What they don't tell you about Credit Card travel hacking

 So I'm a fan of credit card hacking.  Which is signing up for Credit Card to get the award bonus and using those bonuses and benefits to travel for near free.  I recently did a driving trip with my kids to see my Grandparents.  We covered 5 states over and stayed for 6 days.  Outside of gas it only cost us 330 to cover 3 adults 2 kids and 2 dogs. Not to bad.   

All these sites that dedicate themselves to travel hacking like the points guy or nerd wallet don't tell you about business cards.  Many of the reward/Fi sites always talk about is levering business cards. They not only have great bonuses, but don't count toward your Chase 5/24 limit.  Signing up for a business card is easy. You provide a justification. They can range to an established business, blog, to selling something on ebay.  Now what they don't tell you if that these business bonus are usually big, but require a higher spend like 15k in 3 months for 100k points and the big hit in the face is they can give you a very low credit limit like 5k.  Which mean you have to keep paying off you credit card constantly to free up enough credit to get to the 15k.  Ok that isn't easy, but during the right time of year it can be. Like paying taxes, car insurance, or paying school tuition. But then again you have to keep paying off the card all the time. What a pain.  So if you want to go down this route be careful of this issue. 

How to deal with Collections

 I've had to deal with collections twice. Both were mistakes, but something I still had to deal with.

The first one was when was lawn company did unwanted work on our lawn and the second was a dentist bill they auto sent to collections because the bill exceeded $300. 

You need to deal with these immediately.  First things to do is call the company the collections is for to get it resolved. If you need to pay a bill pay it. If it's like my first one, get a manager on the phone and get it in writing the issue is resolved.  Second is to send a letter to the collection company. This is very standard and professional.  There are variations of these to use as a template everywhere.