Chase Sapphire Preferred Review
A powerful combination of bonus rewards, annual credits and travel perks.
Courtney Mihocik is a NACCC Certified Credit Counselor™ and a former senior editor for the Bankrate credit cards team. She specialized in helping people with limited or no credit understand their options for improving their credit scores. She focused on the subprime category and provided guidance to people on their credit-building journeys.
Courtney is passionate about creating a space where people can learn more about managing their personal finances, specifically helping her peers achieve their credit card and credit score goals. She believes that public education fails to teach the essentials of personal finance to students and wants to make up for it in her editorial work.
Previously, she led insurance content at Reviews.com and worked as the loans editor at The Simple Dollar, where she produced daily personal finance articles from founder Trent Hamm in addition to student, personal, business and bad credit loan articles. Before entering the digital media space, Courtney worked in hyper-local print journalism, covering arts, culture, food, news and more for publications in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Courtney graduated college with a 750 credit score, which quickly plummeted to the 500s when she nearly defaulted on her high student loan payments she couldn’t afford. After applying for an income-driven repayment plan and six years of careful budgeting, hustling and responsible credit use, she’s happy to report her credit score is back hovering around 720 and she can qualify for better financial products.
Achieving a good credit score takes time and patience. But as long as you pay bills on time and manage your credit wisely, you will watch your score climb. As someone who went from a 500 score to a 750 score, I can tell you it’s worth the effort.
— Courtney Mihocik, CCC
The Choice Privileges Select Mastercard is a solid option for choice hotel travelers who want to maximize the benefits they can earn.
The Costco Anywhere Visa Card by Citi offers one of the industry’s highest payouts at the pump.
The Home Depot Credit Card is one of a few big brand-name home improvement credit cards out there. Read a full review here.
A great choice for grocery delivery fans, but markups and fees could take a chunk of your earnings. See our full Instacart Mastercard review.
Next Millennium is a catalog credit card offering 0 percent interest on purchases made at My Unique Outlet. But because you can’t use it to shop anywhere else, it’s only worth it if you’re a fan of the store.
With the Wells Fargo Propel American Express Card, you’ll earn 3X rewards points on dining, travel and gas station purchases, plus 1X points for all other purchases.
A solid prepaid card—although kept nearly identical to Netspend cards—but upgrading to a debit or credit card is still worthwhile.
Learn more about trip cancellation and interruption insurance and how to get it.
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