old, or the average age of your accounts isn’t that old. So that’s impacted obviously if you add new cards. But the other thing you mentioned that I wanted to hit on was the, I believe they call it the utilization or the use rate.
So essentially, if you have a thousand-dollar limit and you’re spending $500 a month, you’re using a pretty high percentage of your available credit. That doesn’t look good. You ideally wanna have your utilization rate lower. So I’m not great at doing this, but every year or so I’ll go into all my credit cards, update my income information, and request a credit limit increase.
And I feel like every time I do that, it gives me more available, which brings that ratio down, so that should only be helping my score, hopefully.
Tommy Blackburn: And at the end of the day, you already had an excellent, and from what I’ve viewed, there was a, when I applied for a HELOC, which is I hope will be helpful as well.
And John, I know you have, it’s a home equity line of credit. That one I got actually like the perfect score on that application, which, like for a moment in time made me feel like woo-hoo. But I could say all this to say, like, I think excellent is excellent. I don’t think it matters if you are perfect, excellent or just tipping into excellent. Just like if you’re good. I think if you’re in the good range is whatever they define that, you’re gonna get the best rates, no matter whether you’re at the top of that range or the bottom. It’s just important that you’re there. So it doesn’t really matter whether you have a perfect credit score or if you’re at the edge of excellent.
Nice thing about home equity line and credit, which I think we’ve talked about before, which I know we’re supposed to be talking about credit cards. This should all marry up here is that’s another form of available debt to you that you’re not using. So when they, and my understanding is I think when credit agencies look and see the different types of debt you have as well, that’s attractive to see different forms of it that you’re managing well.
So to have the HELOC. John and I are big fans of what we call opportunity fund, not because we go spending money on home equity lines of credit. I don’t think either one of us uses them. We just like having it available to us in case there’s an opportunity, gives us more liquidity in case something happens in the world.
And another one is that it makes us look better from a credit rating. So that is how having a helm equity line of credit can also be beneficial to you, just makes you look better from a debt perspective for interest rates and so forth.
John Mason: I love my HELOC. I used it last week, actually, you probably don’t even know this.
Tommy Blackburn: Oh, that’s right. I don’t, but I know where it’s going. Or I’m 99% certain I know where it’s going.
John Mason: So I watch too many YouTube videos, but one of them is the CarEdge podcast where they talk about how you should buy cars and they have a very good script. It’s like you go in and you negotiate the out-the-door price of the car, and then once you have it, then you can negotiate the trade-in.
So long and short of it, we had a car that we didn’t want anymore for a variety of reasons, mostly because the reliability has been called into concern, which tangent alert, apparently every new vehicle has some sort of issue, whether it’s a transmission, the engine, the diesel exhaust system. So I don’t know that I ever want to own a new car again, but you know, so tangent over, we went to buy a new car because we wanted to get rid of this one.
And by the time we were done, Tommy, negotiating the out-the-door price of the new SUV, we were just so tired and we’re like, “We need to get the heck outta here.” The last thing we wanna do is get into a screaming and hollering match over the price of the expedition. So I just said I’ll cash for the car.
So two stories here. We told the dealer we were gonna pay cash for the new car, and they were like, “Cash-cash?” I’m like, “What’s cash-cash?” They were like, “Well, you know, cash-cash.” I said, “I don’t understand.” Cash in a bag.
Tommy Blackburn: Yeah. Get it out of the trunk.
John Mason: Like a briefcase cash? I was like, “I’ll be writing a check today.” And they were like, and I think what they were referring to is I didn’t have like a $30,000 loan from the credit union in addition to $20,000 from my bank account. That would be presented as cash, but actually, 30,000 of it was a loan, so just, audience, if you’re going to buy a car and you’re planning to pay cash for it, I think the deal with cash-cash is they want to understand if there is a lien holder even though you’ll be presenting this dealer with cash, maybe it’s not a cash-cash deal. So that’s step one. Step two was we didn’t feel like negotiating. It was nighttime. We were tired so I just used money from the HELOC. I moved the HELOC over into the checking account, wrote a check for the car, that bought me seven days where I could go take the car over to CarMax, sell it, pay off the HELOC.
I think I incurred maybe five or $10 in interest for that, but that was certainly a better experience for me, not having to get into a negotiation match, Tommy, on the value of the expedition. So that was just a classic example of how having that credit was helpful.
