WetBeardHairsWhich credit cards do you use for maximum rewards?
It’s a cat and mouse game to achieve “the best” rewards. It’s made this way on purpose and they change monthly/on a cadence (as you most likely all know). I always look around to research and modify our usage per expenses.
That said:
- Amex Platinum for travel (hotels, flights)
- Chase Freedom for gas (rewards are sometimes targeted)
- Chase Sapphire for streaming, bills and randoms because I like their points incentive(s)
- Citi Simplicity for balance transfers, since they tend to target my family for generous offers (like when we had to buy a new living room :/)
Other than the Citi card, we pay our balances. Our rewards points are pretty built up at this point and we’ll use them for things like vacations, or vacation add-ons, rentals or gift cards for the kiddos.
I am planning to drop my Chase Sapphire Reserve because the service has suffered while the price increased (started at $250 and now it’s $500/yr).
About how much do you spend on hotels and flights to make the Amex worth it? They charge $750 a year!
I'm glad I'm reading your comment. I had just called Chase this morning and the Chase Sapphire Reserve is now $550/annual fee and the bonus is now 60k points (i think.ot used to be 100k, which is what I got when I signed up.for the Chade Sapphire Preferred card). I was interested in order.to get the bonus points but also for the Chase airport lounges - if I can't access those.lounges there.might not be any point (no pun intended).
They shuffled the rewards around a few years ago due to covid.
- Free instacart. We used the crap out of it for the first year during covid. Then the terms eroded and it got really expensive.
- Free Uber priority or Lyft Pink or whatever. That saved us… maybe $10.
- Free TSA PreCheck. It’s worth $75 every 3 years or so. Maybe prices have gone up.
- Priority Pass - yeah that thing that gives you access to like 0 lounges now. It was great when I got my card nearly 10 years ago.
- Rewards points. They dropped Travelocity (thank god) as an intermediary. But now their booking costs are about 10-20% higher than booking directly with the airline/hotel/etc. So we try to bank up our points and use them to purchase whole tickets and we never spend cash through their portal anymore.
- $300 of travel cash. We’re careful to not book travel with that reimbursement through their portal. The 10-20% markup translates to $30-60 in rewards which, at a 5% cash back rate costs $1200 in travel to recoup.
Oh and when I signed up they gave me almost $750 in travel credit as a premium. I think I’m going to start churning again because that was the best freakin’ reward.