Getting “free Money” By Paying Wedding Expenses with Credit Cards

My fiancé and I think we have a pretty good idea for paying off wedding expenses that I wanted to share with everyone. Neither of us had opened a credit card in a while and since we knew we’d be spending a lot on our wedding and we both have good credit, we looked into cards with good points programs. After some research, we each ended up getting Chase Sapphire Preferred cards and now we have over $1,600 between the two of us in travel points that we can use for our honeymoon (you get a crazy sign up bonus as long as you spend the minimum required amount within the first three months, which is pretty easy when you are paying for a wedding). We got this bonus just by using our credit cards to pay our daily expenses and by putting wedding expenses on them for about the past six months (our country club wedding venue randomly counted as a “dining” expense so we got bonus points!). And we still have a lot more to pay off when our wedding gets closer so will get even more points! We don’t carry a balance since the interest rates are really high, we just put the charges on our cards and then pay them off right away (and the wedding expenses are paid for with cash our parents kindly gave us, so the points are basically “free,” lol!!). If you are interested in doing something like this, of course it’s a good idea to do some research and find out which card is best for your situation. For example, if you need to stretch out your wedding payments you could also look into finding a different card that has zero APR for the first year because you can carry a balance for a while without having to worry about getting charged interest until the first year is over. Anyway, I know this won’t work for everyone, but I hope this might help some of you out since there’s so much to think about with wedding planning and I think credit cards points can be very helpful but are probably pretty easily overlooked!