The Great Credit Card Points Illusion, and Other Lessons in Furnishing a Home on the Cheap

Saw a post on r/AussieFrugal this morning from someone moving into a new place, staring down the barrel of buying everything from scratch. Bed, cutlery, crockery, the lot. Their question was the one everyone asks in that situation: is there a way to turn all this forced spending into points, cashback, some kind of win hiding inside the expense?

It’s a fair question. It’s also one I’ve asked myself, and the answer I’ve landed on after years of half-heartedly chasing frequent flyer points is: probably not, not in the way you’re hoping.

The comments on that thread backed this up better than I could. One bloke mentioned he’s sitting on 2.5 million frequent flyer miles from two years of card spend, and even he said his first recommendation to the original poster wasn’t points, it was a NAB cashback offer: spend $1,500, get $350 back, no ongoing fee if you close the account after. That’s real money, not points you’ll eventually redeem for a partial upgrade on a flight to Bali that’s already booked out in economy. Someone else put it more bluntly: putting all your expenses on a rewards card isn’t the financial hack you think it is. I’ve done the maths on this myself a few times, credit card interest rates versus the actual redeemable value of points, and it never quite adds up unless you’re paying the balance off in full every single month and never miss a beat. Most people don’t. I include myself in that, some months.

But the more interesting thread running through that discussion wasn’t about credit cards at all. It was about how much of a house you can furnish without buying anything new.

Facebook Marketplace came up over and over, along with Buy Nothing groups, hard rubbish nights, op shops, Savers, Lifeline, the lot. One person described building an entire kitchen’s worth of crockery by picking a colour, usually blue apparently, and collecting pieces from op shops over time rather than buying a matching set from Kmart in one hit. Someone else scored a table that retails for fifteen grand for fifteen hundred bucks, because the person selling it needed it gone fast. That’s not a small saving. That’s the kind of story that makes you want to spend your Saturday morning scrolling Marketplace instead of doing anything productive.

I moved house about six years ago now, and hard rubbish night in our old street was an education. You’d see genuinely good furniture out on the nature strip, families upgrading or downsizing and just wanting it gone. We picked up a bookshelf that’s still in my daughter’s room, cost us nothing but the awkward conversation with a neighbour about whether it was actually rubbish or just “temporarily outside.” Melbourne’s outer suburbs do hard rubbish collections a few times a year and if you time it right, driving around with a trailer the night before collection is basically a shopping trip. Slightly undignified. Also free.

There’s a broader thing here that I think about more as I get older, which is how much of consumer culture is built around the idea that everything in your home should match, should be new, should look like a catalogue spread. The commenters pushing back on that, the ones saying embrace the eclectic look, buy gradually, don’t skimp on the mattress but skimp on everything else, are describing something that used to just be called “how most people lived” before easy credit and flat-pack furniture made buying a whole house’s worth of stuff in one weekend feel normal. My own place is a mismatched collection of things bought over fifteen years, a couple of hand-me-downs from my in-laws, one genuinely ugly armchair I refuse to get rid of because it’s the most comfortable thing I own. It doesn’t look like a display home. I don’t think I’d want it to.

None of this solves the actual problem the original poster had, which is that moving house is expensive no matter how frugal you are, and there’s a real cost, in time and effort, to doing it the cheap way. Trawling Marketplace for a decent couch takes longer than clicking “buy” on one from a website. Driving around on hard rubbish night requires a vehicle and a willingness to look a bit feral in front of your new neighbours. Not everyone has the time, the trailer, or the flexibility to wait for the right secondhand find instead of just needing a bed frame this week.

But there’s something genuinely good about a culture, even a small internet-forum-sized pocket of it, that defaults to “check if someone’s already got one of these before buying it new.” It’s better for your wallet and it’s better for the ridiculous amount of stuff that ends up in landfill because a laminate desk went out of fashion. I don’t think it’s the answer to everything. I do think it’s worth more headspace than a spreadsheet of credit card points ever will be.