You can save money on gas by buying your gas with a credit card that gives you a rebate for gas purchases. These rebates can be upwards of 6%, depending on which rewards card you choose. Unlike a decade or so ago, many consumers eschew the using an oil company gas card in favor of a traditional Visa or MasterCard that gives some type of reward or rebate for gas purchases. The reasons for this are many, but suffice it to say that flexibility is definitely not the oil company credit card’s strong suit.

With an oil company credit card you’re limited in two ways; one, you have to use it for purchases at a gas station, and two it has to be a gas station owned or affiliated with that specific oil company, for example, Chevron or BP. Need to pick up a new HDTV or 5 lbs of bananas and a large combo pizza? Too bad.

That sort of inflexibility has consumers fleeing company gas cards for the greater options provided by credit cards that pay rewards for gas purchases, but can be used in any store that accepts credit cards, and for any purchase the consumer might wish to make. In many cases they’ll get rewards or rebates for these other purchases as well.

One way to save gas is to use one of these gas rebate credit cards and, this is important, pay off the balance every month, so you’ll accrue no interest charges. Failing that, at least search high and low to find the card with no annual fee and the lowest interest rate possible. Click here to check out a vertical credit card search engine that lets you do just that, find the gas credit card with the lowest interest rate, and more importantly if you’re trying to maximize your gas rebate, the biggest rebate.

These things change with the winds in the financial sector (which lately have risen to hurricane force), but as I pen this you can get a gas reward of up to 10%, depending on the particular card. Don’t forget to avoid any card with an annual fee, unless it’s extremely small and the rewards for your specific type of use far outweigh the impact of the annual fee. That’s a very important point, you must remember to give careful consideration to your expected use of the different cards when making your decision. The offers are varied (and seem to change with the wind) so you have to look at your past credit card usage, and examine how any prospective new card would fare if you were using it instead. Calculate the different rewards percentages for each type of purchase, and total your expected total annual reward dollar amount.

You can use the gas reward percentage to directly offset the price at the pump. For example, if the reward percentage for a particular card is 7%, that is effectively a discount on gas prices that’s applied to the final price you’ll pay. Two more things to consider here; some credit cards have a maximum rewards amount, so keep that in mind when making your decision, and if you fail to pay off the balance every month, you’ll pay an interest rate that I can almost guarantee will be higher than your reward percentage.

So, you can use a credit card gas rebate to effectively save money on gas, if you find the best card, and be careful to use it correctly. It is just one more strategy to save money on gas you can keep in your arsenal. Go here to use that gas rewards search.

….until next time.

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