Churn credit cards = constantly open and close new credit cards for the sign up bonuses but in a careful way that doesn't crash your credit score
So I've met quite a few people in tech who do this and they're literally all hardcore neoliberals. They hate any type of welfare for new immigrants, refugees, and the unemployed. They despise unions and think it's for lazy people. They worship companies and have snitched on coworkers to HR for doing stuff like stealing office supplies and abusing employee benefits
I'm wondering if all credit card hobbyists are like this or just the ones in tech because theoretically, there's nothing about having good personal finance that inherently makes you have shitty politics. I guess I can see how people who do this think poor people are poor because they don't do all this neurotic credit card min maxing shit?
like getting the credit card companies to give you free shit is good but it requires too much micromanagement to be something other than a hobby for the idle rich, when we're talking about the extremes.
It's technically not even free. The average point back is 1-2% for no annual fee cards but merchants are charged 3.25% for credit card transactions. Of course, this means that the extra 3.25% is passed onto the consumer, leaving the average credit card holder with a negative return
The only ones it benefits are the ones averaging 5% back with expensive annual fee cards. Another thing that's transferring wealth from the poor to wealthy, although in this case it's a natural consequence of the free market rather than purposeful exploitation
no, that fee is almost everywhere baked into prices and part of the contracts vendors sign actually forbids them from giving discounts for paying cash. the point of churning isn't about that anyway. it's about snagging high sign up bonuses because they can net you 10-20% on the money you spend to meet the reqs. once you've met the requirements and gotten the bonus, the card gets sock drawered, and eventually canceled before you pay any extra fees. you can make a decent chunk on money you were gonna spend anyway.
This doesn't make any sense to me.
so cc companies put sign bonuses on cards expecting people to use the cards for awhile after they have them. this is basically trashing your credit score for 2 years (cause you opened a bunch of cards) to make some money. it's not enough to live on or anything but some people get a kick out of it, I guess? like they're screwing the credit card companies if they do everything perfectly and getting screwed by the credit card companies if they slip up even slightly. like paying any fee for late payment or worse taking an interest charge is going to eat away at the profit real fucking fast.
I mean that's exactly what I thought would be the case so I don't understand why you would bother. This seems like a lot of effort for very marginal returns.
like I said, I think it's a game for the idle rich
I do not understand why people find screwing around with numbers on spreadsheets this enthralling.
there's a pleasure in working out how something operates mechanically and twisting its behavior to make it do something it's not supposed to. or that's my guess from experiencing something similar in games.
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Hey, Victoria 3 can be pretty fun