The Barclay's website doesn't give you a "You've spent $X,000 this year" number, so I figured that number was unknowable until you got the 10,000 miles of status with US Air. I didn't think I actually spend enough to hit the $25k requirement.

Well, I was wrong. I figured out how to run a report in Mint to show how much spend I've had on each card.

So I screwed up BIG this year. I made the mistake of splitting my purchases over two credit cards: my US Air and my Discover Card. Running that report I mentioned above and I'm only about $1k away from the $25k if all of my purchases had been on one card and I have two expensive work trips coming up! I run all of my work expenses through my personal cards, so this mostly isn't even $25k of my own money!

Well, strategy change now. I'm not going to spend extra, but I'm going to direct all of my spending that isn't in the Discover 5% cashback category onto the US Air card. I just might make it to $25k by end of 2012.

Do you track your spending on these types of cards to make sure you hit the status mark? If so, how?

...why would you ever put ordinary spending on a Discover card?

If I know I haven't paid any fees, I just add up all my payment amounts for the year from the card's payment screen.

If I want to be sure, I open up each statement in the history and add up the "purchases" lines.

It's not that much of a burden.

That will give you a rough estimate, but not an exact one due to any returns you may have made.

The reason I was using the discover card was because payments post there faster. I was churning the card (in a different meaning of the word), I was traveling so much that I would burn up all of my credit line on one card in less than a month. I would dump my expense checks right back into the card to make room for the next set of expenses multiple times a month. The US Air card was taking a longer time to post payments, so I would only send US Air and rental car spend there while hotels went on discover.

AH. We would all be happy to help you thicken out that wallet. Lots of credit to be had.

I use Mint.com to do this. Once all your transactions are in there you can search for all transactions on my one card and then filter on the date. It will tell you exactly how much you have spent YTD.

Otherwise any budget tracking software should do it. Or even just a simple Excel sheet you update every month.

Just call the credit card issuer and they will tell you. I just did this the other day for my United cc.