Identifying great credit card rewards...Great...But remember to use them!:
Bottom Line: The good news is that credit rewards have never been better. That could lead to surprising great news if you've forgotten to use them! According to BankRate.com's latest research 31% of reward cardholders have never used their rewards. That means that a third of us probably have a lot of money/value just waiting to be used. If this rings true with you it's worth looking into sooner rather than later and setting up an ongoing plan to use them going forward.
The most common rewards program used is cash back (49% of all rewards). If that's what you have and/or prefer it's often really easy to redeem them monthly. I have three rewards based credit cards that I use with regularity. Two of them offer cash back (American Express & Capital One) that I redeem for account credit monthly as a pay the bill online. A couple of clicks & it's done. That might be something that'd work for you and keep you from forgetting to redeem what you've already earned.
One other unrelated piece of info that came from Bankrate's most recent report. We're seeing that older Millennials have rapidly been adding credit cards. By the age of 27 most Millennials now use at least one credit card regularly. In fact use among the oldest Millennials (27-36) now stands at 61% which is higher than Gen Xers at 56%. This is encouraging given the low credit card default rates as Millennials had previously lagged in developing credit profile and scores due to credit avoidance after the Great Recession. Hopefully this trend continues with the younger Millennials/adults as part of a healthy use of credit that will allow them to benefit from credit history, scores & rewards.