As I start doing the year-end financial stuff, one thing I always do is tally up the credit card charges.

Marriott Visa: $36,068.81
AOL Visa: $3,206.25
Discover: $1,176.39
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Total: $40,451.45

As far as rewards earned, we got 41,384 Marriott points. That's enough for up to 7 free nights with some points left over. At $80/night, that's about $560. We got $40 cashback from Discover. We haven't redeemed our AOL reward points yet but they're worth a few more dollars, so total rewards are a little over $600 for the year. We also got one free hotel night from Marriott that we get every year on our account anniversary. That saved us over $200. We used that when we went to New York for our anniversary in July. So really, our rewards were over $800.

I was a little surprised to see the total is nearly $9,000 more than last year. Looking back, I can explain most of that. My wife had surgery in 2006 that I didn't pay for until 1/07. That was a couple thousand. She then had surgery again in 07 that cost another $800 and some. We also started planning my daughter's Bat Mitzvah which is in September and gave deposits to the caterer, the DJ and the photographer totalling a few thousand dollars. Add in a couple of costly car repairs on our two 100,000-plus mile cars and that accounts for almost the whole $9,000.

All in all, not so bad. No late payments. Every bill paid in full each month. Zero interest charges. And only the Marriott card has an annual fee ($65) but as you can see, it is well worth paying for what we get in return (over $760 in free stays earned this year).

I only use my Discover card when they have a good 5% cashback bonus special. As a result, I haven't used it for a few months. But a few months ago, I also redeemed my cashback bonus for $20 to be applied to my account. The only problem was I ended up having a zero balance when that occurred, which left me with a $20 credit. I kept meaning to use the card since I had a credit, but I forgot. Yesterday, I got a check in the mail from Discover for the $20 credit. I guess it is better for them to pay out the money than to keep tracking it on my account. Honestly, I'd rather have the money and not have to worry about using the card to utilize it.

I just compiled all of our credit card statements for 2006. One of the forum threads made me do that because I wanted to see our total charges for the year. Here's the breakdown.

Marriott Visa: $25,173.77
AOL Visa: $5,879.22
My Discover: $413.83
Wife's Discover: $309.75
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Total: $31,776.57

To look in terms of rewards earned, with the Marriott card, we earned 27,698 reward points. That's enough for up to 4 free nights with points to spare. Even the cheapest Marriott runs about $69/night + tax, so those points are worth over $300. Add in the free AOL service we earned (until they stopped charging) and the cashback we got from Discover and our total rewards were probably in the $500-$600 range. Not such a bad deal.