What Are the Best Travel Credit Card Perks?
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Your Money Briefing. Money and market stories from the Wall Street Journal. I'm J.R. Whalen in New York. Happy days are here again for consumers who enjoy racking up perks from travel credit cards. We'll have details in a moment. First, these money headlines. U.S.
What travel credit-card perks are driving a 'golden age' for consumers?
wage growth is set to pick up modestly in the coming years, but economists think that pay raises are being depressed by powerful forces. Sluggish productivity gains an aging population and oversees competition that could persist despite low unemployment. It's one of the lingering mysteries of the economic expansion that began nearly nine years ago. Why has growth in Americans' paychecks remained anemic despite the unemployment rate plunging to its lowest level in 17 years? Larger raises may be coming after average hourly earnings for private sector workers rose 2.7 percent in each of the past two years. Private sector forecasters surveyed in recent days by the Wall Street Journal reported On average predicted 3% earnings growth this year, followed by 3.2% next year and then 3.1% in 2020.
And if you spent the last few weeks shopping, you weren't alone. Data culled from Bank of America's credit cards, debit cards and customer accounts show that retail spending as well as wages accelerated, albeit slowly, in March. That's welcome news of confirmed by national data given the slow start to the year for spending. One contributor to the slow spending start to the year was the delay in refunds from the earned income tax credit and the additional child tax credit. Well, now new tax withholding tables have gone into effect, which has translated into higher pay and more of an urge to spend. This is your Money Briefing from The Wall Street Journal. Welcome back, everybody. Take a look in your wallet.
Is it stuffed with credit cards, some of which offer travel rewards? Don't be embarrassed if it is. Wall Street Journal middle seat columnist Scott McCartney is here to discuss the sort of golden age consumers are currently in with respect to racking up attractive offers. So, Scott, right in your column in the Wall Street Journal, there's an array of quality offers out there these days. Consumers can have a separate credit card for any number of specific activities.
Yeah, I think that's really the best strategy right now. The card business is really competitive. So there are all kinds of really lucrative offers out there. But they've gotten kind of specific. So some cards really reward travel and dining. Some cards give you perks. Some cards are really good for everyday spending. And I think for each of those, you should have a different card.
So it's okay to have your wallet stuffed with these cards because a consumer can really make out pretty well.
Yeah. I mean, we're looking at thousands of dollars worth of benefits. You can easily get back 2% of your annual credit card spend. I think that's kind of a minimum. You can certainly do better than that with all kinds of different travel rewards. It really depends on how you spend, what you spend on. It's worth getting your annual statement from various credit cards you use and looking at what you spend in each category and then figuring out which card has the best perks, the best benefits for that particular spending.
There's a lot of fine print, a lot of different offers being offered by a bunch of cards. And one of the things you say in your column is keep the figure 2% in mind. And you mentioned the fact that consumers should always look to get a minimum of 2% back on their purchases. And that's a pretty good, kind of like a good mile marker for the consumer to have in mind.
Yeah, I think so. There are tons of cards that do not give you 2% back, but you can pretty easily get that. If you don't want to play the game and engage in all this, get a card that has no annual fee and pays 2% cash back. There's a Fidelity card that puts 2% in a Fidelity account for you. Citibank has a double cash back card where you can get 2% back. So start there. That's the minimum. But depending on what kind of travel you like to do and how you spend your money, you can do much better.
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