Tommy Blackburn: Yeah, absolutely. It’s nice to, the flexibility it awarded you and even though I didn’t realize it’s a little bit of a tangent from the episode, we’re supposed to be talking about credit cards.
But yeah, it’s exhausting going through those, even when you know like exactly what you want, the whole game plan, it’s amazing how much time it takes, is probably part of the strategy to wear you down, by just making it such an experience. So I can just relate, that exhaustion at the end of it.
And yeah, I get that. I was just like, here’s this transaction. I’m not doing the other transaction right now. We’ll revisit this some other time.
John Mason: So my philosophy with credit cards, Tommy, I think, is similar to yours, is that I have, and my wife, she does a good job. She’s financially responsible.
She doesn’t dedicate as much time to maximizing credit card dollars as I do, and I think that’s okay. But I have an arsenal of cards. I have a three or four cards that I like to use.
Tommy Blackburn: An arsenal. It’s a good way to put it.
John Mason: And I’ve been training my son. So I lay out my cards. I’m like, “All right, which one do we use, son?” You know, for this episode, which one do we use?
Or for this purchase? So I have my Citi card, my double cash rewards card, which is 2% cash back on everything, that is my default card anywhere I go, ’cause I have refused to get less than 2% cash back. Then I have a dining card that gives me 3% cash back on travel, 3% cash back on restaurants. So I know when I’m eating out or when I’m traveling, I’m booking that card.
And then I have a Costco card that gets me 4% cash back at gas stations or 5% cash back at Costco Gas. So I’ve got those three that I use. Obviously, we have our business card, which is number four. And then I have a grocery card, which is like three or 4% cash back on grocery shopping. So I’m trying to not wear myself out completely, but I’m trying to always get 2% and then when the opportunity arises to get three or four or even five, I’m trying to pull out the card that makes sense. But I have not applied for a new credit card in five years probably, was probably my last one.
Tommy Blackburn: I can’t say that same for me. I definitely, as far as trying to be strategic about what card I’m using for a given transaction, I do try to be strategic. I like the 2% cash back, although I’ve moved off of that a little bit. And part of that is like a bigger points strategy thought, which is that 2% cash back is great and I love cash back.
Can’t argue with the strategy, but it’s like for Chase or Amex, some of these that have the transferable points where you can transfer it to an airline or transfer it to a hotel and potentially have those points be worth more, that way, though there are times where I’m like, okay, I’ll get the 1.5% back through the Chase card instead of the 2% cash back on like my Wells Fargo card, just because I’m now putting a little bit more value on a transferable, and then just the cashback. But I love the simplicity of cashback, so I don’t knock that at all. And many times I almost wanna just get back to that world because it’s just very simple to, easy to understand. Cash is cash, don’t have to worry about transferring points around.
John Mason: Well, you’re also really good at using, you do more international travel and more flights than we do.
Most of the time, we’re traveling in the RV. Most of the time you’re flying. So I think you get a lot more value in those points where, like, for instance, for me, it’s a toss up whether or not a campground even counts as travel. So it’s like, do I use my travel card for a campground, or do I use my cash back card for a campground?
So I don’t even know. And they definitely don’t accept miles or points, right? So for me, the 2% becomes a guarantee, if you will. But I think your story of being able to get TSA precheck and global entry and access to airport lounges, all of that’s been really helpful for you. And I know we talk about this during strategic planning meetings when clients are traveling overseas.
So many clients do not have a good travel card. Like for instance, travel cards give you car insurance when you’re renting a car, and they pay for all these other things that we just talked about.
Tommy Blackburn: Trip insurance. Yeah. Luggage lost. I mean, yeah, they have a lot of benefits on them, as well as usually no foreign transaction fees.
So as we’re, you know, the intent of this episode is to complain about credit cards or the convenience fees that we’re seeing now. We’re kind of laying out maybe some of the good first, or at least how we got here, right? So that, those things, and for me, and I think even for you now, John, yeah, some of the perks of cars.
So one, some of the protections when we’re traveling, even domestically, like if you rented a car, having some of that, having access to lounges and airports, no foreign transaction fees. Amex is really good and confusing at how they’re doing things these days. You gotta think about it, and sometimes it’s exhausting, and I completely get like not wanting to think about it, but they’re like every, the folks who really get into credit cards call it like the coupon book now, where, so you’re like a member with Amex.
