Use Credit Card Points for College

 

Tulane Freshmen Check in (Photo source: Tulane PR)

An excellent quickie article at Business Insider outlining credit cards that pay cash back to college savings plans:

Business Insider

The key takeaways are that if you manipulate it right, these programs often pay more in cash to you than many other types of cards. And typically if you average it out, most cards offer you ~1% back one way or the other. Some offer more on some purchases and less on others (they likely have deals with certain vendors). But interestingly, a few college cards offer 2% or more! For example:

Fidelity’s American Express card offers 2% back (read more HERE)

Barclays Upromise Mastercard offers up to 5% back (read more HERE)

Those of you like me who say “hey I’ll put my business expenses on the card and REALLY make some money” are out of luck as the Barclays card will not offer rewards for business expenses according to the website.

Nonetheless, if your current points program is lame, and you don’t do anything with those points anyway (I know you’re going to take that trip, sure you are) then dropping a few bucks into your kid’s college account isn’t the worst thing you could do.

Compare what you’re doing now and see if it makes sense. Don’t make a decision blindly.

Note: I do not endorse any card on this site nor do I get any referral fees to those cards. This is for informational purposes only.