# Beginner Guides
Credit Card Tips — Retention Offers
A retention offer is a special incentive from a credit card company designed to persuade you not to close your card. For cardholders, these offers can provide extra rewards while l...
From Beginner to Pro with Credit Cards (2): How to Get Free Flights — Sign-Up Bonus + Transfer Points + Award Tickets
Today’s article introduces another very simple way to get free flights. Compared with the previous method, it adds just one extra step: transfer points....
Credit Card Miles 101 (1): How to Get Free Flights — Sign Up for a Card + Redeem an Award Ticket
How do you get free flights? Start by applying for a credit card. This post walks you through the process from card application to finally booking a free ticket....
Online Shopping Essential: A Tool to Automatically Compare Cashback Rates Across Shopping Portals
Earning cash back by shopping through various shopping portals is a money-saving trick many people swear by. But finding the portal with the highest return is not always easy. Here...
Credit Reports and Credit Scores FAQ
If you’re an international student who just arrived in the U.S., or someone who has been here for a while but still isn’t familiar with how the credit system works, why should you...
My Orlando Disney Guide — Hotels: Booking an SPG Hotel
After booking the flights, the next question was where to stay. The goal for this trip was simple: spend as little cash as possible, ideally none at all, by booking award nights wi...
My Orlando Disney Guide — Trip Report
After spending so much time talking about booking tickets, reserving hotels, and all kinds of money-saving tricks, it seems like it’s finally time to talk about the trip itself. Th...
My Orlando Disney Guide — Flights: SFB to a Small City
To keep things interesting, I’m putting the booking story for our flight from Orlando to a small city in this post. It took several twists and turns before this ticket was finally...
U.S. Credit Card Application Q&A
We previously published a series of articles on credit card application tips, along with several beginner guides to applying for credit cards. This article mainly ties those relate...
Credit Card Application Talk — Sign-Up Bonuses
There are two main ways to evaluate whether a credit card is good: its long-term holding value and its sign-up bonus value. So for most applicants, the motivation for applying usua...
Credit Card Application Talk: App-O-Rama (AOR)
Before introducing this method, readers should note that it is not as suitable for everyone as Reconsider. If your credit history is less than one year or your credit score is belo...