Quick update on us. Our lawn mower was fixed at a cost of $60. Instead of buying new we are saving lots of money by repairing it. I did spend extra money on ski gear for our trip to Banff next year. Man, nobody told me how pricey ski equipment was! I think I did great though. I spent around $100 for 12 things including snow bibs for the kids and snow pants for me and DH. Bought gloves, fleece hats and other warm weather gear. Of course the items aren't top notch, but they will do for 2 days of skiing, as we plan to do other things in Alberta such as the Telus Spark science museum! I bought everything at Walmart because most winter gear is marked down to like 70 percent off.
In terms of credit cards, I am lol/24 as I have so many cards that I can't count. But, they are allowing us to travel at a greatly reduced rate. Infact I have no out of pocket costs for a 6 night/7 day trip next Easter for my family of 4. We paid for our flights from EWR to YCC by transferring American Express MR points to Aeroplan. I signed up for the Platinum card and got 100,000 MR for spending 3k in 3 months. I signed up for 2 other cards (Green and PRG) to get an additional 75,000 points which I cashed out for Fairmont gift cards which will cover food. Our hotel nights (fairmont lake louise and fairmont palliser) are free because I opened the Chase Fairmont card which gave me free night certificates. The rooms at Lake Louise go for around $600 a night, so such a good deal. I also used my Chase CSR travel credit to cover the airport shuttle to Lake Louise. Credit card hacking is amazing and I wish I had gotten into it sooner.
I have so many more examples of awesome trips that have been made free/nearly free because of points!
Here are the cards I have so far:
I have Amex: Platinum, PRG, Green, Blue Cash
Chase: Freedom, CSR, Fairmont (converting to CSP in August) and Hyatt. I had Disney but closed it.
Capital One: Quicksilver
Barclays: Arrival Plus
Discover: It
Bank of America: Amtrak
DH also has Freedom, Amtrak and Chase IHG.
My credit score is 815 despite having 12 cards opened since November 2014. The key is to pay your balance off in full each month and have a great credit score to obtain approvals.