Advanced Personal Finance

Review: Capital One Card Lab

(Note: This is NOT a paid post)

Capital One has rolled out a new service to try to get you to use their rewards credit card above all your others. It’s called Card Lab and it allows you to customize the credit card rewards to your specifications. After checking it out (though I didn’t apply for a card), I found the Card Lab to be a really cool idea, well executed.

Power to the people

I read about how credit card companies are trying to get people to use their reward cards rather than everybody else’s. They call it ‘getting to the top of your wallet.’ Anybody who uses rewards credit cards (and if you pay off your balance every month, there’s no reason you shouldn’t) knows that certain cards are superior to others in various situations. Some cards offer better rewards at gas stations, some give you rewards from buying from certain merchants.

Maximizing credit card rewards is almost a sport. Some very popular bloggers have explained how they maximize their rewards and make some pretty decent money doing it. But up until now, you had to play by the banks’ rules.

Not any more…

Without making any judgment about Capital One or their credit cards per se, I can say that their Card Lab concept is pretty cool. They present you with a list of categories (e.g. reward type, interest rate). Within each category, you find various choices.

You select which choice you prefer and as you do so, choices within other categories that are no longer possible grey out. It was easy for me to find my ideal Capital One card - no annual fee, cash rewards with a bonus kicker. I don’t care about interest rate on balance transfers, introductory interest rate, or what the APR actually is.

I’d like to see this catch on with other banks. I’m lazy and something like this could get me into the rewards game more than I am now. Right now, I have a really simple rewards program with USAA that I like. Keeping track of which card to use in which situation is way to much work for me.