Last October, we opened three new credit cards to help defray some hotel and plane expenses for a family vacation. In November, we opened a business card as well to cover the massive expenses that come with running a sophisticated blog operation such as this one.

Our credit score before the October apps (but after four new credit cards earlier in the year): 829. Our credit score after all the new credit, a new checking account with State Farm, and a mortgage application: 758.

Lessons:

1. Applying for new credit will drop your credit score…
2. …But the drop won’t kill you.
3. One of the most important times to be careful is before a mortgage application, but we were still okay.
4. After the accounts have aged for a bit of time, say  6-12 months, your credit score will probably be about as good as if you hadn’t applied for any additional credit, if not better (thus the 829 we had to begin with).

Of course, all we have so far is a conditional pre-approval subject to scrutiny from the underwriting department, so this could still blow up on us. Further updates here as events warrant!

The new list of Priority Club Pointbreaks is out. For those of you not in the know, PointBreaks are one of the best values in the hotel loyalty world, as you can get a room at an Intercontinental or a Crowne Plaza (and yes, at a Holiday Inn as well) for only 5,000 points per night instead of the usual 25,000+. It’s a good enough deal that you can actually plan a vacation around it. If you see something you like, grab it quickly as quantities are limited and some of the better deals disappear very quickly.

As of press time, the official PC website linked above was not updated, but fortunately FlyerTalk has the list. EDIT: The PC link above has now been updated.

And in case you weren’t aware, you can get 80,000 Priority Club points via the super-awesome non-publicized offer, so that’s 16 free nights if you really want to work this deal.

APOCALYPSE NOT: Technically speaking, merchants are now allowed to add a surcharge for people using credit instead of cash as of today. There has a been a flurry of articles about this recently, but it’s much ado about nothing. If merchants started doing this en masse, then the credit card game would be a lot less rewarding. It’s not going to happen, though, and here’s why:

1. “No extra fees” is a state of equilibrium. If everybody had a surcharge on credit cards, one merchant in a given niche could gain a lot of business by cheating and not charging an extra fee. Other merchants would be pressured to follow suit or lose business.
2. Cash has costs too. Much is made of the few percentage points merchants pay for accepting credit cards, but cash has costs too–extra labor and increased theft, for example.
3. People spend more when they use credit cards. Sure, merchants can save a few bucks by reducing fees, but they’ll also reduce the amount people will spend.

All of which is to say, lucrative points-earning opportunities will continue for the foreseeable future.

$10 OFF $20 at BARNES AND NOBLE: Toys and games only, here’s the printable coupon. Online codes are K9W7J4X and J7K3M8X. Lego excluded, alas. (H/T: Slickdeals)

MIDDLE CLASS IN MANHATTAN: One our my hobbies is reading about how awfully expensive New York City is and being thankful we don’t live there. Here’s the latest from NYC:

The average Manhattan apartment, at $3,973 a month, costs almost $2,800 more than the average rental nationwide. The average sale price of a home in Manhattan last year was $1.46 million, according to a recent Douglas Elliman report, while the average sale price for a new home in the United States was just under $230,000. The middle class makes up a smaller proportion of the population in New York than elsewhere in the nation. New Yorkers also live in a notably unequal place. Household incomes in Manhattan are about as evenly distributed as they are in Bolivia or Sierra Leone — the wealthiest fifth of Manhattanites make 40 times more than the lowest fifth, according to 2010 census data.

Though to be fair, there’s some historical perspective as well:

“Soon, there will be no New Yorkers,” proclaimed the Sunday magazine of The New York Times in 1907, in an article that detailed how families making $1,000 to $3,000 a year — $24,000 to $72,000 a year in today’s dollars — were being pushed out because of increasing rents, and servants’ wages, as well as the crushing cost of ice and coal. Adjusted for inflation, laundry alone for a family cost $115 a week. A pound of chicken? $8.08. Rent, on the other hand, for a “small, middle-class flat in a decent, but unfashionable locality,” would seem to be a bargain in today’s market, at the price of $272 per room per month.

In 1968, New York magazine documented the mad scramble for affordable apartments ina cover article detailing the extreme lengths to which average people went to secure one. “Surgeons have postponed operations, housewives have gone back to work, hippies have cut their hair and families have destroyed their pets,” the magazine reported. “Little hope is held out for the middle-income ($15-20,000 a year) people, career girls who do not want roommates and couples with more than one drawer-sized infant.” Brownstones that had sold for $125,000 in 1958, according to the article, were selling 10 years later for twice that much (in today’s dollars, a jump from $827,000 to $1.65 million).

Reports of the middle class’s demise also appeared in 1978, 1998, 2006 and 2009, when The New York Observer chimed in with “City to Middle Class: Just Not That Into You.”

The full article, though lengthy, is quite interesting. (H/T: Barry Ritholtz)

I try to post daily, but… slow times the past couple of days. No great card offers, no giveaways at Staples, no bank executives foisting an obviously doomed but very generous marketing campaign upon us. The blogging experts say you should always churn out content but I really don’t want to waste my time or yours. But check back Monday morning and I’ll have cobbled together enough material for a respectable blog post.