Not only do you have their lounges, but if I go to certain gas stations, I get 10 cent off on a gallon. And so now you’re doing this new calculation of like, which is better? The one that gives me 5% back, or the 10 cent plus the 1%. So you have that. I don’t know, Amex has a lot of stuff, like, I don’t know, some of your streaming service, just depending on the card.
So you’re trying to like, it’s much more than even just like the amount of points you get anymore. It’s like this whole membership club that you’re now trying to figure out what is the value potentially for some of these cards of these other benefits that come with it. So it’s certainly not the easiest and the most transparent to figure out.
Maybe to bring it back a little bit to a reason to get cards now, and we even were making clients aware of, they’re certainly not pushing it, is these welcome bonuses, ’cause they can be certainly very attractive. Recent one was the Chase Sapphire Preferred, good, I would call it entry or middle of the road travel card there, has a hundred dollars fee, but their offer was a hundred thousand points after you spent, I think it was $5,000 in three months, which most people are gonna do that just living. So the advice was don’t go spend money to get the points. It was, you’re gonna spend this money anyway, you can pick up a hundred thousand points, which the nice thing about that car, particularly if you like cash back, you can take the points as cash.
So that would’ve been a thousand dollars of cash you could have got just for doing your normal thing. Pay a hundred dollars fee, come out at least $900 better, probably more. With that card you can also transfer to partners to try to maximize it more if you want to get creative. But yeah, that’s another thing here, right, is just thinking through welcome offers can be quite attractive.
John Mason: They can be. And like you said, you never wanna spend money that you don’t have or spend money just to qualify for these points, right? Like a thousand dollars back after you spend five is not a good return on your money unless you were gonna spend that 5,000 anyhow. But the other thing we see with clients is A, they were maybe irresponsible previously with credit cards, so they’ve been scared to venture back into them, or B, Dave Ramsey told them not to, or C, maybe they’re scared of the fee associated with a credit card. We wanna debunk all of that. Like if you’re not responsible, don’t get a credit card, probably.
But also don’t be scared of the fee because just like a fee to a financial planner, fees are only negative if you’re not getting equal or more value from the fee. So that a hundred dollars card is undoubtedly gonna have some sort of travel insurance, some sort of rental car protection. It’s probably gonna pay for TSA pre-check every so often.
So you’re going to get more than a hundred dollars of value. And then, oh, by the way, no foreign transaction fees, et cetera. So if you’re doing any traveling at all, you know, you should be at least getting 3% cash back minimum, on travel. Or you should be exploring some of these cards that offer the luxury benefits or ancillary benefits as it relates to your travel. I know the Amex Platinum makes you like gold at Hyatt or something.
Tommy Blackburn: Yeah. Amex Platinum and this one, brace yourself, audience, if you’re not aware of it, it’s a $700 fee per year. So that’s a, it’s a high fee.
Typically, they have a nice welcome offer to get you in, and they have other credits. You can easily add up $700 of value. You’ll get out of that card for a year. Usually, I would suggest try to think of it, maybe like, I’m not changing my behavior. This is gonna help behaviors I already do, and that can justify it.
And I’m just thinking, John. So yeah, we do need to be aware of these fees. Don’t be afraid of them. You can cancel a card anyway if you get annoyed with it. But yeah, think about the value you’re gonna get. Is it worth it? And I think about like just where I came from and like, John, how I was raised is what I think about, and my parents, I guess they would call ’em money scripts or their money habits, which was good habits, allowed them to be successful, but pretty frugal at times.
And I think about them, like I haven’t, I never even mentioned that card to them, a $700 fee card, ’cause I know it would probably just blow a gasket and probably cause them to really question. We’d have to have some conversations to really explain it.
I think I did get them in, I did get them into the Sapphire Preffered. I was able to explain that to them. But I mean, that was a huge lift of like explaining like, “Don’t let that a hundred dollars fee sway you. Like let’s go through it.” So I just share that ’cause it is comical. I think about the internal battles I have to have with myself and maybe that’s helpful for the audience.
Like we are people too. we have these same thoughts that go through our head, these same things. They’re like, “No, I’m not spending that on this card.” But we try to challenge our preconceptions to rethink things periodically.
