Three Tips To Use Your Discover Card More Efficiently
Today, we’re presenting a guest post from Manshu from One Mint, a personal finance blog that covers a wide range of topics like gold ETFs, India ETFs, bank interest rates, and other stuff that affects your money. If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to his feed.
I wrote about my 60 seconds Discover Card approval experience a few months ago, and since then I have used this credit card quite a bit. Along the way, I have discovered a few things about Discover, which I am going to share with you today in the hopes that you will find them useful and make your use of this credit card more efficient.
1. There is an app for that: If you have an iPhone – Discover has a very slick app that you can use. It is very functional because seeing balances, recent transactions, and making payments are all very easy on it. I have started using it recently, especially for checking out recent transactions and making payments, as these are things I do most often, and can be done easily on the app.
2. Keep an eye out for the 5% cash-back: Generally, Discover gives you 1% cash-back on your purchases, and it declares a category on which it gives out 5% cash back every quarter. For this quarter it is Home and Fashion. In January, it was Travel, and I see that in June, you get 5% on restaurants.
There are a couple of things to keep in mind about this:
a) First is that you have to sign up for these. Signing up is simply clicking a button which says – Sign Up – when you log into your account. I have never missed signing up for this, but I am guessing that some people do miss clicking this button, and that is probably why Discover needs you to sign up for this in the first place.
b) Second thing that struck me about this was being a little smart in managing my credit cards as far as the 5% category is concerned. I use multiple credit cards, and I had to book a few air tickets last quarter, which I did using another card.
I missed out on easy pickings just because it slipped my mind. If you use multiple credit cards, which you probably do, then it is a good idea to take a moment to think about the 5% category in the present quarter, and let it register in your mind. This will increase your odds of making the most out of the 5% cash-back.
3. Spend Analyzer Tool: There is a spend analyzer tool in the Discover website that shows you a pie chart of your total expenses broken out into categories. This is a pretty slick thing because it takes your expenses, categorizes them, and then presents a snapshot of where your money is going. I didn’t pay much attention to this initially, but then I tried it out once, and was surprised to see how much money I was spending on restaurants. If someone had asked me what percentage I thought I was spending on eating out, I would have been way off the real numbers. More than anything else, this is probably an indicator of how clue-less I am, but still, this will be a good report for everyone, and looking at it every once in a while may reveal things about your spending pattern that you didn’t know about.
Knowing about these three things made me use my card more efficiently and I hope you find these little bits of information useful too.
Related Posts:
60 seconds Discover Card approval experience – This is Manshu’s post about his application process.
