As I stated in my earlier post, my wife and I have been traveling nearly for free since discovering travel hacking in March 2016. This post goes over how my credit score has been impacted since playing this game. Additionally, I’ll be sharing all the credit cards I’ve collected along with the points accumulated since March 2016.
CREDIT SCORE IMPACT
As you can see, over the last 21 months, my credit score has remained fairly constant. You can’t even tell when I began to apply for the credit cards. Though anecdotal, I’ve got 21 months of data to prove that applying for a ton of credit cards does not, in fact, hurt your credit score. My credit utilization rate is less than 5%. Couple that with paying all my bills on time and you have the makings of a strong credit score.
WHICH CREDIT CARDS DID I USE?
In 21 months, I applied for 7 credit cards and did not have to spend additional money in order to collect the bonus points. Basically, for each new credit card I obtained, we funneled all of our monthly expenditures onto one credit card until we met the spending limit to obtain the points. Once we met the spending limit for one card, we moved on to the next one. Rinse, lather, repeat. We ultimately had my wife open up cards under her name as well and as a result, we’ve doubled up on the bonus points accumulated. As you can see, we’ve been able to amass a huge chunk points at no expense to our credit scores nor our wallets.
My next post will center on how we used our points to get free travel!
Life as a CRNA 