The Credit Card Couch

We have been looking at Credit Cards for some weeks now. Let’s check another very important tool for your financial independence - Mutual Funds. They give you the growth of the equity market, but do not require you to have the full know-how of how equity markets work or the troubles of reading through the balance sheets of n-number of listed firms. Now there are a couple of ways to go about it. One, you check the most popular and talked about funds on social media and start buying them, or you can actually understand how these work and create a balanced portfolio of funds for yourself that complement each other. This article would be for the folks interested in the second approach. So if you fall in the first category, who believe in investing the most talked about funds, you can probably ignore the later part of this discussion. Mutual Funds are not something that we can cover up in a single article or discussion. I will be trying to create a series of such articles where we discuss a...

Till now we have spoken a lot about free travel and stay using credit card points, but never deep dived into it. So I thought why not explain it with my own example which I had previously mentioned here .  Our journey began with acquiring a once amazing card called - Axis Magnus back in 2022 . Though the card is only a shadow of its previous glorious self, I have linked the features and benefits page for your information. One of the market leading features of this was, that on a monthly spend of INR 100k, you would get 25k Edge Reward Points. Magnus being a Super Premium card, would also elevate the cardholder to HNI status with Axis bank. This meant that the transfer ratio of edge reward points jumped up to a crazy ratio of 5:4 In 2023, I also had a wedding of a cousin in Pula, Croatia. So there were quite a lot of expenses that I could foresee. This along with the rent payments and other monthly expenses for both mine and my wife’s home, including a gold scheme that was running,...

Post Diwali, the temperatures drop and the country and most of the other easily accessible countries from India are ripe for tourism. That is why I thought I should talk a bit about this insanely popular credit card category available to us. T ravel credit cards are possibly the most loved type of credit cards that are out there. And that is because, most people nowadays, especially with the growing social media, love to travel. And these cards help you just a notch in satiating your wanderlust. How? Well that's the purpose of this article today! I will touch base on the host of benefits that most travel cards provide, how you can try to make the most of them and wrap it up by giving a few suggested cards from the myriad of choices available! So let's jump right in! A travel credit card can help the cardholders by substantially saving upfront on travel bookings by giving direct discounts on flight/railway tickets and also on hotel stays. Apart from this, they also come as co-br...