How to Use Credit Card Rewards to Support Your Writing
About a year back, I did something spectacular for a writer to do — I bricked my less-than-a-year-old laptop. It was an odd accident that shouldn’t have made the machine completely unusable. Nevertheless, I had to think about how to replace it. Even though we set aside money each month for technology upkeep, we hadn’t anticipated needing to replace a laptop so fast. So, the money we set aside for tech each month hadn’t charged up enough yet to buy a new device.
But in the months since, I logged into my credit card account to see a healthy amount of rewards points. Translated into cash, they’d reached four digits.
Directing rewards to your ability to write
Normally, my husband and I have opted not to allocate the cash we can get from our credit card rewards within our regular budget. We want to try to make sure that we’re living within our means and that our spending is never higher than our work-based income, as other income sources like stocks can be so up in the air. So, we typically just dump the funds into our savings here and there whenever we think to do it, seeing the extra money as a nice blessing.
But after the Laptop Disaster of February 2024, we rethought our strategy. We still don’t treat the rewards as we-can-count-on-it money, per se. But the idea is, the rewards don’t always have to go just to savings. I can use at least a portion of that money to reinvest in my writing without having to strain our finances even a penny.
What you might do
How much money you get from your credit card of course will depend on how much spending you do with that account. I funnel almost all of my expenses through my main card, though, so it doesn’t take much effort for them to accumulate. If I also paid our mortgage with a card instead of through an automatic bank account transfer, the accumulation would be even better. (There are pragmatic reasons we opt not to do that.)
But some examples of ways you could use credit card reward money to defray or completely cover writing costs include
- website design/updating
- professionally hosted webinars or conferences
- paying an editor or cover designer
- IBSN purchase
- book formatting software (e.g., Atticus, Vellum)
- dues to organizations like The Author’s Guild
- subscriptions to publications such as Writer’s Digest
- email list services
…and of course…although I don’t think I need to say it…
a laptop.
Whether you consider the above options as critical and thus deserving of inclusion in your main writing budget depends on your personal writing goals. Your setup doesn’t have to mirror anybody else’s. But the key is to treat your credit card money simply as an operational cushion. It can allow you to handle writing emergencies (including unexpected price increases) without jeopardizing your main emergency funds or savings, let you test options you come across, or reach for stretch goals. It’s up to you whether you want to spend the money quickly on small offerings, such as a single webinar (~$100), or save for a bigger option, such as a significant marketing package (~$10,000-12,000).
If the money is coming anyway, you might as well look at your possibilities
Credit card rewards take a little patience to acquire, and they’re not going to buy you a private writing cabin. But they are easy to earn. You can get them just from handling essentials like buying groceries or paying your electricity bill. If you’re not already tapping them to get your words into the world, and if you don’t have to use them for anything else unexpected, take a look at how much you’ve accumulated. Then consider what’s most vital for you to be able to take the next step in your career and realistically apply the rewards to those offerings. It’s a low-stress way to advance a little faster in a field where income is notoriously limited, so you might as well take it.