Save 17 cents per gallon

Posted by Tad Johnson - Apr 15th, 2008 at 22:04

You may have detected a theme as of late : gasoline is getting really expensive. On these pages, I’ve offered a silver lining to the escalating costs as well as some ideas to keep the costs down. Here’s another that fits into the latter category.

Get a credit card that offers at least a 5% rebate on gasoline purchases.

These come in a few shapes & sizes. Some are co-branded by a particular oil company (I carry a BP Visa card) while others are more generic (all the majors offer some flavor of gas rebate cards). Since gas is in many ways a fixed, recurring expense (assuming your driving patterns don’t vary too wildly) it makes sense to take advantage of these rebate offers. At $3.50/gallon, a 5% rebate is like saving 17 cents per gallon. Not bad!

As with any credit card rewards program, be sure that you don’t carry a balance month to month. These cards generally charge a higher interest rate to support their rebate offers, so a few months with a balance could easily wipe out a year’s worth of rebates.

http://www.rewardscards.com/gas-rebate-cards-ranked.asp

Gas Rebate Cards ranked via kwout

5 Comments »

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  1. I think there is one obvious tip for saving money on gas … take fewer trips. I think our culture is too comfortable with this on-demand lifestyle. In the old days, people would keep a grocery list and then go shopping on the weekend to stock up for the week to come. Now we are constantly making trips to the super market or over to pick this up or run that errand. I think we could all save some gas and some stress if we slowed down, planned, made lists, and stocked up.

    Comment by Dan — April 16, 2008 #

  2. Dan, great point. You can save 100% instead of 5% by simply not burning that gallon in the first place.

    We could all take a hard look at where we’re driving and check if it’s really necessary.

    Comment by Tad Johnson — April 16, 2008 #

  3. I’ll just add that the Discover Open Road Card includes 5% back on gas purchases as well as the above mentioned “Auto maintenance.”

    @Tad: Does your BP Visa require purchasing BP gasoline to get the 5% cashback?

    Comment by Eric — April 20, 2008 #

  4. @Eric - Indeed, the BP card offers 5% back only at BP gas stations.

    I used to have a Citibank card that offered 5% back at any gas station, but they mysteriously reduced it to 2% awhile back.

    Comment by Tad Johnson — April 20, 2008 #

  5. Out of all the gas credit cards, I definitely like the BP Visa card. It seems to give up the best rebates and rewards. The only downfall is that you have to use it at a BP station but around me, there are a lot. I don’t know about the rest of the USA.

    Comment by Tom — April 26, 2008 #

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