One Page to Rule Them All

[strubled]

Summary

Create a page that allows us to quickly test if the card value and recommendations are working correctly.

UX Example

Card Spend Input

A basic form that will take values for categories that travel cards pay out for. Eventually will replaced with Plaid transaction categories automatically

Example Form

Category	Spend
Dining	$1000
Flights	$2000
Hotels	$1000
Grocery	$20000
Gas	$800
Other	$15000
Submit

Card Values

• Need to generate a value per point - i assume this is done already somewhere...a recent one is here: https://www.creditkarma.com/credit-cards/i/credit-card-point-valuations/
• Take points offered by $1 spend per card, multiple times the value per point...so like for groceries, if you get 4x points for groceries, and you spend $1000 at $.02 per point, you get 4000 points * $.02 = $80 of value…
• Will need to change / cap points earned in some cases
• Each category will subtract annual fee to compare across cards
• Each category will assume the person doesn’t have any cards...we can as a next step add in that a user already has the chase card for example so won’t be eligible for the sign up bonus.
• Flights will assume you book all of your flights through the assigned company. For example if you get a Delta card, we’ll assume you book all flights on Delta

Example Table (we'd need to list all cards, or maybe the top 5-7 cards)

• Takes the inputs from above and calculates a value score for each category by card

Value	Chase	Amex	Capital One	Hilton
Dining	$50	$10	$30	$0
Flights	$50	$10	$30	$0
Hotels	$50	$10	$30	$0
Grocery	$50	$10	$30	$0
Gas	$50	$10	$30	$0
Other	$50	$10	$30	$0
Sign up Bonus	$50	$10	$30	$0
Annual Fee	$50	$10	$30	$0
Total Value	$50	$10	$30	$0

Recommendations

• Chase for Groceries
• Platinum for Everything Else

Total Value Generated: $2,750

How to Build Above

Run a query to find which card wins per category. If there are 5 categories, the query will run 6x (one for each category and one for total value), and return the name of the card that wins per category. Whenever a card is selected only 1x, use the value returned for that category (i.e. $200), but if a card is selected for multiple, will make sure we don’t double count the annual fee.

• Calculating the total value will be tricky...will do this for now
• Chase: $200
• Platinum: add up all other categories, which is $1250, then add in (# total categories (4) - # categories won (3))* annual fee ($500) = $1500 = $2750

[strubled]

@sknechtel - this is the ticket i'm thinking about working on next

[sknechtel]

@strubled OK - I thought about putting edits directly in the document, but then I was scared I would mess something up. So I'm going to do them individually down here?

1. Points Guy also does points valuations for a bunch of travel reward cards, updated monthly: https://thepointsguy.com/guide/monthly-valuations/
2. I think you mentioned this somewhere else, but we're probably OK using 1 pt = $.01 for just modeling this out to see if it works

[strubled]

Yes leaving comments like that is great!

Cool. I’ll start with $.01 per point. Do you think overall this first page makes sense?

[sknechtel]

@strubled Part of me was thinking - should we include an amazon card in our test cases? I feel like that's pretty specific but I think upwards of 40% of eCommerce transactions are amazon and i think they offer 5x on amazon transactions -- but that got me to thinking about something else that (I frankly don't know how is handled) - what about overlapping transactions EG. what if a transaction is amazon and groceries. It shouldn't matter right? Because on a high point grocery card they should be counted as groceries and an amazon card would count them as amazon purchases (if not excluded in the rules)?

[sknechtel]

Yes, I think overall the page makes sense. I'm going down rabbit holes at this point.

[strubled]

Hmm so @sknechtel the amazon card is a cash back card. I’ve been thinking a user is either a travel card user or cash back but wouldn’t do both. Is that a false assumption?

we could do a few things:

1) Compare only travel cards 2) Compare only cashback cards 3) Compare both 4) Give the user the option of what they want it to do (1-3)

I'm not a hard core cc user, but the one card i've ever used is cashback. I've always felt like I may not be optimizing, but it's the easiest for me to understand. That being said, maybe this site will change my mind...so maybe it does make sense by default to just do 3 and then let the user do 4 (eventually). I don't think programmatically it should be any more eng effort to do 1-3, it just comes down to loading more and more cards into our database.

