Now, to highlight an example of how great an opportunity a sign-up bonus could be relative to the fees for paying your taxes, I'm going to talk about a sign-up bonus that just came out for one of my favorite travel cards of 100,000 points after spending $5,000 in three months.

And this is a card that earns transferable points. Think about the cost to put that $5,000 spend, even if you didn't have it, would be about $87.50 if you were paying 1.75% in fees. So you might think, okay, well, if I'm just earning one point per dollar, maybe that's not worth it because those points might only be worth $50 or $60, I'm going to pay $87 in fees.

However, because there's a 100,000 point sign-up bonus, this looks very, very different. So worst case, I think you could use that sign-up bonus in the travel portal, and this card makes those travel predemptions worth 1.25 cents. And so 1.25 cents times 100,000 points is $1,250. So if you're getting $1,250 to spend $5,000, that's a 25% effective cashback rate.