I only have two credit cards. A personal rewards credit card, which I’m looking to upgrade, and my Chase Ink Business Cash credit card. Any more credit cards and my wallet starts getting too fat. When the wallet gets too fat, it’s hard to sit and type Financial Samurai articles. Then my world would start crumbling down.

There used to be a time when I was young, dumb, and broke. I’d buy a lot of things on a 0% introductory interest credit card. I’d then transfer the balance to a new 0% introductory interest credit card a month before the old card’s new usurious rate kicked in.

Getting an interest-free loan for a year felt great and I kept on doing the balance transfer routine until I started making money. Once I was no longer poor, I realized spending all this time opening up new credit cards, keeping track of expiration dates, and purchasing things to get points was a suboptimal use of my time. So I stopped around age 24.

Once I started traveling a lot for work, I also cancelled my travel rewards credit cards. Why bother when I was already traveling a fair amount to the coolest places in Asia paid for by my company. The AMEX points racked up into the hundreds of thousands, just waiting for me to buy something I didn’t really need from their selection of goods online.

To demonstrate how much I didn’t care about redeeming my reward points, I made a grave mistake by cancelling my corporate card before redeeming over 400,000 points when I negotiated my severance!

It was only after I had cut up my card and left the office for good did I realize my mistake. Thankfully, I called up AMEX to explain what I did and they let me redeem. I ended up getting a bunch of gas cards and some gifts for my in-laws.