My family uses credit cards for all purchases and we pay them off in full each month. Although sometimes we’ll use a 0% APR promotion for bigger purchases.
Which cards do you use for maximizing your rewards?
I like US Bank’s card that allows you to pick 5% back categories each quarter, as opposed to ones that tell you what the 5% back is.
Citi Double Cash for most purchases.
Savor One for dining/groceries.
Amazon Prime Card for Amazon
Been using the Citi Double Cash for years. I always paid the balance monthly, and generally request my cash reward every few months.
I mostly use two cards:
- Citi Costco Visa - for Costco, gas, and restaurants
- Citi DoubleCash - 2% on everything else
That covers like 95% of my spending. I have other cards as well, such as:
- Bank of America Cash Rewards+ - home improvement stores; I don’t bring it with normally, but it gets 3%, which is nice
- Delta Gold - we live near a Delta hub, so the free checked bags usually pays for the fee
- Discover It and Chase Freedom - rotating 5% categories, I check periodically and bring it if it’s a category I use frequently
But most of my rewards are from signup bonuses. I’ll usually have a card I’m working on, and I’ll use that for any category that didn’t have a better than 2% rate.
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!
Edit: I’m also bitter that Amex bought all of the airport lounges that I used to get into for free with my Chase card.
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). ETA: Can you use all of the Priority One lounges?
What other benefits do you get for that $550? Is the fee waived the first year?
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.
Yep, I agree about Chase. And the same could be said about Amex with the changes in perks + the Centurion lounges always being full. I have been an Amex customer for a long long time and regularly call to get my fee partially waived (it’s hit or miss). I stay for their customer service. It’s second to none. To answer your question, I travel a lot. I do gov consulting work so it’s all reimbursed :)
Yeah I’m a bit sad that I picked the chase ecosystem instead of Amex now. I’ve got the non-business trifecta and don’t want to switch because I have a ton of points, but it seems like the Amex rewards are “nicer” these days. Even if it’s unlikely I’ll fully utilize most of them. Although Chase is working on opening their own airport lounges so maybe that will help.
I use Amex blue cash preferred for groceries, Amazon card for amazon, Walmart card for walmart (still haven’t gotten used to ordering groceries online, so only getting 2% for instore purchases after a year), and pnc cashback for 1.75% every day. I’m looking for a better catch all card with better cashback or benefits. I pay off my cards every week, just to make sure I don’t carry any balance ever. I strictly use it as a cashback machine, and for security.
Citi Double Cash 2% for most purchases
Citi Custom Cash for specific 5% categories I can target, though in practice I usually use it for groceries
Discover Cash Back / Chase Freedom Flex for the rotating 5% categories
Personally I don’t travel enough to bother with travel rewards cards but maybe that’s an option for other people.
PS - I’ve found that Discover usually has higher discounted gift cards if you wind up using your cash back towards that, sometimes it works out better than just doing cash back against your balance.
American Express Blue Cash Preferred. That 6% on groceries comes in clutch with as much food as we buy.
Y’all getting rewards?? I only get to pay more if I don’t pay back in time. 😅
BoA, 2.625% on everything, 3.5% on travel/restaurants.
https://thepointsguy.com/credit-cards/critical-points-stop-ignoring-bofa-preferred-rewards/
Doesn’t it require holding over 100k with BofA?
Or Merrill. You can move an IRA or regular brokerage account.
I have a visa and master.
They do seem to collect some kind of points in my online banking, but I haven’t bothered to find out how they work, yet.
I think I get 15% off car rentals? But I don’t drive.
I use a variety of cards but mostly rely on sign up bonuses to give me enough points to travel with. Without those I would use a cash back.
Right now I use Bilt a lot. It alows you to pay your rent and earn points. My rent is probably ~75% of my monthly expenses. Their transfer partners are very good if not the best of all programs. It also has 3x dining which isn’t a big spend for me but it’s still good. Otherwise I have a several other cards for niche categories.
