Awesome.

That's sweet. Looks amazing!

Just finished up the Chase Reserved and Preferred bonuses, and sitting on ~150k of UR points. Trying to figure out how to monetize them best. I'm sure some research would do the trick, but haven't had the time recently.

I am a fairly broke student, as I'm in the final year of law school, so I haven't had much opportunity for travel. Travel is obviously the best value, so I'll hold out. The SW companion passes seem like the next best move, but I'll probably wait on that too until I have the funds and time to fully take advantage of the full 2 years of travel.

I'm eyeing first class to Japan on United or one of the other partner airlines, so for economy you can get a lot of bang for your buck. I made the mistake one time of using the points through the Chase portal, when the best value is often going to be transferring to United or one of the others.

Transfer to Hyatt and redeem at their all inclusive resorts if you have a passport. 150k gets you 6 nights where I'm at at the Hyatt Zilaria in Cancun. The preferred card gets you your global entry back into the states and the CUN airport has two lounges you can use with the priority pass.

Personally I feel like I get a great value out of the points as these rooms range from $400-1500 (when we were looking over New Years) a night depending on when you book. All of them are facing the ocean as well which is the nuts. Food is fantastic and you can order as much as you want. The only need to worry about is a flight down, transfer, and tips (and even then the crowd right now is doing that minimally, the March crowd was doing it much more), which would fit into the budget of broke law student if you book cheap flights. I can post more pics or info if needed, but overall I can't say enough about this resort which is why I've been twice in 9 months.

Pro move would be to get two SW cards for the CP and then use those to book flights to Cancun following jzpiano's plan. Looks like it's ~15k pts RT from my home airport. You'd end up with plenty of leftover SW points for whatever you wanted. Throw in a cashback card or two of $200+ and your trip is 100% free! Gotta love churning!

I was going to recommend that, but he indicated he wanted to wait on the SW cards, but yeah if a free trip is what you want that's the best way to do it. However, if you do that add in a barclays arrival for travel credit to cover the airport taxes and the transfer you just have less than 100 worth of tips (you could also get by not tipping if you wanted as it isn't required and the service is the same, but they work incredibly hard here so I throw them a few bucks at each meal, drink order, etc.). If you want to save the chase points then you could do a hyatt card which is 40k points these days (not as good as the older 2 free nights anywhere, but almost as good). Free/cheap vacations are the nuts.

So I got three credit cards near the end of last year: Chase Sapphire Reserve, Chase Sapphire Preferred and Chase Ink Business Preferred. I also still have open a Bank of America card that's around 12 years old and a Wells Fargo card that is five years old. I don't keep any balance on any of these cards, and my credit rating is around 800. My girlfriend and I are hoping to use the Ultimate Rewards points we accumulate for a European vacation in July or August. When I got the cards, my thought was I would keep the Reserve another year for the 1.5x travel (I easily use the $300 travel credit on public transit in my city, so the annual fee is really $150), and I would downgrade the Sapphire Preferred to a Freedom Unlimited and the Ink Preferred to an Ink Business Cash rather than close them. Do you think this is the right way to go when I can still open two more Chase cards? I figure it's not good for credit to cancel these two cards, and the $150 cash back for opening the Freedom Unlimited isn't much anyway. The $300 for opening the Ink Business is just a little better. Probably downgrading and using my open Chase spots on other cards would be better for our travel plans.

That sounds correct from the little I know, hadn't considered the Ink Preferred downgrade myself yet. I think the 1.5x travel should be largely a moot point though, because you would ideally be transferring the points to United or another airline? Not sure if that bypasses the 1.5x or still includes it.

Check this flowchart from Reddit if you haven't: https://i.imgur.com/01vTsaV.png

Full thread here for occasional updates: https://www.reddit.com/r/churning/co...ion_flowchart/

It seems like your next shot "should" be SW Business, and if you get rejected because you already have a Business Ink, either the regular SW or United depending on if you want to try for the Companion Pass.

I'm in the same boat, having both the Reserved and the Preferred. As I'm sure you know, the Reserved costs $55 more in fees than the Preferred (waived for 1st year), after subtracting out the travel credit. You get an additional 1% on dining and travel with the Reserve, so I'd tally up how much you spend per year on that, since it subsidizes the difference in fees. And then determine what the various benefits are worth to you (e.g. airport lounges).

I was thinking about the 1.5x on travel through the Chase portal perk with the Reserved, but I guess it doesn't matter much if the optimal route is to transfer UR points to the individual company's loyalty program before use.

