The bourgeois pastime of credit card rewards points

sharivari you wanna reconsider??

ya i'm getting that new sapphire reserve card

Weirdly my chase rewards travel does not give me 1.5x plus all the prices seem jacked up. Maybe it's an old card that didn't have that deal.

The Chase card looks great but they don't operate in the UK, unfortunately. Hopefully it'll lead to AmEx upping their benefits as i can imagine a lot of people are going to switch.

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do you have a chip card? stick that thing right in there and hold until I tell you to stop.

offer may not apply to you

This is a pretty good offer on Avios / BA Executive Club points for anyone in the UK:

iirc 4500 Avios would normally cost £87 - or be earned after spending £4500 on an AmEx. You can get the same for free if you sign up to the Sunday Times Travel magazine for £30:

http://www.headforpoints.com/2016/09/02/avios-the-sunday-times-travel-magazine-promo/

http://www.creditcards.com/reviews/chase-sapphire-reserve-card/

Can you get out of an annual fee by cancelling after you get your sign-on reward?

Cuz that one has a sick bonus but the annual fee is pretty high.

annual fee gets tacked onto purchase balance prior to due date of first monthly payment. user doesn't receive bonus until after spending $4k. (user has three months to meet this spending threshold.)

better of canceling after first year.

doesn't seem like a great deal with that fee

I saw somewhere that the rewards points are supposed to be 1.5x if used through chase travel? Which I guess would make that like a $1500 bonus right there. But OTOH when I looked at travel through Chase Rewards the prices seemed way inflated compared to expedia or other sites. Anyway it's at least a $1000 sign-up bonus. Minus the $450 annual fee that leaves you with $550, which is still better than most sign-up bonuses.

Then it also says something about a $300 "annual travel credit." I'm not sure I understand what that is, but if it's what it sounds like, it seems like you're netting a minimum of $850 in the first year. So one year and out doesn't sound too bad.

One thing I have been wondering -- is there a good way to compare something like Delta miles vs. cash? My Delta Skymiles card gives me 2 miles per dollar spent on Delta, but I'm wondering if that works out better than just getting the 3x points for travel that my other card has.

maybe helpful? http://thepointsguy.com/category/series/mile-and-point-value-series/

The $300 kicks in almost immediately after you spend on travel. Like, as you charge travel expenses, you'll see a travel credit equal to the amount spent show up in your account (until you've spent up to the full $300 and thus exhausted the credit).

my dad got good use of the american airlines miles programme. i believe it's 30k miles for every 70k miles travelled. good if you do a lot of travelling. american's business class and service in general has suffered though tbh

Seems like maybe the Delta card isn't even worth booking Delta with. I'll probably just keep it for the perks.

Can you get out of an annual fee by cancelling after you get your sign-on reward?

Hypothetically you could spend $4k in the first month, get the bonus and subsequently cancel (i think you get two months from opening the account to get a refund on fees) but Chase reserves the right to take the bonus points back - and almost certainly would.

You can get a pro-rata refund on a Platinum AmEx after bonus in the UK but i think they might have stopped this in the US recently.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/business/dealbook/credit-card-rewards-chase-sapphire-reserve-annual-fees.html

It is so popular that JPMorgan Chase, the bank that issues the card, ran out of the engraved card’s fancy metal stock in only 10 days, and had to send a temporary plastic placeholder to disappointed customers.

i've got a Fidelity Visa that gives me *2% on every purchase, no fees, no fuss. which is good for me bc i am lazy and don't make purchases strategically or anything. i just travel a lot for work.

*the catch is it's 2% put into your Fidelity IRA. (1% if you just straight up want cash - i think). but if you were going to make auto contributions or otherwise funding an IRA, it's kinda like 2% in your pocket.

will you can open a fidelity cash management account and get that 2% back as cash

xp that sounds good actually! I just got one that's a basic 1.5%, no fees, no fuss one that I want the rewards to go into a self-employed 401k ... but there's no automated thing with mine.

If you do the Fidelity card, it makes much more sense to do it into a Roth IRA than a regular IRA, because you don't get the tax advantage of a regular IRA for using cash back rewards from a credit card (i.e. the rewards are already tax free so you're not reducing your tax load).

Marriott have bought Starwood so if you have a credit card that gives you either Marriott or Starwood status, you can status match with the other for free.

Idk if this will have an impact on whether Starwood sticks with Amex in the future but it's a nice bonus to have Marriott gold status (free breakfast, lounge access, etc) for now.

I did a round of travelling earlier this month (London to Dubai to Dhaka to Singapore to Dubai to London) and the AmEx Platinum bonus of free entry to airport lounges makes a huge difference. Jade status at the Shangri-La in Singapore was also great - i got about $70 worth of drinks (so four beers), fresh fruit, etc, thrown in, plus a box of chocolates on my birthday. Add travel insurance and the bonus points i redeemed for a business class flight to Moscow in December and the initial fee has paid for itself about four times over already.

That Hilton HHonors Visa turned out to be way shittier than I thought because the points are nowhere near as valuable as I got the impression they were. Obviously it varies depending on the prices of the room you want at the time, and there are better deals and worse deals, but 80K+ points turns out to only be enough for a few nights in a mid-range, non-urban hotel (Hampton Inn, Doubletree).

Also we decided our CC spending was getting a little out of hand, so we're switching to only paying fixed expenses on CC and doing everything discretionary from a separate checking/debit account from our main account. Making sure we only spend what we have etc.

I realized the "rewards" thing really does give me this dangerous little adrenaline hit that makes me spend more.

Something worth considering for anyone who has to renew their transport season ticket soon is that you get 25000 Avios points for spending £3000 in the first three months of having a BA AmEx credit card. It is a terrible APR so only good if you have cash in the bank or a season ticket loan coming in from work.

If I buy my fiancee's season ticket for £4000, I will get 6000 air miles and trigger the £3000 target, meaning 31000 Avios in total. Enough for a business class return to Moscow nominally worth £1200.

There is a £195 fee but if is refunded pro rata so if you cancel next month, in theory, you can get a £1200 flight for about £20 of outlay.

I will keep mine to trigger the two for one flight redemption voucher you get at £10,000.