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The CardBuzz blog

Card-by-card write-ups from our team, features, fees, lounge access and who each card actually suits. For the numbers after every cap and exclusion, head to the card pages.

5450 posts · Page 216 of 455 · View the full archive

Credit Health

January Credit-Score Reset: Five Habits to Start 2027 Right

January is the one month when almost everyone is already in planning mode — budgets, fitness, resolutions. Your credit score deserves a place on that list, not because it needs a dramatic rescue, but because credit healt

12 Oct 20268 min read
How-To Guides

Building 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

12 Oct 20269 min read
Credit Health

Downgrade or Close: Shutting a Credit Card the Smart Way

Every credit card eventually outlives its welcome. The joining bonus is spent, the fee starts feeling heavy, or the spending pattern it was built for has moved on. What separates a careful cardholder from a careless one

12 Oct 20269 min read
How-To Guides

Credit 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

12 Oct 20269 min read
Deals & Offers

Transfer Bonuses: How to Use Promotions Without Getting Burned

A transfer bonus is a limited-time promotion that adds extra miles or hotel points on top of the standard conversion ratio — transfer during the window, get a percentage more. Banks and partner programmes run them to sti

12 Oct 20269 min read
How-To Guides

Combining 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)

12 Oct 20269 min read
How-To Guides

How 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

12 Oct 20268 min read
How-To Guides

Keeping Points Alive: Expiry Rules and Activity Strategies

Points die. Airline miles expire after periods of inactivity, hotel points lapse, and even bank reward points — usually the most generous — eventually have validity windows. Every expired point is money you earned and th

12 Oct 20268 min read
News & Devaluations

Devaluation Risk: How Rewards Programmes Lose Value

Every loyalty currency in existence has one direction it drifts over time: down. Airlines and hotels periodically reprice their award charts, raise the miles required for the same flight or night, add surcharges, or rest

12 Oct 20268 min read
How-To Guides

The True Cost of Moving Points: Fees, Taxes and Timing

Transfer valuations usually focus on the glamorous side — the ratio, the award price, the per-point value. But every transfer carries costs that quietly eat the headline number: explicit transfer fees, taxes on the trans

12 Oct 20268 min read
How-To Guides

Transfer or Redeem Directly? A Decision Framework

Not every point should be transferred. The transfer game has a quiet failure mode: enthusiasts who move every point to airlines, then watch balances gather dust behind expiry dates and award charts they never use. A good

12 Oct 20268 min read
How-To Guides

Sweet-Spot Redemptions: Finding High-Value Transfer Targets

A "sweet spot" is an award redemption where miles buy far more than their typical value — the kind of booking that makes the whole transfer game worthwhile. Sweet spots are not accidents; they emerge from the structure o

12 Oct 20268 min read