Card Watchdog – Credit Card Tracker Review
Disclaimer: This post and review was sponsored by Card Watchdog. However, the service itself is free and anyone can sign up.
I have seen ads on this service on our First2Board site and never thought too much about it until I was offered a sponsored post opportunity to review it. The full review of the different parts of the website are below my conclusion of the service.
Summary of Card Watchdog:
After using it for a few weeks, Card Watchdog is a completely free website that helps you track your credit cards in terms of signup date, sign up bonuses and annual fees. Its a great free product to help credit card churners managed their credit cards in two critical ways:
- Sign up Bonuses: it lists the signup bonus and reminds you when the promotional period is over
- Annual Fee: It keeps track of your application date so it reminds you of the annual fee after the first year
Another use for this could be to track retention bonuses. Recently I have been cancelling a few Citibank AA cards and was offered a nice bonus for staying as a card member. I will be using this site to help me track this retention bonus.
You don’t need to enter in any confidential information. All you would need is the type of credit card you signed up for and application date.
Conclusion:
I think this is a great service for credit card churners. I didn’t really take them seriously until I actually signed up and used the service. I didn’t really know what the site was about until I started using it. Its a must for anyone who signs up for a few credit cards a year.
The site could use a few more features, such as the ability to display less/more columns than the site currently has. However, even without it, it is a very useful tool that I see myself using going forward.
Signup Process
This is as easy as they claim it to be. They don’t need much information from you other than your name and email address. You can sign up in seconds, one if you have Chrome Autocomplete
Credit Cards
I was skeptical about this section as I thought I would have to enter in a lot of confidential information about my credit cards. This skepticism was unfounded and they actually need very little information from you.
The only information about your credit cards is the type of the card, application date, and signup bonus. Usually the signup bonus is auto-filed with the current promotion when you click on the credit card, which is pretty cool. Here is the page to add a credit card:
- Whose Card: You can keep track of multiple users with the same account. The main options are Mines, Spouse or Other, where you can designate another person, like a relative or friend.
- Card Name: Type in the name of the card and there is a drop down list from you to choose from. (Tip: If you have a Chase Ink, it’s under INK, not Chase, which i thought was pretty weird)
- Last 4 digits of card: completely optional but necessary if you have two of the same Chase Inks, Barclay cards, etc
- Annual Fee: Usually auto-populates. Check to make sure its correct as sometimes there are different offers with different annual fees
- Application Date: You would need an approximation of this date if you don’t have it.
- Custom notification is pretty nice in that you can set up alerts once, monthly, or yearly, separate from the pay bill notification
- Minimum Spend requirements – auto-populates so check to make sure this is your offer
- You will need to put in the minimum spend date as it is not smart enough to calculate based on the promotional bonus text field.
- Sign-up Bonus – auto-populates so check to make sure this is your offer. They usually list the public offer so it may differ from what you got.
Other than those fields above, most of the other things auto-populates.
My Cards Page
Below is a snapshot of the cards summary page. It lists the name of your card, benefits, APR, and application date. You can sort by any of the columns, such as date or user. Without it, it will list in the order you entered the cards into the service.
I would love it if they could include the minimum spend requirement, bonus, and received sign up bonus columns rather than the APR. For the power users of this site, we’re not going to be racking up any balances on the card long term. Another neat feature would be the ability to adjust the columns shown, such as adding/subtracting them to your liking.