My annual fee

I’ve always been rather petty about certain things. I’ll give you an example.

Because I was raised to fear debt above all else, I didn’t get my first credit card until I was well into my 20s. And really even then I didn’t quite get how credit cards worked. Which was ironic, in that I was working for a personal finance magazine by then. In fact, it was while editing a story about credit cards that I finally figured them out. It was one of those “best cards to get now” kind of articles, and the person writing it (who knew what she was talking about, luckily for me and the readers) recommended the GE Rewards Mastercard. Why? Well, it paid 2% cash back on all purchases. (There was a cap of course; I think $250 a year was always the most you could get back.)

Obviously such benefits are easily canceled out if you don’t pay your balance every month, but as a rather petty consumer, I’ve always done that. And I loved that once a year, I’d get a credit back from my card company on the last 12 months of spending that the card had enabled. There card carried no annual fee. Basically, they were paying me to use their product.

Later the GE Rewards Card became (I think) a First USA card, and now it’s part of the Chase portfolio. They don’t really play up the cash-back thing, presumably because it attracted a lot of petty consumers, like me, who paid no fees, carried no balance, and relished our little yearly refund.

Over the years, in fact, these various adminstrators of the card have made it less and less easy to get that money. Instead of simply doing nothing and letting them automatically crediting the account, now you have to actively ask for it. They don’t remind you. They also switched over to a “points” system, and try to get you to spend your points on magazine subscriptions or whatever. You have to go to a special web site and find the option for choosing actual money as your “reward.” Oh, and if you’re not paying attention, your points expire, and you get nothing.

So I just went through this process the other day, and now the way it’s set up, instead of just selecting $250, you have to pick $25, ten times. Basically you “order” ten $25 checks. Actually this was the setup last year, but in reality, they sent me a $250 check.

This year: They actually sent the ten separate checks, in ten separate envelopes.

I was very happy to see them. It’s not, of course, that this sum of money is going to have some impact on my quality of life. It’s that no matter how hard they try, they can’t prevent me from collecting my annual fee from them. It’s probably my most satisfying yearly consumer ritual.

As I say, I’ve always been rather petty about certain things.