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Am I supposed to just stop eating food and buying gas? I don't understand what you're trying to say. If the alternative is pay cash and not get these benefits the only other logical reason for your statement is that I have a choice in the matter to not do these things.

[Bayart]

No, what I'm trying to say isn't that your decision-making is flawed, but that there's little decision-making involved and that you're driven into that path by the way the system is structured in the US. You guys are being forced into a situation where the most rational decision is to have a dozen credit cards to optimize for an arcane rule-set.

It's pretty f*cked.

[cnst]

It's not uncommon to be able to collect more value from the rewards than what it costs for the merchant to accept the credit card.

For example, it often costs 3% or less to accept payment for a merchant, but there are many cards which offer rewards that can be valued at 7.5% cashback, or even higher values if you're into chic travel.

For example, many people have more than one of the same card, e.g., Chase Freedom is a popular example. By having 3 cards, you can increase the quarterly limit on the product by 3x — similar to using extra threads on a multicore CPU — it's still the same system, so there's no extra inconvenience. Since they're all from the same issuer, having any number of Chase cards is a fixed cost for the user, because all of them appear in a single account login, and can also be set to have identical due dates, too. Likewise, Google Pay and Chase have no limits to the number of cards you can add to a digital wallet, so, it works out there, too.

It's amazing how so many iPhone users project the perceived inconvenience of this approach, but there's actually no inconvenience for Android users, since Android's NFC is open and doesn't have any limits.

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Also don't forget AARP is open to everyone. I'm 33 and a member.