Discussing How to Use Rewards on a Shared Card

One of the things that couples are most likely to fight about (and even to get divorced over) is money. Smart couples will make sure that they discuss their financial histories, their spending styles and the money goals that they have for the future long before the wedding bells ever start to ring. But even those couples who do talk openly about money and who don’t fight about it often may find that there are little things that come up now and then in their financial lives which catch them off guard and cause problems in the relationship. One of those things is the situation of using rewards points on a credit card shared with a spouse.

Although many people have rewards credit cards, most of them don’t actually think too terribly much about their rewards. They get the rewards cards that they think will offer them the most back for their spending and they spend their rewards points as those points become available for use. That approach is fine and dandy if you’re using a credit card all by yourself but it can become a serious problem in a relationship. Imagine that you intend to save up your rewards points in order to be able to take a great vacation-for-two in a couple of years and then you check out your rewards balance and find out that your spouse spent the points on a new yoga mat that she’ll probably never use. You can see how this becomes a problem for some relationships.

The best solution, of course, is to try to deal with the issue before it becomes a problem. Whenever you are choosing a new credit card with a spouse, you should talk about the pros and cons of the credit card rewards that are offered with the plan. You should discuss what types of rewards you would benefit most from and agree on a credit card that is going to allow you to work towards a common goal. This discussion is great, too, because it will encourage both of you to use the credit card regularly in order to reach that goal sooner.

If you already have shared credit cards with your spouse that offer rewards, it’s not too late to start talking about them. Sit down and have a financial conversation in which you go over all of the credit cards that the two of you have together and separately which offer some sort of rewards plan. Try to come to an agreement about which of these cards is the best to use. You may find that you can work towards a common goal together (like the vacation) and also use additional cards to let you each work towards getting something smaller for yourselves (like the yoga mat). The solution isn’t really the difficult part to come up with. The difficult part is initiating the conversation so that you and your spouse can be on the same page about how to earn and spend the rewards points on credit cards that are shared.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 14th, 2008 at 11:52 am and is filed under Tips & Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.