So festive and abundant will be the gatherings of learned societies in coming weeks that one might think the point of the holiday season is to share papers, not gifts. (Every paper is a gift, I know.)
Conference travel effects a grand annual transfer of wealth from gown to town, although it is not often observed. In the next few weeks, a braying mass of scholars will descend upon the designated conference sites for such groups as the American Philosophical Association, the Modern Language Association, and the American Historical Association. Those weary travelers will arrive to the glee of airlines, hoteliers, and restaurateurs—thereby adding new meaning to the philosopher William James’s reference to the “cash value” of ideas.
Such travel costs are a major professional expense for everyone from the lowliest desperate, job-seeking graduate student to the chair-holding professor whose institution subsidizes her travel generously. The financial cost lies not only in the most obvious factors, such as the charges for your room. Consider, for example, the delay between expenditure and reimbursement. The persistent habit of bursars in insisting upon receipts, even though a perfectly sound business practice, converts travel expenditures into temporary loans by scholars to their universities. You pay for your plane tickets far in advance usually, but the purchase cannot be reimbursed until after the conference. So scholars carry the costs of travel for months, sometimes, until receipts are filed and reimbursement checks cut.
There are also fees. Consider not just conference-registration fees, but the small fees tacked on by credit-card companies. When cavorting with other presenters in St. Peterburg at the Third International Conference on Nikolai Chernyshevsky, you may think it a grand gesture to pay for the table’s round of spirits by slipping the waiter your credit card. However, back in the States, you may discover a pesky currency-conversion fee slapped onto the bill. Or, when stuck in O’Hare waiting for a connecting flight to Duluth, Minn., for the First Annual Conference on Psychotropic Substances, you might realize that you forgot to withdraw cash from your bank and find yourself forced to use an airport ATM with a $4 transaction fee—prompting you yourself to reach for a psychotropic substance or two.
You can blunt such adverse effects with sound credit-card practices. It pays, for instance, to save up money well in advance, allowing you to pay off credit-card balances no matter what your expense level for a particular month, so that you don’t have to carry a balance and pay interest on it while waiting for reimbursement from your institution (for more principles of sane credit-card use, consult my July 24 column).
An excellent credit card is also essential for sound conference travel. There is a vast world of difference among credit cards. Three cards worth considering are the Citi Hilton HHonors Visa Signature Card, the Hilton HHonors Card from American Express, and the Charles Schwab Invest First Visa Credit Card. I’ve used all of them to my satisfaction. None of them have an annual fee—no card is worth paying that, not to Pennywise, at least.
The Citibank and American Express Hilton HHonors cards work nearly the same way, although one is a Visa and the other American Express: For every charge made on those cards, from groceries to gas, you earn points toward free stays at the Hilton chain, which includes, in addition to its luxury brand, such other hotels as Hampton Inn, DoubleTree, Embassy Suites, and Hilton Garden Inns. The cards are especially lucrative when charging a night spent at those hotels, because that earns you double points. With the Citibank Visa, you may also double dip, earning air miles along with Hilton points for each stay.
To take full advantage of those cards you must, obviously, stick by the Hilton brand. That might mean taking a pass on the official conference hotel. I’ve never found that to be a social liability. At some point, all conferencegoers retire to their rooms. There is almost always a Hilton option within walking distance of the proceedings, I have found, and often at a discount to the officially designated hotel. As you build up HHonors points, as they are called, you wind up with free nights to spend at other conferences (stretching your yearly travel allowance), to use for research trips, or to visit Dear Old Ma.
The Charles Schwab Invest First Visa Credit Card is the best credit card in the world in financial terms, as far as Pennywise can make out. It gives 2 percent cash back on every single purchase you make. It reimburses all ATM fees, no matter where they are incurred. It charges nothing for foreign-currency transactions. The only hitch with the Schwab card is that it requires cardholders to open a Schwab One brokerage account. No deposit in that account is required, though, and the cash funneled into it from your card purchases can be transferred over to a savings account, if you wish. You don’t have to buy stocks with it. You can play Santa Claus with it for yourself or someone else.
Let’s say, for example, you and your partner attend next year’s Walter Rodney Thirtieth Anniversary Memorial Conference at the University of Guyana—well, there ought to be one—and the plane tickets, hotel, and sundries total $3,482. The following month, $69.64 will magically appear in your Schwab brokerage account. Spend at an identical monthly pace, as many people do who charge all their living expenses, and your cash-back total would amount to $835.68 after a year. Not bad just for using the Schwab card to make purchases you would make anyway. Since some of those charges are reimbursed by your institution, if you can tap a travel or research account, now it is you who are finally making a little money, despite the time delay between charge and reimbursement.
If you decide to leave the money in the brokerage account, Schwab offers some excellent fund options, such as the Schwab Total Stock Market Index Fund (0.09 percent expense ratio) or the Schwab International Index Fund (0.19), each requiring only $100 as minimum investment. But you can also just transfer it electronically to a Schwab high-interest bank account—or even to your hometown bank.
Warning: That deal probably won’t last forever. Schwab is offering it as a loss leader to win over business. Another warning: If you do wind up concentrating your assets at Schwab, it may solicit you to accept its financial advising, but the additional fees are unlikely to be worthwhile for small investors who follow basic principles of diversification and cost minimization.
The Schwab card has exceptionally generous cash-back provisions. The Citi and American Express Hilton cards reap major hotel points and air miles. Used strategically, those three cards can really maximize your conference-travel dollars, but if for some reason they don’t suit you, look into alternatives at Bankrate.com.
It pays to get a high-quality card or two because even if the bursar dithers around about reimbursing your travel money, you will be getting some reward for your expenditures. An excellent card can win you hundreds of dollars a year in flights, hotel stays, or money—just for attending holiday conferences, with bells on.
