How-To Guides
Practical guides to EMIs, reward redemptions, lounge access, fee waivers and getting more from your cards.
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How-To GuidesWhy portal purchases sometimes code as a different merchant category
You click through your issuer's portal to a travel site, book a flight, and expect your card's generous travel-category earn rate. Weeks later, the points post at the plain base rate — the transaction coded as something
How-To GuidesStacking rewards on issuer portals: portal bonus plus card rewards
Stacking is the art of earning more than one reward on a single purchase. On issuer shopping portals, the natural stack has two layers: the portal bonus for clicking through, plus your card's own base rewards for paying.
How-To GuidesPortal or direct? A decision rule for routing online spends
Every online purchase now comes with a small fork in the road: click through your issuer's shopping portal and pick up a bonus, or go straight to the merchant and check out directly. Most people decide on gut feel — port
How-To GuidesThe Cardholder Paperwork Reset: Getting Statements and Documents in Order
Nobody frames their credit card statements. Nobody should — but everybody should be able to find them. Statements, fee schedules, closure confirmations, dispute references, and reward programme terms form the paper trail
How-To Guides2027 Spend Goals by Category: Match Every Rupee to the Right Card
Most cardholders set financial goals in rupees — "save more," "spend less" — and then route every purchase through whichever card is on top of the stack. The result is predictable: rewards leak away in small, invisible d
How-To GuidesWhy Your 2027 Card Portfolio Needs an Emergency Buffer Card
Every well-designed system has a component whose entire job is to do nothing — until the day it does everything. In engineering it is the backup generator. In personal finance, it is the emergency buffer card: a credit c
How-To GuidesThe January Autopay Audit: Reviewing Every Card Mandate Before 2027
Autopay is the financial equivalent of a self-driving car: wonderful when it works, and you only discover the failure modes at the worst possible moment. Over the years, your cards accumulate mandates the way browsers ac
How-To GuidesSweep Your Expiring Rewards Before the New Year: A Points Rescue Plan
Somewhere in your wallet right now, points are dying. Reward programmes attach expiry clocks to their currencies — some points last three years, some last one, some expire at the end of the calendar year regardless of wh
How-To GuidesBuilding Your 2027 Credit Card Wallet: A Role for Every Rupee
After the fee audit tells you which cards deserve to survive and the downgrade guide tells you how to retire the rest, one question remains: what should the surviving wallet actually look like? A card portfolio is not a
How-To GuidesCredit Card Annual-Fee Audit Before 2027: Keep Only the Cards That Earn Their Place
Most credit card holders collect cards the way cupboards collect mugs: one for fuel, one for groceries, one someone at a kiosk convinced them to take, and one they applied for because the joining bonus looked irresistibl
How-To GuidesCombining Transfer Partners with Co-Brand Cards
Most rewards enthusiasts hold two kinds of cards: flexible-points cards (whose points transfer to many partners) and co-brand cards (issued with a specific airline or hotel, earning directly in that programme's currency)
How-To GuidesHow to Transfer Reward Points: A Step-by-Step Walkthrough
Knowing *why* and *when* to transfer is only half the skill; the other half is executing the transfer cleanly. A botched transfer — wrong account number, mismatched name, wrong partner selected — can strand points for we