Questions and Answers

Lucky,

We are about to hire a contractor to do about $50,000 work on a new house. The contractor takes credit cards with no added fee. We are trying to decide which card to put the spend on. We like to use our points for international business class awards, booking two tickets at a time.

We currently have about 400,000 AAdvantage miles; 50,000 Chase UR points; 100,000 Citi points; and 200,000 Barclay Arrival points.

Would it make sense to open a Starwood card with AMEX for this purchase? The sign up bonus is only 25,000, but we’d get another 50,000 from spend.

I also have a Chase Slate card that I could convert to a Freedom Unlimited. That would get 1.5 points/$, which I could transfer to UW points.

So what say you? It seems there is some benefit to accruing a lot of transferable points with one issuer, rather than 50,000-70,000 with multiple issuers. While Starwood points are valuable, at the end of the day I’m not sure 85,000 Starwood points gets us very far.

Well, 85k SPG points are worth 105k airline miles so I’d say they have quite a bit of value. Ideally I’d suggest using this opportunity ot sign up for new cards and meet spending bonuses. Your wife and you can could do this easily for 6-8 cards for a tremendous return. I think Ben values SPG and 1.5 UR about the same. If you only want to apply for one card I’d probably get the SPG or a TYP card and earn the spending bonus and supplement your UR balance with FU. There is no correct answer here, just whatever works best for your future plans.

Agree, I would try to meet the minimum spends on several cards, particularly ones with a higher spend requirement.

I would also sign up for the Freedom Unlimited to get the bonus points (versus just converting your Slate).

In general though, I think it makes sense not to over-diversify. Your points have some common transfer partners, but ideally you’d have enough in each account for two one-way business class tickets.