I think it's an easy case to keep the reserve over the preferred if you don't have priority pass coverage elsewhere. I use the 1.5cpp redemption quite often when I don't want to pay cash for specific flights and there's not a good way to redeem miles. Even if it's not a perfect redemption of 2cpp+, the flights earn redeemable and qualifying miles so I think it's an okay trade.

My Chase card lineup is: Reserve, Ink Cash, Freedom, Freedom Unlimited, Hyatt, IHG, Amazon - I think they're all fine. First one I'd get rid of is the Hyatt card if I had to.

I do need to get a better plan entering the new year on how best to prepare for using Ultimate Rewards points on a European vacation over the summer. My plan thus far was just to accumulate points for myself and the girlfriend. I had her get a Sapphire Reserve as well when the bonus was still 100k. We used 30k points or so to fly to Seattle on Alaska Air through the Chase portal, which I detailed here was an awful experience. We have about 370,000 points combined right now. I planned for the girlfriend to get a Preferred as well for another 50k, but now she can't, at least for the next year+.

I have yet to really explore the transferring of UR points and how to best use that aspect. If I'm going to be doing so to take this European vacation, I should probably get started now on picking the right airline/hotel cards to build a foundation to transfer those points. I don't really have active awards accounts with any airlines. Neither of us fly much. She might fly once a year for work, while I don't fly at all for work anymore. We fly an average of once a year on vacation. Is there one airline and one hotel card I should be choosing for a Eurotrip based on bonuses and putting our UR points to optimal use?

I’d look into United or Virgin. United has some pretty sweet business class deals if you’re into that. I got round trip business class to Thailand for 160k per person which I thought was a pretty sick deal considering economy was only half that and sticker on the flights was like $7k or something.

Does United or Virgin have a better CC bonus? A better rewards program?

I looked up Virgin and United CCs. Apparently Virgin is closing all CCs. Seems like the Alaska Visa Signature Card is the one to go for in correspondence with Virgin. Not sure if any of the United cards are worth getting. Should I be getting airline and hotel CCs to prepare for Eurotrip or is it not even necessary/beneficial?

Any known DPs on how to get a 2nd Barclay AA card bonus? I got the 40k back in January, now I want the 60k. I still have my old card opened.

From the DPs with Barclay that I've seen, they won't let you open a card that you already have. I've had luck in the past churning the Arrival+ by closing it, and then waiting until it disappears from my online account (takes like 3 months). Most people say that 6 months is what you need to wait. They like to see spend on their other cards if you have any. They also combine pulls if you apply for more than 1 card in a day (tough to get more than 1 auto-approval though).

grunching -

If I only have a Discover it card with a 728 FICO right now, (approximately) how much additional EV could I get per year if I decided to get more cards and get into the reward churning game - assuming I use credit on about $20k in purchases each year?

A lot of EV. There are a lot of good credit card signup bonuses out there, but it's impossible to know how many you would get approved for with such a short (assuming) credit history. Since you're new, you could get a few Chase cards worth at least $500 pretty easily. We're talking potential EV of a couple thousand dollars per year.

Is there any negative to having open credit cards that I do not actively use?

Not even sure having "emergency" credit cards at my disposal is good b/c even in an emergency, I would hate to rack up debt with that interest rate.

Very few of the major credit issuers are going to take adverse action because of too much available credit. That tends to be more in the game plan of credit unions.

One is, therefore, almost ALWAYS going to be well-served to have more than they need since it is better to have it and NOT need it than to NOT have it and need it (for whatever reason).

Just make sure you run some sort of purchase through every so often so that you don't get shut down for non-use (yes, some of them will do that). There is no rhyme or reason to who does or does not. I have a Saks store card that has never seen activity but is still open a decade later and has actually had a few increases through the years.

Didn't read the whole thread and my offer isn't new thread worthy but if anyone has any questions regarding directly how your credit score affects your mortgage options and what the best options might be given credit score, down-payment amount, and how your paid I'll be happy to answer.

I tried to do a loan for a kid that was "pro" he's from my home town and has several big scores but to make things easy/possible we just had his girls dad's co-sign. His credit was garbage and he didn't claim his winning appropriately.

1k free marriott points today (and every sunday) and 10% discount on target GCs

How?

Thank you for the reply.

Every Sunday before 8pm there is Marriott / NFL trivia on twitter. Answer correctly and you get 1k points.

For Target - they offer up to $300 at 90% each year. Today only. If you need more than $300 you need to go in store and see if they'll let you buy multiples.

https://www.target.com/c/target-gift...bspnbspnbspnbs