The citi dividend is no longer offered right? Do you think we should be consistent in that other no longer available cards for signup aren’t displayed?
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What do you mainly spent it on?
I didn’t know this was no longer offered but I was able to PC an AA plat to dividend months ago to avail of 5% at BBY this quarter. Hopefully, for 2018, Q1 has drugstores and there’s promo for “ice cream” items.
A lot of good info here, but my question is what happens after the first year as far as the card fees? Some of the fees are really high do you pay them or cancel card?
I paid Chase $748 in annual fees last year, probably will be $649 next year.
*The fees are somewhat offset: $300 travel credit and 12000 SW points means net fees of ~$250 last year and $150 next year. The extra $100 last year was for the sapphire preferred opening bonus.
Generally the strategy on fees is:
1- If the card generates more than the fee in extra value for me, I keep it. For CSR ($450 fee minus $300 travel credit), this means I would need to put over ~$3k a year in travel and restaurant spend on the card to break even if I assigned $0 value to the card’s other benefits. The CSR does have other features that I assign value to though, so even if I would not expect to put that much in category spend I would still keep it.
2- If not, then if possible leave it open and product-change to a card with no annual fee. For example, at 12 months age I converted my Chase Sapphire Preferred to a Chase Freedom.
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Most of the best cards do not have annual fees. As with anything, you only pay the fee if you can justify it.
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Ideally, you dump the high fee card for a different one after the first year, but with the restrictions at the major 3 issuers it’s harder to do so now. Or keep it if you value the benefits and travel enough to use them. In a perfect world you’d bump between Amex Plats and CSR on 100k bonuses annually or so.
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I thought amex was once per life bonus?
Also, Chase Sapphire (now All Chase Sapphire are treated as one product family) is minimum of 24 months to receive a new bonus.
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Yep. The world’s not perfect anymore 
What are some ways to monetize the annual $100 airline incidental credit if you are just an occasional but not a frequent flyer?
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I use two cards mostly – the 3% Alliant card (no fee for one year). After one year it switches to 2.5% with a $59 fee.
Amex Preferred Blue Cash - 6% on groceries up to $6000, 3% gas and dept. stores, $95 fee. Many other savings benefits - For instance,right now I am saving 10% on my cable bill up to $300. These have more than paid for the fee.
Amex says one can actually get two separate Preferred Cards, meaning 6% on $12K of groceries. If you don’t buy that much in groceries, gift cards bought at the grocery store qualify. So if you’re buying something at Home Depot, you could buy Home Depot gift cards at the grocery store, getting 6% back.
Since I already have a Preferred Card, I would not get a bonus for getting another one but a rep told me I can apply for the no-fee Amex EveryDay card, get a $150 bonus for spending $1000 in the first 3 months, then upgrade to the Preferred Card.
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The Cathay Pacific (CX) card went to 50k recently. It’s an obscure program but since it’s Synchrony bank it doesn’t really interfere with anything.
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I’ve added a Foreign Transactions section for some general hints and abbreviated “foreign transaction fee” to FTF and “annual fee” to AF throughout the wiki. Also added AF and FTF to the Abbreviations section.
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Doctor of Credit will post when airline gift cards trigger the benefit. YMMV of course but it could be useful.
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There are also long threads about it on Flyertalk.
I made some updates to the wiki:
- Removed mentions of most signup bonuses (with the exception of extra rewards for 1st year like with Discover or Alliant), because bonuses change frequently and become outdated quickly, and this thread is not about signup bonuses.
- Renamed “Airlines” to “Airfare”, removed airline-specific cards, and added a note to explain why – i.e., there’s no best Delta card, since only one bank issues all Delta cards and your only choice is a a trade off between annual fee and benefits. If you feel strongly about bringing them back, please explain.
- I feel the same way about the “Hotels” category. There’s no best Marriott card – it’s a trade off between annual fee and benefits, not a true competition between card issuers. I rarely stay at hotels and I’ve never collected hotel points, so I’d like to suggest that this category be removed or replaced by a more generic “Travel” category. Anyone have opinions about this?
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Best split it up onto chain or hotel specific cards, which has the limits you mention, and generic hotel or generic airfare cards.
Examples of generic airfare or hotel cards include 5x MR Amex Plat, 5% PFCU; 3% Uber Visa, AARP etc.
Why should we include hotel-specific cards at all? This topic is about the Best Rewards Credit Cards. It should not be a complete listing of all the credit cards available out there. Sure, the three Chase Marriott cards are the best cards to earn Marriott Rewards points, but they are also the only cards for Marriott Rewards points. What makes them the Best Rewards Credit Cards?
Perhaps we could list the dollar value range of the rewards points right after the bullet point, like we have for SPG. It should not be the percentage range that is earned in the various categories, but their actual value. For example, Hilton does not earn 2-9%, because the points are worth < 0.4 cpp, so “9%” is really 3.6% at most. Also the ones that include free nights every year should mention that, next to the annual fee.
Removed mentions of most signup bonuses (with the exception of extra rewards for 1st year like with Discover or Alliant), because bonuses change frequently and become outdated quickly, and this thread is not about signup bonuses.
Sometimes the best rewards of the card are the initial signup bonus. If you remove them, then it’s only about cash back and not the total experience.
i think it would be useful for people to just bump the thread whenever a new or obscure product comes out. Most everything else is covered well by the travel bloggers. It’s newsworthy if it has a high bonus or isn’t from the big 3 banks,
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