Updated Credit Card Comparison

Given that it’s been almost 9 months since I created the first iteration of the credit card comparison graph, I’ve deemed it time for an update. Here are the highlights of what’s been happening in the land of Canadian credit cards since March:

• RBC: Removed welcome point bonuses on Rewards Gold and Rewards Classic cards; removed renewal bonus on both Avion cards; Mike Weir card is no longer offered.
• BMO: Abolished Mosaik brand on MasterCards; removed the ability to have (and pay for) both cash back and Air Miles options on your card; many other changes to card offerings. The No Fee Air Miles card now gives twice as many Air Miles (1/$20 instead of 1/$40). The Gold Air Miles card gives the holder a 25% discount on Air Miles redemptions, making Air Miles 1/3 more valuable and the Gold card look pretty promising for Air Miles collectors. Added student cards, which are the same as the no fee Air Miles or cash back cards, but with additional Student Price Card benefits.



• TD: No changes whatsoever.
• CIBC: Interest rate on Classic Visa and Platinum Visa increased from 18.5% to 19.5% to bring them in line with the rest of their cards. Added Dividend Infinte Visa, which provides the same cashback tiers as the Dividend Platinum and has the same annual fee.
• ScotiaBank: No changes whatsoever.

I’ve updated the graph with the latest set of cards from the Big Five banks. I also removed the student cards to reduce clutter – if you, my loyal reader(s), want them back, let me know and I can re-add them.

The link in my original post will now display the updated graph, as will clicking on the image in this post.

Canadian Credit Card Comparison

Part of my recent work on the WikiDev 2.0 project has been to make some fancy visualizations (read: charts) to display our data in an easily-understandable and attractive fashion. To do this I settled on the Open Flash Chart 2 library, which will make you a nice Flash graph populated with data generated from a PHP script (among other things). Since WikiDev didn’t yet produce the required data, I decided to create another project in order to learn how to use OFC, so I’d be able to handle the WikiDev data as quickly as possible once it came in. My interim project was a comparison of various major credit cards available in Canada.

After working on this long enough to figure out that a) OFC is great for displaying static data and is quite easy to use, b) the credit card that suits you best depends on your lifestyle (obv.), and c) OFC isn’t so great at letting you dynamically change your calibration parameters to match your lifestyle, I scrapped that project and decided to re-implement it in Flex. Now the graph has sliders.

What the graph does is compares the credit cards offered by the Big Five banks (BMO, CIBC, RBC, Scotiabank, and TD) based on how much value they will offer you over time. The basic formula of this is (RewardValue – AnnualFees) for each year. Rewards can come in the form of cash back or reward programs, and point accumulation often differs depending on where you spend your money. Use the sliders at the bottom to calibrate the graph to your spending habits. The value of a reward point is calculated based on reward type. If the points are redeemable for travel (such as Air Miles, Aeroplan, Avion, or Aventura), then the value of those points is compared against the cost of a bunch of flights, and the maximum value is taken. Value for points that are only redeemable for merchandise are calculated using the most valuable gift card for which you can redeem your points, as gift cards give you more purchasing flexibility than individual items.

I’ve calculated travel reward point values against flights from Edmonton to YVR, LAX, YYZ, BKK, and SYD. It’s a decent reference point, but for maximum applicability to your needs, determine how much one reward point will benefit you (in dollars) and enter it in the appropriate field on the ‘Advanced Settings’ tab. To determine the value of a reward point to you, look up how much a flight you commonly take (or want to take) will cost you pre tax, and divide it by the number of points required to redeem for that flight. Point redemption references: Aeroplan, Aventura, Air Miles, Avion.

Note that I’ve excluded low interest rate credit cards and some specialty cards. Low rate cards are only useful if you carry a balance; if you do that, your value is significantly lower than what this graph displays.

Oh, and since the graph contains 41 credit cards, the legend is only there to provide a quick reference of what cards are compared. Use the tooltips on the lines (above whole year tick marks) to see what card you are looking at and what its exact value is at that point in time.

Click on the thumbnail above to see the graph. Values take into account current promotions at the time of this posting (March 13th).

Legislature grounds at night in the fall

A couple of days ago we went to check out how autumn was fairing at the legislature grounds at night. It ended up being quite the warm evening, so we hung around for a while and took some long-exposure pictures. Here’s a sampling.

Lighting Photos Revisited

Last time I tried taking pictures of lightning in any kind of decent storm they didn’t turn out very well. This time, instead of having a little P&S camera, I was prepared with my Canon 40D. With the help of the sky-darkening ominous clouds, it gets dark early enough now that by the time the 9:00 storm rolled around I could take long exposures, which is always helpful when trying to photograph lightning. That, and it wasn’t actually raining here, so there was nothing to obscure my view. In the end I managed to collect 27 pictures with good amounts of lightning, a few of which were quite spectacular. Of course, it always helps to have the provincial legislature in the foreground as well.

It might be cold, but it sure is pretty

The blowing snow has cleared and downtown reappeared, but it’s still Really Fucking Cold (I’m pretty certain that’s the official classification on some obscure temperature scale — possibly Fahrenheit). One consequence of the cold is that all the buildings downtown are working overtime to stay warm, and as a result are venting massive amounts of steam. At night, the steam catches the lights and looks gorgeous; tonight this was combined with ice fog off the river which made for a big glowing mess of soft light.