Perpetual buying incentives: Things to watch out for.

Air Miles

by Roland Kriewaldt

Air Miles are a marketing ploy that lures us into using credit cards to "earn" items that may be cheaper to buy direct.

Purchasing items at high interest to have something else is the long road to getting something for nothing. And even if our reward item works as advertised, we may not have wanted it in the first place had it not been "free." That usually means it's going to wind up in the garage or the basement after we finish admiring our good fortune and the "Hey everyone, look what I got!" honeymoon is over.

Besides, any company that's greedy enough to charge excessively high interest rates won't be giving anything away for free. That's just an illusion; a cost that is more than covered by the money they'll earn from our compulsive spending sprees.

And as for the actual "Air Miles" themselves — I'll bet 40 of them won't get most of us to the nearest airport. So why bother?