I don’t think it’s a matter of spent.
It’s signup bonuses + benefits + retention offers > annual fee
3 Likes
Doesn’t spend weigh into that?
Please forgive a credit card simpleton🤪
1 Like
That’s what my dumb dumb approach has been. Both cards I use regularly are 2% but one of them gives 4.5% on a particular category which can be changed month to month.
1 Like
Which one is this one
Far from dumb
1 Like
Bank of America Signature Visa. I think anyone who can fog a mirror qualifies.
2 Likes
This is what I have. An Amazon card and a 3 points per dollar card for everything else. That’s all.
BILT Mastercard: no sign up fee - use it to pay my rent (~9,000 a month lol…don’t ask, just waiting for the market to ease up so we can buy but don’t want to compromise our living for now) so wracking up 100,000 points this year. No fee for charging rent.
Amex Gold: 90,000 sign up points and 4x groceries up to 25,000, so about 100,000 points a year plus sign on.
If you want to fly business to Europe it’s worth it. HOWEVER, it’s a pain in the ass to find seats and I seldom get lucky. LAX/SFO to Paris for 60,000 points business each way is a very nice reward for using credit cards.
4 Likes
15 Likes
Didn’t read the whole thing, but, after trying to use my Chase Ultimate Rewards to try to book tickets back from Europe for ~6 wks from now, I think I’m over the whole points thing, too. Cash back (or the travel “eraser” from Capital One) is so much more straightforward.
I don’t travel enough to make these cards worth it.
1 Like
you pay 9x12 = 110k in rent? per year? wtf kind of mansion are you trying to buy bro?
3 Likes
I’m slacking now honestly. I used to do it once every month at 3 hours a month. I just went 4 months without touching it lol. And in those 4 months I lost around 50k points due to expirations. I have a 4 tab excel spreadsheet that takes care of all the churning activities.
2 Likes
Award travel is way more complicated and an art in itself.
3 Likes
I have business expenses but most of all, you can put a lot of personal expenses on your card. I live in NJ so everything is expensive. 1k a month on utilities, groceries, gas, and basics is normal here. That 1k a month can easily get you a minimum of 240 cash back in a year. If you sign up for 2 credit cards with annual fees, you’ll get 2k in cashback or up to 10k in travel. These are just estimates but I’ve personally spent 38k on annual fees and so far, I’ve received 98.5k in travel/cash/benefits
For best redemptions your travel dates have to be flexible. If you are set of travel dates then it can be hard but checking frequently helps as you can see open seats. For me it’s totally worth it because i would have never travelled business class this frequently without points. It gets harder to find seats when you are traveling as a family but being flexible with dates/airport help and those 15hrs international flights can be enjoyable.
3 Likes
Totally, knowing which program offers best redemption and where to transfer your points to find that sweet spot requires lot of reading and keeping track of ever changing award rules.
You can transfer Chase points to Flying Blue at 1.25 and today is the last day to buy their points at +100%
1 Like
Quick example.
Amex Biz Plat charges a $695 fee. It comes with multiple credits for the fee.
$400 in Airline credit since you can double dip the credit before closing the card - You can cash this credit out, say 80% of the value in cash.
$600 in Dell Credit - You can cash this out using buying groups, say 80% of the value in cash.
$10/month cell phone credit - $120 value a year.
Altogether, atleast $920 in value if you know what you are doing.
Now you can get this card every 91 days(used be just a few days but that got nerfed). This is without accounting for any of the sign up bonuses or anything else like Lounge Access, status etc.
4 Likes
I think both of these things are way the travel cards are not a good match. I’m kind of lazy (snort), and, while I’m self employed, that means I have no true PTO and have to find work coverage and I always travel w/ my partner, so my dates are not flexible (since his dates are not super flexible). Bleh.
The other thing is that, ever since airlines started allowing you to reserve an exit row seat at the time of booking, we have no motivation (thankfully) to spring for an upgrade to premium economy or business.
Current example is me trying to book a flight back from Munich (to LAX). Lufthansa doesn’t partner w/ Chase (which I just discovered today; I had stupidly assumed that Chase partnered w/ all freq flyer programs), Air France/KLM (which has quite reasonable cost) hasn’t released all of their exit row seats for our preferred flight, and United (which has the best value for points usage) totally gouges to book the exit row.
1 Like
