Five ways to get the most from your credit card

Credit card companies are using incentives to keep customers using their plastic. Here are five incentives you can use to get the most out of your credit card:

3. Price guarantees

Kiichiro Sato/AP/File
A Citi Bank sign is on display in Chicago. Citi offers credit cards that offer 'price protection' for consumers who buy something and then quickly find a lower price.

If you find that an item you've purchased with your credit card is available elsewhere at a reduced price, you may be able to get a refund. Several cards offer "price protection," which allows you a certain grace period after making a purchase to claim your money back should that price be reduced. Both Citi and Chase offer credit cards with this feature. Read the fine print and make sure you understand the terms and conditions that apply before claiming your refund.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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