Travel rewards are one of my favorite life cheat codes, but it takes a little research and work to get it right. Fortunately, I did a lot of that for you—and consolidated it in my Travel Rewards 101 free mini series. I’ll send you an email every day for about a week with the relevant podcast episode or article, so that—by the end of the series—you’re ready to make moves.

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I’d like to start this blog post by stating the obvious: Nobody’s perfect.

I pride myself on being excellent with credit cards: I regularly use my points to take free vacations, I’ve never carried a balance, and I’d consider myself relatively savvy (all right, much savvier than your average credit card user).

But even I make credit card mistakes, and today, I’m going to highlight three annoying ones I made recently that I want you to avoid.

When I got my new American Express Gold card in August, it had been more than a year since I’d gotten a new one. My skills were a little rusty.

(As a reminder, here’s my full credit card rewards breakdown, with the 6 cards I consider nonnegotiable in any good travel rewards strategy.)

Mistake #1: I forgot to set up autopay.

I’m the queen of autopay. I love automating stuff that I’d otherwise forget.

I’d automate my bathroom schedule if I could—ain’t nobody got time to remember to pee.

But I made a crucial mistake with my new Gold card: I forgot.

Because I had a Platinum card already (and the cards are shared in the same account), I (wrongly) assumed that autopay would apply to the new card.

You can imagine my surprise when—about a month later—I saw a $29 late fee from American Express appear in my Copilot transactions (God bless Copilot; I caught it immediately).

“What the f*** is this?” I said out loud, probably off mute in the middle of a meeting.

Frantically, I logged into my AmEx account, certain that mistakes had been made (and not by me). Surely I hadn’t been late on a payment. How was that even possible?

And there it was, staring back at me:

LATE FEE: $29

My heart sank as I noticed the due date for the first statement was the day before. I had missed it, because I had neglected to set up autopay.

It bears repeating: I automate as much as possible in my personal finances, including investing, because I know that needing to remember every month to pay bills and transfer money to my investment accounts leaves very important decisions to the fickle, forgetful nature of my overcommitted schedule.

Keep reading for mistakes 2 and 3.

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s…another heady book recommendation.

• Book: The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy by Christopher Leonard. I’ll hit you with the TL;DR: Quantitative easing has led to asset bubbles (stocks, homes) and made the owners of those assets (the rich) richer, while hurting wage workers. Monetary policy is complex, but its impact on the value of our wealth really can’t be overstated. The terrifying-but-well-documented hypothesis that Leonard proposes? Both wage and economic stagnation in the 21st century are the result of QE (more colloquially known as “money printing”).
• Podcast: “What Are the Tradeoffs Between Real Estate and Stock Market Investing?” from Real Personal Finance with Scott Frank and James Conole. I am, once again, considering real estate investing. I swear—once a week, I’ll get an MLS property ping from the local agent we were working with a few months ago with some falling-apart duplex, and I do what every good woman does at the sight of a dilapidated being: I can fix him! (Just kidding—kind of.) Scott and James do a great job (as always) of breaking down the tradeoffs between the two most popular asset classes.

Since this week’s podcast episode is about building a spending plan that serves you without making you feel like shit for every discretionary expense, I’m throwing it back to a blog post I wrote last year about the unexpected consequences of tripling my income.

I’ve always been a little preoccupied with side hustles (well, since entering the workforce—I was decidedly not interested in working more than I needed to in college).

My starting salary was $52,000 in 2017. Soon after, I started teaching fitness, which added roughly another $5,000 to the picture each year.

How I started earning more

Things went on more or less like this for a few years; then, in 2020, two major seeds were planted and things started shifting:

After earning a series of promotions and raises with my first employer, I switched industries and got a substantial pay raise. (For anyone reading this who wishes they could run me over with their Prius, you heard it here first: The tech industry is very lucrative. My former compensation was roughly doubled by the move.)

I also started this blog in my free time because the bossy 5th grader in me needed an arena where she felt like she was calling the shots, and she wanted a way to tell people how to leverage an HSA. Shockingly, it’s become a great source of income for me.

So there you have it: The Cliff’s Notes version of my trajectory from average earner to six-figure stardom and full-time impostor syndrome (yay!).

The important thing worth noting here about how that second piece of the puzzle fell into place: I followed something I was innately interested in and drawn to. I didn’t force it. I think there’s something to be said for alignment in the side hustles you pursue and their ability to generate income.

What I’ve learned from more than tripling my income in 12 months

#1: Because I’m chronically obsessed with saving money, the more I made, the more competitive I felt about earning more.

It sounds ridiculous, but earning more only made me want more.

If you’d told me this time last year that my income would be pushing $300,000 today, I would’ve thrown up and passed out. I couldn’t have fathomed it.

But since it happened gradually (think “frog in boiling water”), each little bump just made me feel more and more obsessed with getting more. I’m pretty sure I think about money and my income more now than I ever have, even when (hell, especially when) I was making $50,000 to $60,000 per year.

Granted, I wasn’t as obsessed with FI at that time—but the point stands that, for some reason, the result of getting more money was wanting more money.

I can only imagine how brutal it is for people who allow their spending to rise in proportion with their income. While my spending went up a little bit, it didn’t rise in proportion to the income increase.

And I’m not sure if it can be related to that experiment with rats where the rat is perfectly happy eating their bland-ass rat food, until the experimenter starts pumping small hits of sugar into the water…and before long, the rat just stands in front of the water tube frantically pressing the “sugar” button with its tiny rat hand. A rat possessed.

Do you see the metaphor? I am the rat. And also the frog.

Keep reading.

Would you believe me if I told you the inspiration for this episode came to me while lying on a facialist’s table?

A few months ago, I would never have spent money on something as luxurious and excessive as a facial—but as I lay there for 60 minutes, conscious but with my eyes closed, I realized that my nervous system was unwinding for the first time since…oh, I don’t know, 2020?

This episode dives into the epic reframing that can help us derive more joy from the way we spend and notice more easily when things are out of balance.

Adam Day, a CFP and CFT, joins us for a discussion of our money scripts and money motivations—and shares some free resources—and you can complete the exercises yourself.

Listen now.