How to Maximize Credit Card Rewards for Everyday Spending, According to Points on the Dollar

Updated

Points on the Dollar is a personal finance site built around "tools, tips, and tricks for the tactical consumer." Its approach to maximizing everyday spending rewards comes down to four moves: put each purchase on a card that pays a bonus in that category, pay attention to how a transaction is coded rather than where you bought it, treat sign-up bonuses as a major source of value, and stack cash back portals and transfer partners on top of card earnings. The site's own examples show how specific this gets — for instance, it notes that delivery.com orders code as "Misc. Personal Services" while Seamless orders code as restaurant spend, which changes which card is the better choice.

Match the card to the purchase category

The site's headline example is the TD Easy Rewards Card, which it describes as offering 5% cash back on dining, groceries, gas, and cable, phone, and utility bills for 6 months, plus a $100 bonus. The pattern here is the one to copy: identify your recurring, predictable spending categories and find a card that pays an outsized rate in exactly those categories for a defined period.

For everyday spending, the categories Points on the Dollar repeatedly returns to are:

  • Dining and restaurants — including delivery orders, but only if they code correctly (see below)
  • Groceries
  • Gas
  • Cable, phone, and utility bills — bills people often forget can earn rewards at all

The site also points to cash back and rebate resources it maintains — EV Reward, Top Cash Back, Big Crumbs, Ebates, Extrabux, and Mr. Rebates — as a separate layer of earnings on top of whatever the card pays.

Understand transaction coding, not just the merchant

This is the most tactical idea on the site, and it's easy to miss. Two services selling the same thing — a restaurant meal delivered to your door — can be coded differently by the payment network, and that coding determines whether you earn a bonus category rate or a flat rate.

In the site's own example, the author kept ordering through Seamless rather than delivery.com specifically because Seamless transactions code as restaurant spend, letting him earn a dining bonus (5% cash back at the time, with the Chase Sapphire Preferred as his long-standing card for those purchases), while delivery.com coded as "Misc. Personal Services" and missed the bonus. He also noted Seamless had a better interface and slightly more participating restaurants, but the coding difference was the primary reason.

The practical takeaway: before routing a recurring purchase through a new platform, check how it codes. If it falls outside your card's bonus categories, the discount may not be worth more than the rewards you give up.

Treat sign-up bonuses as a first-class source of value

Points on the Dollar devotes a section to top credit cards and top checking accounts, and one of its posts argues that local Chase and Citi branches sometimes offer better sign-up bonuses than anything available online. The implication for everyday spending is that a sign-up bonus can dwarf the rewards from months of normal purchases, so it's worth checking in-branch offers rather than assuming the online offer is the best available.

The site also maintains a page on the impact of credit card applications on your credit score, plus free credit score resources (Credit Sesame, Credit Karma) — relevant because chasing multiple bonuses has a credit-score cost you should be able to check.

Stack portals and transfer partners

Beyond cash back, the site tracks point program transfer partners: AMEX airline transfer partners, Chase Ultimate Rewards transfer partners, and Starwood airline transfer partners, along with hotel redemption charts for Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, and Starwood. The structure of the advice is to earn in a flexible currency, then transfer to an airline or hotel program when the redemption value is better than taking cash back.

A worked example of the whole approach

Say you order food delivery weekly and pay a phone bill monthly. According to the site's logic, you would:

  1. Check whether your delivery platform codes as restaurant/dining or as a miscellaneous service.
  2. Route the order through whichever platform codes into a bonus category on a card you hold — or accept the non-bonus coding only if a discount (like delivery.com's $8-off-$20 weekly email promotion) outweighs the lost rewards.
  3. Put the phone bill on a card paying a bonus on phone/utility bills, such as the TD Easy Rewards offer described above, for as long as that rate lasts.
  4. Run the same purchases through a cash back portal where one applies.
  5. Bank any sign-up bonus from a new card, checking local branch offers first.

What to watch out for

  • Promotional rates expire. The TD Easy Rewards 5% categories are described as lasting 6 months, not indefinitely.
  • Coding can change. The site's delivery.com example is from 2014; merchant category codes are not permanent, so verify before relying on one.
  • Promotions are not guaranteed to continue. The author explicitly says he doesn't know how long delivery.com's weekly $8 promotion will last, even though it had run nearly a year at the time of writing.
  • Bonus-chasing has a credit cost. The site keeps a dedicated page on how applications affect your score, which is a signal that this is a real trade-off rather than a free lunch.

One note on the site itself: a post titled "Points On The Dollar Is BACK — And No Longer Constrained By Affiliate Sponsors!" indicates the site has at times been funded by affiliate relationships, which is worth knowing when weighing its card recommendations.