John Mason: That’s a good story and probably takes us right into how did we get here? Every time we swipe a credit card, there’s fees, and those fees end up going back to Visa, MasterCard, Amex, and I know I’ve seen YouTube videos of congressional hearings or something where they’re interviewing people from Visa, and they’re like, “You had a 55% profit last year.” And Visa’s like, “Yeah, we did pretty great, didn’t we?”
But somehow that’s bad. Anyhow, fees have caught on up to us a little bit and rewards have caught on up to us a little bit, because no,w when I go out to fill up my truck or I’m going out to eat, 3%, 4% fees are now being passed directly on to me. So in the interest of keeping this episode shorter, I’m starting to carry around more cash.
So hopefully, that doesn’t make me a target if you know where I live. I’m carrying around more cash, ’cause I want to have the ability. I got 10% discount the other day off my dinner bill ’cause I paid cash. That’s a pretty good deal.
Tommy Blackburn: Hard to argue with that.
John Mason: So I’m gonna start carrying some cash, and I carry a checkbook, and I also, I haven’t swiped a debit card in 15 years probably. But over the weekend, I went over to my bank and I created a separate checking account that I keep 500 or a thousand bucks in. And I’m gonna use that debit card to pull only from that tiny checking account, not my main checking account, but this like Venmo checking account, this bill pay checking account, this debit card linked checking account, so that I can be a little more in control if I get skimmed or if I get hacked or if something bad happens, it’s not tied to my big account.
That’s always been, for me, the big benefit of the credit cards is the protection. It’s like one step away from me. It’s not, I didn’t spend my money, I spent the bank’s money. And now I feel like it’s almost a reversal, Tommy, where I’m gonna start paying some cash for some things now.
Or maybe it is worth 1% in fees to me to still be able to use my credit card, but I’m losing money on transactions now where I wasn’t before.
Tommy Blackburn: It’s not as attractive. Yeah. I not, I genuinely wonder where this is gonna all end up. And you’re right with the credit cards, that was always a nice thing about it was it was a level of separation between your cash and the bank and whoever might be looking for payments, as well as credit cards have generally just been much better about disputing a transaction and canceling things and getting money like that has always been a historically a much easier experience than if somebody got ahold of your bank account and did things wrong, or a debit card. I think you would usually get back to the right answer, but it was a much more tedious process than a credit card.
So I do like the level of separation you’re trying to build there, and maybe debit cards or those type of transactions will get better. I’m with you, because yeah, you’re doing the math in your head, which is like, “Hey, if finally get 2%, they’re charging three. This is no longer in my favor.” As you said, visas, or as you joked, alluded Visa made a 50% profit or something, which, hey, good for them.
They have a lot at stake here, right? So I can’t help but wonder. A big part of their profit, their industry is from these merchant fees that they charge to facilitate these payments. And if that goes away or if people, consumer behavior all of a sudden is, “I’m going back to using essentially cash to avoid these convenience fees.” Yeah. They’ve had an incentive to figure out how to keep that from happening. I don’t know how they’re gonna get to that answer, but you wonder, or does an entire industry die? I suppose it’s possible and happens. But at the end of the day, that’s not your problem. As a consumer, your problem, it is up to you to be as most efficient as you can with your money, which is, hey, if all of a sudden credit cards are no longer competitive, then just go the other direction and start using cash.
Cash-like ways of paying. Unless you can see reasons where maybe now, again, it’s more of the membership thing, like the protections, and you get access to other things. And maybe that’s the new draw of a credit card. But you’re still probably not gonna go swipe it regularly. You’re just going pay your membership fee and probably not use it for anything else.
I don’t know. But yeah, we’re Mason & Associates, same boat as all of our clients and everybody else spending money out there, right? Like, I’m not, I’m going to choose the form of payment that is most efficient. And if it’s cashed, then so be it.
John Mason: And it’s confusing too because you go to the mechanic and you pay for your oil change and you’re like, okay, if I hand you a hundred-dollar bill, obviously, there’s mechanics that maybe would or would not report the income.
That’s one thing. But then there’s also a, there’s a cost to doing business when you have cash. You have to go to the bank, you have to deposit it, there’s theft, there’s other issues with cash, to,o physical time spent to do all those things, where maybe it should be worth it to the merchant just to not pass that credit card fee onto the consumer, and we would just say at Mason & Associates, we’ve been charging 2,500 for our initial plan for 10 years, I think.
And we used to pick that up via check, and now we pick it up through a payment portal called AdvicePay. And that AdvicePay charges us a convenience fee, but we have not passed that convenience fee onto a client.
