Everyone wants to optimize their credit cards.
5% on groceries.
3% on gas.
Transfer points to airlines.
Open another card for the sign-up bonus.
Then another one because it has better travel protections.
Pretty soon you’re carrying six cards and checking which one to use every time you buy something.
Meanwhile, Fidelity’s card just gives you 2% on basically everything when the rewards are deposited into an eligible Fidelity account.
No annual fee.
No foreign transaction fee.
No spending cap on the 2%.
The rewards don’t expire.
And here’s the part I like.
You can automatically send the rewards into a brokerage account, IRA, HSA, 529 or other eligible Fidelity account.
That turns something people normally spend into something they can invest.
The math isn’t huge.
Spend $2,500 → $50 back.
Spend $25,000 → $500.
Spend $50,000 → $1,000.
Spend $100,000 → $2,000.
But now suppose someone puts $50,000 a year of normal spending through the card and automatically invests the $1,000 reward every year.
At a hypothetical 8% annual return, doing that for 20 years turns those $20,000 of rewards into roughly $45,800.
The interesting part isn’t the 2%.
It’s the automation.
You don’t have to remember to invest the reward.
You don’t have to decide whether you should spend it.
It just shows up in the investment account.
And someone in the discussion said they were putting $400 to $600 a month aside into an S&P 500 fund from their rewards/spending setup.
That’s $4,800 to $7,200 a year.
At 8% for 20 years, $500 a month invested would grow to roughly $295,000.
Obviously, that’s assuming the return actually averages 8%. It won’t.
But that’s the point.
Small amounts become very different when you keep doing them for decades.
And there is another lesson here.
A complicated rewards strategy might theoretically produce more.
Maybe you can squeeze 3%, 4% or 5% out of certain purchases.
But if optimizing everything makes you spend more, miss payments, pay annual fees or simply give up because it’s annoying, the extra percentage isn’t worth much.
Someone in the thread basically described the appeal perfectly: after trying premium travel cards, the simple 2% card became attractive because they didn’t need another pile of airline points.
That’s the part people miss.
The best financial system isn’t always the one with the highest theoretical return.
Sometimes it’s the one you can use for years without thinking about it.
Spend normally.
Get 2%.
Invest it automatically.
Repeat.
That’s incredibly boring.
And boring is often what actually compounds.