How To Decide Between 1.5x Points And 1.5x Points

Not fair. You're comparing the $95 version of the Everyday card to Chase's free card.

A legitimate comparison would be to the free version of the Everyday card.

We max out the $6,000 in grocery spending and have about $3,000 in gas spending each year, which makes the $95 fee for the Everyday worth it. That's 36,000 MR points. I don't have any other cards that give bonuses on these. The 36,000 MR points are worth, at worst, $720 to me because I can use them in conjunction with an Amex Business Plat on my airline of choice or for premium tickets for 2 cents per point.

If I used a no-fee 2 percent cash back card, I'd get $180 back on the $9,000 in spend. If I used the Chase Freedom, I would get 13,500 points, which even at a very generous valuation of 2.1 cents per point, is $273.

So, the annual fee easily pays for itself -- even if I were only to use the Amex on the category bonuses (and throw in a bunch of smaller Amazon or other charges in the months I use them to get the spend).

I keep things simple and just use the card with 1.5x rewards.

Questios?

These cards are useless to me after the sign up bonus.

This is irrelevant to this, but QR has a shadowy pic of their super business class on their website, along with a clock with the countdown. According to them, the reveal will be on March 8th, at 11:00.

So I assume you don't use SPG Amex for base spend unless you're *this* close to a JAL redemption or something?

How do you handle your credit score with so many credit cards? Or do you even care about it?

With the loss of using Amex at Costco, I prefer using the Chase Freedom Unlimited now. I buy a lot of groceries at Costco and as a result, it's hard for me to max out the grocery bonus.

@Manny: Ironically, the more open credit cards you have, the better your credit score becomes.

Your credit score is based majorly on: A) paying on-time, B) available credit / utilization of credit. To a much lesser extent, # of recent inquiries, age of accounts, and variety of credit sources. So, the more cards you have, the larger your overall available credit becomes, and your score will go up. It *will* initially drop for the first ~2-3 months due to a new account adding an inquiry AND adding a "0 months" to the average age of accounts. After that it'll rise nicely.

Even better, now that you had added to your overall credit by adding a new card, your utilization % is less with the same amount of spending, which also helps increase your score.