While I like the idea of simplicity, I'm just not wired to be fully simple with just a couple cards. Just never been how I handled credit so I don't think I can start now. Before I started understanding this churning concept, I maximized my return on spend. I ran the numbers and just couldn't see leaving money on the table by not doing it. I didn't necessarily go out of my way to find niche cards, but if we had something available I used it to the fullest. Shopping on
Amazon? Use hubby's Amazon card. Drug store? If it wasn't a 5% category, hubby's Amazon card too
Gas? What do we want to earn this month, cash or points? Even before I started this sign up bonus game, I had 5-6 cards in active use at any given time and probably at least 12 open.
It's kinda the couponer mentality. Started out of necessity, continued it because, well, why should I pay more than I need to? I'm a big believer in value so I will pay more for something up front if I can get a longer use out of it, but how I do that is by saving money off the stupid, consumables type stuff. So that extends to vacation too. I have a main activity that we'll spend cash on but then ancillary stuff needs to be paid for with "found" type money - either rewards programs or flea markets/yard sales (the "biz"
) I can appreciate not having to track so many accounts, so I think this won't become a lifestyle choice opening tons of cards each year, but for short term goals I'm willing to make the trade off. We did pretty good before with earning enough to supplement the vaca budget, but occasionally you have to replenish the stash. Or like this year, take a bigger trip outside of our vacation budget. We did that before with Europe but I "borrowed" from future years budgets to do that... that's kind of rough and stupid things came up so it took me longer to "pay back" than we expected. Going forward I think I'll just ramp points earning rather than "borrowing".
I'm not ashamed to admit I'm reaching my limit where we are now. Just myself I'm sitting on 10+ bank accounts with 4 of them requiring something to avoid a monthly fee, and 7 logins for my active CC's. (yeah I gotta get cracking on some closures)
I get this is where "always be MSRing" comes in, then you'd only have 1 or 2 cards you'd have to monitor at a time. (Although some folks have much higher cash flows and still do 4 or 5 of those at a time
) but I haven't quite mastered suppressing the maximizing urge. I have 2 MSR's at the moment and we still put spend on other cards. Not so much on me right now, but hubby really doesn't like not using his own cards, it's easier on his personal budgeting, so it kills me a little when I add up the stupid small stuff and realize we could have finished off a card (or something). But he does use multiple cards and at least we're maximizing more that way now. Work in progress
So when we have an energy curtailment, we have to keep the entire building under a certain limit or we get hit with fines. For a manufacturing plant, that pretty much means office work only. Sometimes in the summer with really hot days we will have unexpected ones, so they basically pay everyone for 8 hours of minimal work on the production side. Sometimes there is an option to pay the power company extra to not have to go down for the curtailment period.
I totally thought they did this at your house like 
