2 Reasons To Change Statement Date

During the summer, I wrote about how you should change your statement dates to earn your rewards quicker. This is something you need to do if you have more than one version of the same card or the same rewards. Changing your statement dates, especially when you earn the same type of reward program, is important.

2 simple reasons why you should change statement dates:

• Ability to earn points quicker
• Ability to stagger paying your credit cards allowing you to float a little bit longer

Short On Points?

Three weeks or so ago Matt tweeted and I had mentioned that I will help him with his struggle:

@asthejoeflies struggle is real. No chance to hoard.. we have 4 more half booked trips to pay for 🙁

— Saverocity (@Saverocity) March 12, 2016

Assuming Matt has more than one card earning Ultimate Rewards and we know Matt was looking for additional Ultimate Reward points, if he had staggered his statement date, the potential for the UR points to hit his account quicker would have been made and that would be one less thing for him to worry about. There are actually two parts to fixing the struggle, one is this method and another being a manufactured spend method that can’t be posted for public consumption.

Another example would be if you’ve just exhausted all your Chase Ultimate Rewards into Hyatt to go Vendoming, but you realized you’re 10,000 points short for your flight using United MileagePlus miles. What do you do now? If you had 2 Ultimate Rewards earning cards, and one closes at the end of month and one in the middle, you can now manufacture spend your 10,000 point shortage to the card that closes first. If they both closed on the same day, then you’d be out of luck on seeing those points quickly.

The value here is to see your points in your account faster than you normally would if you keep the same date.

Floating The Funds

Many finance professionals will not recommend this, but if you are in a bind you can extend your due date a little further. I don’t particularly recommend it, especially if you decide to buy $50,000 in one month and tomorrow your Serve card is closed you will be in quite a bit of jam. That being said, if you have the credit limits and if you can handle the float and figure out the best way to manufacture spend you can effectively do a rolling balance transfer every month. Doing this method can get tricky. I have missed a payment on my Barclay card once because I forgot I used the card doing this juggle. When I realized my mistake, Barclay’s was not able to waive the interest but they were able to waive the late fee.

There You Have It

The 2 reasons to change your statement date are not revolutionary, but the idea is to take a simple thing and see that it will give you something that provides additional value to what you are doing.