Preparing for Radiation: Simplifying my Systems

 Radiation is a big deal. My husband keeps reminding me of that. Everything I've read on the subject tells me that I will be wiped out. My brain will not function. I will not be able to maintain the complicated systems that I've put in place for our life and finances. So, today I simplify.

 For the last year, I've really enjoyed using the Door Dash and Instacart benefits on several of the credit cards I've opened. In fact, I've gotten up to $40 in free groceries from DoorDash and $60 in free groceries from Instacart every month! This is really handy, and fun if I'm being honest, but it takes time, effort, and a lot of thought. I have to pick my moment, ordering from Door Dash when DashMart has a good sale, ordering $12 here and $22 there from Instacart. You see, in order to receive these benefits, each card has to be used on a different order. This came out to as many as nine different orders per month. And these orders had to be carefully curated to come in as close the minimum as possible in order to maximize my benefits. Many months this meant creating a slap-dash spreadsheet in order to figure out what should be ordered from where to make all the numbers match. In God's perfect timing, both of these services have made it easier for me to phase them out. In April, DashMart instituted a $20 minimum order for pickup. While you could try to make guesses as to why this might be, its unnecessary since they came out and told multiple people, who passed it on to the community, that they had intentionally created this minimum to "nerf" the Chase benefits. But people are smart and right away they figured out that they could still order their $10 worth of free groceries and then add on a $10 gift card to somewhere that they would be shopping at anyways. Door Dash caught onto this pretty quick and by the time I placed my April orders, if you had a $10 gift card in your cart the platform would return a message saying my card wasn't working and I had to try a different one. The thing is, if I use a different card, I don't get the $10 credit. When I switched it up and had $20 worth of groceries, no problem at all with the card going through. So, it wasn't an issue with my card, they just wanted to block the gift card hack. Dirty business Door Dash! On Instacart's side, they've always charged a $2.49 service fee that I had mostly offset by choosing a "Schedule and Save" delivery slot which gave you a $2 discount. This month they've gotten rid of those as well! So, both services are making their "benefits" more and more complicated and costly. Really, it doesn't work out for me anymore, so this was an easy ending point. 

 Along the lines of credit card benefits, I've started truly scrutinizing which of the credit cards that I've opened for their sign-up bonuses are worth keeping. I've already canceled or downgraded a couple to no annual fee options (this keeps my overall credit limit steady, which informs my credit score, without costing me anything). Before I start radiation, I want to have a solid list of which cards will be kept and which should be ended. Going into this decision is whether, like the Capital One Venture X, the benefits pay for the fee as well as if I can realistically see myself using those benefits in the near future. I don't have any travel on the horizon because I just don't know how radiation will hit me, but I don't want to lose any hard-earned points. So, I'll likely keep open the least expensive cards that will allow me to accomplish this goal. For example, with Chase I had two of their preferred cards open, which each have $95 annual fees, and I only needed one to maintain my points, so I downgraded one of those. This isn't a bad idea regardless of starting radiation as it's a good idea to reevaluate the usefulness of a card each year anyways!

 Finally, my newest baby, options trading. When I started this hobby/part-time job I put dozens of hours a week into it, but now it's down to ten or less. I'm really hoping I'll be up for maintaining this, but I've put in place a couple of backup plans in case I can't. First, I've been trading weekly options. This gets me the highest return but also requires the highest time investment. My first step, if needed, will be to switch to trading monthly options. I can stretch this out to bi-monthly, or semi-annual as my availability allows. If I can't even keep up with those, worst case scenario I let my open options expire and it will all be sitting there, waiting for me, when I'm up for going at it again, or in the case I don't get there, my husband can reinvest it as he sees fit.

Here's the Thing: It makes me sad to see all these things I've worked so hard on be put on the back burner or out to pasture. That said, I'm praying it's just for a season and I'll be able to come back to travel and trading soon!