[strubled]

To build this page, going to need to save a few things:

Travel Credit cards

• name
• description
• logo url
• sign up bonus spend required
• sign up bonus points earned
• annual fee
• gas point multiplier
• gas points limit
• gas points multiplier beyond limit
• grocery point multiplier
• grocery points limit
• grocery points multiplier beyond limit
• dining point multiplier
• dining points limit
• dining points multiplier beyond limit
• hotel point multiplier
• hotel points limit
• hotel points multiplier beyond limit
• airfare point multiplier
• airfare points limit
• airfare points multiplier beyond limit
• other points multiplier
• other points limit
• other points multiplier beyond limit
• point value

Cashback Credit cards

• name
• description
• logo url
• sign up bonus spend required
• sign up bonus points earned
• annual fee
• gas rate
• gas rate limit
• gas rate multiplier beyond limit
• grocery rate multiplier
• grocery rate limit
• grocery rate multiplier beyond limit
• dining rate multiplier
• dining rate limit
• dining rate multiplier beyond limit
• hotel rate multiplier
• hotel rate limit
• hotel rate multiplier beyond limit
• airfare rate multiplier
• airfare rate limit
• airfare rate multiplier beyond limit
• other rate multiplier
• other rate limit
• other rate multiplier beyond limit

I thought about saving these as the same credit card and use a type, but that seemed wasteful since I can't re-use "points" and "rate"...we'd have rows with tons of missing data. I'm not sure if this is going to end up being a bad decision later on lol

update: i changed my mind due to being a little leery of how setting up controllers and a separate model for travel vs. cashback may make things more complicated than it's worth. going to do this instead:

Credit cards

• name
• description
• type (travel, cashback)
• logo url
• sign up bonus spend required
• sign up bonus points earned
• annual fee
• gas point multiplier
• gas points limit
• gas points multiplier beyond limit
• grocery point multiplier
• grocery points limit
• grocery points multiplier beyond limit
• dining point multiplier
• dining points limit
• dining points multiplier beyond limit
• hotel point multiplier
• hotel points limit
• hotel points multiplier beyond limit
• airfare point multiplier
• airfare points limit
• airfare points multiplier beyond limit
• other points multiplier
• other points limit
• other points multiplier beyond limit
• point value
• sign up bonus cash earned
• annual fee
• gas rate
• gas rate limit
• gas rate multiplier beyond limit
• grocery rate multiplier
• grocery rate limit
• grocery rate multiplier beyond limit
• dining rate multiplier
• dining rate limit
• dining rate multiplier beyond limit
• hotel rate multiplier
• hotel rate limit
• hotel rate multiplier beyond limit
• airfare rate multiplier
• airfare rate limit
• airfare rate multiplier beyond limit
• other rate multiplier
• other rate limit
• other rate multiplier beyond limit

[strubled]

i'm just now realizing to make this easier, we need a card admin page. show all of the cards, allow us to edit them, add new ones, delete them, etc.

8

[sknechtel]

That makes sense

Sent from my iPhone

On May 13, 2020, at 8:33 PM, Dan Struble notifications@github.com wrote:

 i'm just now realizing to make this easier, we need a card admin page. show all of the cards, allow us to edit them, add new ones, delete them, etc.

— You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or unsubscribe.

[strubled]

this is such a huge user story...I think the next steps are to:

• [x] fill in one travel card and one cashback card (which requires finishing #8 (so I'll do that first), and then generate a value score for both
• [x] create a total value including the annual fee
• [ ] create a total value including the sign up bonus
• [ ] create a total value including the limits on spend
• [x] create a recommendation section that tells you what cards to use based on the inputs

eventually, i'll go back and clean up things like:

• [ ] update the form inputs to show the correct $s and cents
• [ ] fix the form to only allow certain things, some are required, etc
• [ ] make all of the tables and pages responsive...they look terrible on mobile

[strubled]

Problem

I'm realizing that I may not be able to create the recommendation section since the way I'm building the page right now the fields are being calculated in the view. I can't query or sort the values since they are already returned in the view. Basically the resulting list of cards shows a total value, but I can't do anything fancy calling out the card w/ the highest total value. Even if i could, that's not enough as often times it's going to work out that the user needs to use multiple cards.

options

Keep Hacking With What I've Got

• use some sort of javascript, maybe a jquery table to do the sorting we're after.
• even if I got this to work, we're left with not storing the transaction category values which we'll probably want to do with Plaid so that we don't have to keep hitting Plaid when a user leaves the site and then returns the next day (we can keep things in session for a while). I guess the counter argument is we could only store the transaction categories and then use that in the jquery table.

Kill a Fly With a Bazooka

• store the form / transaction categories in a table called transaction_category_totals
• upon form submission, calculate the total values for grocery and such in another new table called card_value for each card that we stored on the system
• when the page loads, we'll then replace all of the logic in the view of doing things like @grocery * card.grocery_cash and instead replace with card_value.grocery. another example, we can remove if @total > spend_limit do blah blah else do blah blah because we theoretically could do that in the controller and then save the result
• for some reason this option feels more right even though it's going to set me back a little bit. I'm putting so much logic in the view right now and everywhere i read it literally says not to do that. alright f it, going with this.

[strubled]

shoot so now i'm going to add in the sign up bonus...is that the same dilemma as the annual fee? going to have to think about that. going to have to first gather intel about how cards pay out sign up bonuses. is it always just spend $x and we'll give you y points or n dollars? does it depend on the type of spend in a particular category?