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My Entry into the World of Credit Cards

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After joining my job in June 2018, my salary account was opened in ICICI Bank. During the account opening process, I was offered a Life Time Free (LTF) credit card. Simply put, this was my first chance to get into the credit world without any extra hassle because first of all, neither was I aware of the concept of credit scores nor I had any credit history and secondly, I was just curious about credit cards after seeing of my father use his credit cards with extra caution and the monthly event of credit card bill payment that used to happen at my home. And in that sudden moment of joy, I made my first mistake in the credit world.

Representative Image (Source: https://jessepollak.github.io/card/)

Now if your guess is that I started spending crazy amounts of money which I couldn't repay, then you are WRONG! I am a miserly person. Money doesn't leave my hands and in general, my credit utilization has never exceeded 5% of my credit limit. So coming back to my first mistake, I asked the ICICI representative to give me the "most basic card". He gave me the ICICI Platinum Chip Credit Card and at the time I was happy with it. It took me almost 6 months to realize my mistake.

At the time, we were planning to go for a movie. One of my friends had got the LTF ICICI Rubyx credit card at the time of opening the account. So he logged into bookmyshow at the appropriate time and got the Buy One Get One Free offer on Rubyx. I was stunned by the power of this card and started checking if there ware similar benefits on my credit card but to my dismay, there was no such offer on my card. My initial decision making had cost me dearly.

Since then I voraciously started reading about credit cards and their offers, reward points, cashbacks and penalties :p As I read more, I came to a realization that I had also lost an opportunity to optimize rewards on certain significant online purchases that I did with my credit card instead of my father's credit card. Although I did realize that there is much more to credit card rewards than just free movie tickets.

I have tried to make amends for the lost 6 months. I received an offer to get Amazon Pay ICICI bank credit card and quickly applied for it in February 2019. This card more than doubled my rewards as I got >1% cashback instead of 0.5% reward on the platinum credit card. I adjusted my credit cycles to optimize the grace period that I get. I also created a list of all the credit cards at my home. Listed down all their benefits side by side to pick the most suitable card when I make any transaction.

I will mention here three instances where I used the best among the available credit cards for that transaction.
  1. Railway ticket booking on IRCTC - I used the Kotak Royale Signature credit card which waived off the transaction fees for ticket booking and I got almost 45 days to pay for the actual ticket.
  2. Online Shopping - I used the HDFC SmartBuy platform to get 10x rewards for my online purchases on Amazon with Regalia First credit card.
  3. Hotel bookings - For this I didn't get any curated benefit. The hotel that I liked the most was not in the list of hotels on HDFC SmartBuy platform. So I used my Amazon Pay ICICI credit card to book the hotel and got 1% cashback.
In future, I am planning to find more opportunities to optimize my rewards. I am planning to put my house rent on my credit card by using RentPay platform on https://redgirraffe.com. I have enough credit limit to hardly have 15-20% utilization even with rent in a city like Mumbai. I am also planning to get my first Credit report after completing 1 year as a credit card holder. Moreover I am looking to get an upgrade to my platinum credit card or at least a credit limit increase.

I still feel I don't know enough about credit cards. I am always is search of new stuff related to this lucrative field of money. I am open to information and suggestions from experienced people in this field. For the newbies, my only advice is to stay disciplined!

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