Rewarding Reseach

Credit card art image from here

For most of our expenses, my husband and I both use an airlines reward credit card. Now, there was a time when we could barely make the minimum payments on our credit cards. So it's a little hard to believe that we now use a credit card every month for our expenses. The difference is, we now pay it off in full each month! We totally learned our lesson the hard way, but we've found that we're now very disciplined about paying it off, because we never want to end up back where we were before.

There are two main benefits for us by handling our expenses this way:
(1) We can keep track of everything we're spending in one place rather than having to consult a bunch of receipts in order to enter our expenses into our budget tracker.
(2) We're awarded one mile for every dollar spent.

In the past, this worked great for us and we've used these rewards to go on several trips. But since we've had a baby, our plane trips have definitely decreased. I've been thinking about switching our main credit card to a cash back card, since we may see more benefit from that now than from getting miles.

In my research I came across this site, which lets you compare credit card rewards programs based on your own needs. I'm having trouble deciding whether to go with a cash back card, or with this card, which will deposit the rewards directly into a 529 plan for our daughter. For now, I'm still researching, but I'll check back when I decide.