I used to be really into points and used those points to travel a lot in the last decade.
I don’t anymore. The rewards are not only in exchange for the return business they hope for, but also partly for the data you allow them to collect on you. It is perfectly fine to make that trade, but it is good to factor that into any pro/con balance you make when deciding what programs to participate in. Seeing what was collected on me turned me off the idea, and I now use a standard credit card without benefits for my shopping.
… how does that protect your privacy though? Unless you rolled your own credit card protocol and clearing house, then someone is getting that data.
Yes, that someone is the credit card issuer, in my case my bank. However, at least here, these bonus programs are typically affiliate programs where a substantial data exchange takes place between who knows how many parties. For example, one of the most used credit cards in the country I live (which I previously used) is issued by the largest grocery store owner in the country, that owns several of the largest grocery stores. All your purchases are then directly associated with your profile, and they personalize offers and ads. They are also affiliated with a large number of other retail stores, which also exchange data with each other as part of being a part of this benefits program.
As I said, there is nothing wrong with saying “OK, you can have my data in exchange for these benefits”. My point is simply that these benefit programs are usually not a case of them just trying to get you to shop with them, but will usually involve data exchange that you may or may not know the extent of. This should be factored in when deciding whether to take part in the programs or not, as it is part of the real cost of using the credit card.
I could most likely find a program that does not as extensively hoard my personal data as the example above, but since the extent of data collection and sharing is often quite opaque, I prefer to limit the number of actors with which I share this data as I don’t consider the benefits good enough to make such a compromise on my privacy.
I’m not disagreeing with your view that privacy should be a concern. It is. I’m wondering which credit card doesn’t sell your data.
Supposedly the Apple Mastercard issued by Lehman Brothers doesn’t sell your data.
I’m based in Europe, so banks are legally bound by GDPR. There does not seem to be any mention of third parties in the terms of service, and I have never explicitly agreed for them to share my data with anyone after that. So legally, they should not be able to sell my data. It seems to me you are US-based, and maybe finding a credit card that does not by default sell your data is difficult there?
Your comments have made me very curious about the extent of data collection by the bank, though, so I have just requested to see what data they have stored on me. If I can’t find any direct mention of third parties in the data dump, I will also directly ask them whether they share my data with third parties, and if so, with which.
And you think your credit card without benefits isn’t selling your aggregated purchase history data? Might as well get the rewards or use cash.
As commented below: if they do, they are breaking the law, and generally I trust that my bank is GDPR compliant. I have requested insight into the data they have on me and will specifically ask about third parties if I can’t find any information in the data dump.
But yes, they still do have all that data stored. There is no anonymity even if my assumptions about GDPR compliance is correct, but my privacy is in that case better maintained because the number of parties with access to the data is limited. Cash would increase anonymity, but cash only is not really viable where I live anymore.
I’ve done it before too but it really is sort of ridiculous to jump through hoops just to stretch your spending power by 1 or 2%, isn’t it?
If you make alone or with you S.O. $100K a year that’s one to two twousand dollars extra. Not sure if leaving that on the table is something I want to do now that I found a card I can exploit paying monthly in full as if it were my checking account.
If it’s just a card you like anyway and it’s easy then great, but to spend time figuring out 2% vs 1% and meeting all the requirements, that’s a damn small amount compared to increasing your income potential, learning skills, or getting various other life choices right.
I just think overall, personal finance folks spend too much time on these gimmicks vs maximizing their income or avoiding costs. Probably because it seems easy and you can do it from your couch.
Also, I shouldn’t have said income. It’s more like 1 or 2% of your credit card spend, which is hopefully a much smaller number (say $800 on a $100k income with $40k CC spend)
I’ve been pretty happy with my United Chase card. I travel a lot, for work, though, so it adds up.
In fact, all these cards with their programs are evil, they make us spend more and more, it’s marketing and business baby, nothing personal!