If we were to raise our financial planning fee based on inflation, it would account for our net income. We’re not going to raise the fee to $2,600 and then tack on a 3% convenience fee. We would just raise it to $2,650 if that’s what we felt like we had to do. Personally, I think that’s how it should be done is that it should just be reflected in the price.
But for whatever reason, we have to like entice people in with the $99 oil change or $69 oil change is like the advertising, and then they slap the fee on. So, for folks who are competing based on price, I can see why it’s not baked into the price. But it does feel like false advertising a bit.
Tommy Blackburn: You are right. And perhaps that’s the other many sides of that equation is that consumers, perhaps decide to stop doing business with merchants that are passing a convenience fee onto them, because maybe it’s less convenient for, yeah, where you’re just like, “You know what, Joe across the street, he’s got the real price and he takes a credit card. Like there’s no, I don’t have to think about this anymore, so I’m going there.”
Versus doing this, and what was the other thing? Oh, when you were talking about like the efficiency of, from running a business. Yeah, completely agree. Perhaps some businesses, maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. Like really thinking about what’s the cost of administration here, of now having cash, we gotta get it to the bank, more books and records to try to keep up with versus like just the ease of an electronic payment system. And it even got me wondering, John, which I’m just spitballing here, and probably the audience doesn’t care at all, but you begin to wonder like maybe banks begin charging for, “Hey, we’ve got all this cash we gotta deal with again from these merchants and we’re gonna start passing on some fees to do it this way,” because you’re doing, making life, you know, there’s a cost to us staffing these tellers and staffing these banks. And yeah, maybe it comes full circle. I don’t know.
John Mason: Well, like anything, Tommy, I think it goes back to being prepared, like we’ve talked about another episode. So, my takeaway for the audience is have your quiver or your arsenal of credit cards that you’re gonna get your points or your miles for, maybe carry a check or two with you just in case.
Maybe carry some cash with you. But you have the ability to spring if you can get a 10% discount paying with a hundred-dollar bill, it should be nice to have that in your back pocket, so
Tommy Blackburn: I completely, you know I agree with you. I’m just chuckling here. Do you remember? Hopefully, everybody appreciates the little tangent.
But I can remember as a kid going to the grocery store and those check machines that they would run it through. Like, we, going back to that, that really slowed down the process of checking out. Oh man. It’s hard to imagine.
John Mason: Yeah. I wonder how that would work with self-checkout. You like write a machine a check. Yeah. Who knows?
Tommy Blackburn: Oh, that’s wild.
John Mason: Any takeaways for you, Tommy?
Tommy Blackburn: I think it’s kind of just, always, we’ve come up with systems that work for you. So don’t make it more complicated than it needs to be. But look for efficiencies, and credit cards have long been an efficiency, but let’s not be so stuck in our ways that we don’t acknowledge if the landscape has changed.
So, I love, I really love, yeah, have quivers. I’m sorry, have arrows in your quiver so that if credit cards, the way you’re ready to take full advantage, if it makes more sense to pay you with cash or something like cash. You know you’re ready to take advantage of that, too. It’s like having that HELOC. It’s the opportunity fund. It never hurts to have that arsenal, as you said as well.
John Mason: And maybe just call out NerdWallet, audience, is a good resource. If you’re looking for a quick way to filter by bank accounts or credit cards or sign-up bonuses. nerdwallet.com I think is the website, does a pretty good job at doing that. Tommy, thanks for being with us on another episode.
Tommy Blackburn: It’s always a blast.
John Mason: Audience, is our content helping you make more informed decisions? Do you feel educated and empowered? Have you made positive changes in your financial plan since you started following our show? If so, please do all the things for us: like, subscribe, hit the bell notification, send us a note at MasonFP, like Mason Financial planning@masonllc.net. Share this content with friends, family, coworkers. We appreciate you for being on this journey with us, and again, doing all the things to help us continue to have this podcast grow. Remember, we’re financial planners first, we do this second. And as always, we hope you leave this episode and every episode feeling more educated and more empowered to make positive changes in your financial plan.
The topics discussed on this podcast represent our best understanding of federal benefits and are for informational and educational purposes only, and should not be construed as investment, financial planning, or other professional advice.
We encourage you to consult with the office of personnel management and one or more professional advisors before taking any action based on the information presented.