Rebates calculator for credit cards

I have shared before my opinions why I see credit card cash rebate is a better way to go especially if you wish to achieve greater savings. With direct cash rebates instead of receiving reward points, you have the freedom to spend the cash on anything that you want for example to offset or pay your future bills. You can read my article on Reward points or cash rebates.

During a crisis like now, I know more and more people are aware about the needs to reduce expenses. However no matter how much expenses you try to lower, you do still need to pay basic necessities like bills, groceries and cost of transportations. But with credit card payments, you can squeeze more savings out of those expenses.

There are many popular cash rebate credit cards in the market. To name the popular ones, they are the Citibank SMRT and Dividend cards, UOB One, POSB Everyday and Standard Chartered Manhattan cards. Depending on your spending habit, different combination of credit cards used can yield different amount of savings. As for me, I try to consolidate all my expenses which include bills, groceries and ezlink transactions to UOB One card. All my expenses add up nicely to about $300 or more each month.

If you have bigger expenses you may try to use different combination of credit cards to optimize your savings. Take note, I mention the word optimize in the previous line. In order to achieve optimization in savings, it is advisable that you PLAN your expenses before hand.

To help in the optimization process, I have created my first version of Rebates calculator for credit cards. In the excel file, you can try to forecast or plan your expenses to be charged under various credit cards. Your objective is to achieve the highest effective rebates in percentage based on your spending inputs. A higher effective cash rebate simply means you can achieve more savings with those combinations. I post below a screenshot of my excel file.



Take note my Rebates calculator for credit cards is still in its raw stage. I believe further improvements can be made if I receive feedback or gather enough interest and support from multiple users. So try it out!