It’s almost the end of the year, and it’s time for some people to clear their credit card points.

First of all, I want to ask everyone, will you spend crazy money in order to get enough credit card points or participate in some of their activities to give you points for installment repayment?

We can use accumulated credit card points to redeem physical gifts, redeem airline miles, offset credit card annual fees, and even redeem memberships on video websites.

But most people will not tell you that the price/performance ratio is actually very low.

For example, if you open a credit card points redemption mall at random, you will find a weight scale with a market value of 99 yuan, which requires 99,000 credit card points to redeem.

For most banks, you will earn 1 point for every RMB 1 spent. A few banks will earn 1 point for every RMB 20 spent. If you accumulate RMB 99,000 without participating in the activity, you must spend at least 99,000 yuan for points transactions

In fact, it is quite a loss for an individual. You even have to pray that the points redeemed for goods will not increase in price during this period, otherwise it will not be enough to meet the threshold.

Many card game experts say, aren’t there many channels to reward points? Double points on holidays and birthdays, and some banks will also launch promotions to give points for installment repayment. Don’t you know how to use it?

But have you ever thought about the cost behind it?

The time spent looking for these activities, or the high interest cost behind the installment repayment (we have published a special article to calculate the credit card installment repayment interest rate in detail, so I won’t go into details) is far more expensive than redeeming this physical gift. The value is much higher. Looking at it this way, are these point accelerators cost-effective?

What’s even more frightening is that in order to encourage you to use credit card points to redeem gifts in a timely manner, many banks’ policies on credit card points are not permanent, but set a validity period for these credit card points, usually one year. , once the validity period expires, the points will be reset to zero.

This kind of consumer psychology makes many people buy a lot of products that are currently worthless to them in order to meet the redemption threshold of credit card points.

Banks issuing credit cards essentially earn merchant fees. The fee is usually 1% of the consumption amount, and these incomes are much higher than the value of points used to redeem gifts.