Over the years, I got really good and playing what I call the shell game. To slowly pay off a large balance without paying fees, I would transfer it to a new card with 0% apr. Then when that card offer expired, I would get a new card, and on and on.
But the shell game is winding down, mostly because it is becoming harder to find a card that will offer you 0% with no balance transfer fee. So I’m trading in my shells for a card that I can just use for purchases.
At one time I thought all credit cards were basically the same. However in dealing with many different cards over the years, one stands out as being the best to use for purchases.
My card of choice is now the Discover card. And the reason I choose it is a little unusual: they make it easy to download transactions at the end of the year for tax purposes.
This is probably an odd reason. But my credit card is used for my business and at the end of the year, I really need to be able to total all my expenses by category for tax purposes.
I first discovered how important this was after changing to Discover from Bank of America. My old card had no way to download the year’s worth of transactions so I had to keep track of everything on a spreadsheet. When I switched to Discover, I was overjoyed to find a link to a Year-End Summary.
When I clicked on it, I was delighted to see that it allowed me to download the entire year’s worth of transactions in Excel spreadsheet format, with appropriate categories. So now I could easily sort by the category column and get all my gas purchases together, all my shipping charges, all my merchandise purchases, etc. Then I could total each category to put on my Schedule C.
At first I thought my Bank of America card just didn’t give me this option, but others probably would. Then I switched from Discover to Chase because I thought they had better cash back bonuses.
When the year ended, I went online to download transactions. But unlike the Discover card, the Chase did not give me anything I could bring into Excel. Instead it was a pdf which listed everything, but in very broad categories such as services, merchandise, and automotive.
I’m not sure what the Chase people were thinking with the pdf. How exactly am I supposed to import that into Excel so that I can sort and total? What I ended up doing was copying/pasting each transaction. They also had little pictures of pie charts and check boxes.
Compare this with the Discover card. Their summary was a csv file of just data, not pictures. And their categories were broken down better as well. For example, they had a separate automotive category and gasoline category (Chase lumped both of these into automotive). And I could easily open their file with Excel so that I could sort and total.
The Discover download allowed me to organize this data in minutes, but with the Chase card, it took hours.
Another benefit of Discover: throughout the year when you log in, they give you a pie chart that shows you exactly how your money is being spent.
So since I pay off my card entirely each month anyway, rates are not important to me. But saving hours at tax time is. For this reason, I’ll always go with Discover from now on.
Earline Mortner has used offers about credit cards to chip away at a balance for years. She also has a website about ladies casual shoes and womens casual shoes.
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