Of plane tickets and credit card balances

by mzumtaylor on March 7, 2012

Last night I put $858 dollars worth of plane and train tickets on our new Capital One Venture card (we were approved!), despite the fact that we don’t have the money in savings to pay it off immediately.

Of course, this goes completely against the plan that I outlined when I first discussed getting the card, but I’m pretty okay with that.

Wait, what?

That’s right, I’m okay with carrying a balance on our new credit card because I know that it is going to be very, very temporary.

The original plan (it may have become apparent that I like plans. :D ) was to never buy anything on our credit card unless we had the savings set aside to immediately pay for it. This one purchase where we will end up carrying a balance is going to be the exception; I have no intention of deviating from the plan in the future.

So why is this $858 purchase different?

Well, it wasn’t supposed to be. When we sat down in the beginning of the year to look at our big ticket items for 2012, we knew that this trip to Michigan was going to happen in May, and that it was going to cost between $800 and $1,000. I did the math, figured out what we were going to have to save to make the trip happen, and diligently put that amount of money aside each month.

But then February happened, and we found out that we owned on our taxes, and every available dollar of savings–present and future–was diverted toward our emergency fund to help it recover once we paid our tax bill.

Now it’s March, and plane ticket prices for May have already started going up, and I made an executive decision: I put the plane tickets on our card, and I know that between now and the end of April, we have enough extra “saving” money that I will be able to pay off the balance with no trouble.

No, it’s not ideal to be carrying a balance, but the way I look at it, we were always going to spend the money on this trip. We had a plan for how to pay for it, and though that plan go slightly derailed, we’ll still be able to make it work. In the long run, being able to get plane tickets when they’re still (relatively) inexpensive and earn rewards points for the purchase is worth the few dollars of interest we’re going to pay because we didn’t quite have our savings where we wanted it when it was time to buy.

What do you think? What would have done in this situation? Would you have bought the plane tickets, or waited until you had the money saved?

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