Plastic Purchases

We have purchased a new, large, rug for our living room.  My favorite store, for home furnishings, is Pottery Barn and that is where the rug is coming from. 

Rather than pay cash for the rug, we are electing to use our Pottery Barn credit card.  The PB credit card provides a point for each dollar spent and the points add up to rewards.  500 points provides a $50 certificate.  We are purchasing a $1000 rug and as such opted to use plastic to obtain the rewards.  $100 in rewards will be used to purchase some new glass wear already picked out as well. 

Before we went down this path we shopped around to make sure that the rug I had picked out was the best option for us.  Meaning that I love Pottery Barn, but there are lots of other home furnishing stores so we needed to make sure that my selection was not out of bounds. 

Secondly, we waited the requisite number of days before purchasing the rug (pursuant to our $100 rule).  A 10 day wait was required since the purchase was $1000.  We actually waited many more days since we were also shopping around.

Third, we have the cash in the bank for this purchase.  So even though we are using plastic we will promptly pay off the purchase with cash before we incur any interest or other costs associated with a plastic purchase.

And even after all that I get a little jolt of anxiety running up a $1000+ plus credit card bill.