Card Up My Sleeve

Author Jaime Doughsmith belongs to a society of "card smiths," dedicated to the art of mining incentives and rewards from credit cards. He specializes in cashback farming, buying as much as $50,000 of VISA gift cards per month with high cashback credit cards. It's an eccentric hobby that earns him about $20,000 cashback per year in addition to free vacations with airline miles from credit card sign-up bonuses.

"Card Up My Sleeve" provides credit card users with a glimpse into the lives of the cardholders' top 1 percent. As Doughsmith points out, we live in a society where powerful banks seduce the masses with credit card offers and exact exorbitant interest rates from those who can least afford them. Yet victimhood is only a state of mind, as evidenced by Doughsmith's humorous and revealing accounts of cardholders who saw that the credit system is a mug's game, but decided to game the system.