Episode 6: The Credit Card Series: Ep 1, Pt 2

We highly suggest using a friend/family/your favorite podcast (coughhh) for a referral link for two reasons. One, the terms of the referral link are often much better for you, the new client, than the one that is available on a credit issuer’s website. Think about it, if Chase doesn’t have to give everyone that applies for their card the best bang for their buck, why would they?! It is a business after all, but they’re smart enough to know that when a friend mentions a card, you’re more likely to sign up for it. Therefore they incentivize the person who has the card to tell others about it AND sweeten the deal for you, the referee (not the soccer kind), so there’s a higher chance you’ll sign up. We here at the Freeway Philharmonic want you to get the best deal possible, so if you find a better referral through a friend, please use that over ours! Reach out if you’d like to see the referral offers we have available!

“Wait a second, what is a sign up bonus?” Well first and foremost, sign up bonuses are the fastest way to earn points! Sign up bonuses are additional large sums of points you are awarded if you complete certain spend requirements in the time allotted when you sign up for a new card. For example, when I signed up for my Chase Sapphire Preferred, I had 3 months to spend $3,000 in order to get a 60,000 point bonus! Each issuer has different requirements, so look closely at your card and make sure you complete the spend in the time allotted!

Don’t return anything you purchased during a sign up bonus period because if you end up under the spend requirement they will claw back the points retroactively. This is a really ugly process, especially if you’ve already spent the points, so just save yourself the headache and spend over the amount required if you’re afraid you’ll return anything during that time frame.

All credit card issuers have a portal on their website that you can shop through to earn more points than usual on other stores. If you use it wisely, you can get way more than 1 pt / $1 using this portal instead of going directly to the site to get the item. This additional points earning is on top of the rewards you already get using your credit card, so if your card earns 2% cash back on every purchase and the portal advertises 2% cash back for the site you’re gonna buy something at, you’re earning 4% back on that purchase! WaoOoOOwWWwww.

This is Chase’s shopping portal, where you can click through their links to get more points!

Similar to the credit card shopping portal, there are other types of cash-back portals that can get you even more money back. If you like saving as much as we do, you should use an online cash-back portal to amplify your savings. There are several, but our favorite is Rakuten.com.* If you sign up today and spend $40, you get $40! What a deal!

This website is free to use, and you don’t have to do anything other than click through their link and buy your product as you normally would. Then you get whatever the advertised additional savings is, on top of the points you’re earning through your credit card spend! In that way it’s very much like the credit card portal. In the image below, you can see stores typically offer between 1-20% cash back, and that number goes up to 100%!!!!

It can be super helpful to combine your card’s coupon book (see below) with a Rakuten cash-back deal to do what they call “stacking” your savings.

*If you click the referral link above and sign up, we may get a reward too, which helps us run the show. So please and thank you! ❤

Rakuten allows you to save even more money by using their free portal to shop!

The REALLY fun thing about Rakuten is if you have an Amex card that earns flexible points (so not an airline/hotel card or cash back card), then you get 100 points PER DOLLAR YOU SPEND THROUGH RAKUTEN. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?!?!?! It’s insane. One of the best credit card points earners today. I have literally racked up tens of thousands of points on Rakuten on TOP of my card spend, (it stacks with the regular 2 points per $1 I’m getting or whatever). One big purchase can literally get you a free flight if you strategize it well. We’ll help you do that via tutorials in the near future!

Go to CashBackMonitor.com to see what the highest cash back deal you can get for a specific site is. Just be wary of spreading this sort of business across tons of cash back sites, because they have a minimum you need to earn before you get your cash/points back it may take a lot longer to see those payouts if you have low balances everywhere. Here’s a picture of the site:

We love this site. You can see which portals offer the highest cash back, including hotel/airline portals! More on that later in our credit card series.

As mentioned, a great way to strategize when you’re first starting out with credit cards is to get a fee-free credit card and a low-fee card that pair well together, AKA cover a lot of categories without a huge price tag.

A few cards we recommend pairing:
1. Chase Sapphire Preferred ($95/year) with the Chase Freedom Unlimited (fee-free)
2. Chase Sapphire Preferred ($95/year) with Bilt (fee-free)
3. Capital One Venture ($95) with the Capital One Saver ($0)

The cards above cover a lot of spend together. The Chase Sapphire Preferred and the Freedom Unlimited cover 3x Chase points on dining, restaurants and online grocers, 2x points on travel, 3x points on select streaming services, 5x points on Lyft through March 2025, 3% back on drugstore purchases, and 1.5% cash back on everything else. You double dip on 3% back at restaurants, so it’s not listed above, BUT the fun thing about two cards from the same issuer is that if one of them is a points earning card, you can convert your cash back to points. This is AMAZING because that 1.5% back on everything means you get 1.5 points per dollar on uncategorized spend instead of 1 point! It’s one of the best methods to get more bang for your buckaroo, brother.

An easy way to look at pairing cards from different issuers is what overlapping transfer partners they have that you may want to use. Bilt and Chase both have Hyatt as a transfer partner, so if you plan to stay at a Hyatt in the near future, you can transfer points from both cards to your Hyatt account.

If you have any questions on why our methods for pairing cards, consider scheduling a free consultation with us.

Make a checklist of all the benefits your card *comes with already* and regularly add deals to your credit card to use when you’re purchasing items. What we mean by this is, your card comes with certain benefits when you sign up. Some offer a hotel credit, others offer a bonus category each quarter, and you should make sure you use them all each year. Put a reminder in your calendar towards the end of your card year anniversary (or December, whatever the terms are for your “annual” benefits) so you don’t forget to use the benefit! This helps offset the annual fee, so it’s really useful to get this money back for yourself.

Another way to offset the annual fee is by adding deals to your credit card if they offer them. See a screenshot of what we mean below:

You have to click “Add to card” or the little (+) to actually add the offer to your card!

These deals usually appear under your credit card Offers page, sort of like a coupon book. Again, all of the store deals have a (+) or “Add to card” button that you need to click to add them to your card. Just because they’re listed doesn’t mean you automatically have them loaded. Some of the deals above are for 20% cash back, $20 cash back, etc. You can see the insane amount of savings you can accrue by using this to amplify your spend. Always check these offers before purchasing something! I mean ALWAYS!!!!!!!

The highest redemption value will almost always be earned by transferring your points out of the credit card portal and into a transfer partner’s program. This is because the value of your points within the credit card ecosystem is predetermined by the credit card company, and that value will never change within their portal. Chases values their points at 1-1.5 cents/pt depending on the card you have when you use the portal to book travel. Because of this, you will see major inflation on the redemptions within their portal when compared to booking directly with the airline, so you use up more points or miles than you would by simply transferring them to the program in question. The benefit of flexible points is that depending on how you use them, they will usually earn much more than that one cent per point outside the portal!

Here you can see a $238 RT flight would be ~24K Amex points!!!! Way too many. Here is what it is on Delta directly:

It’s only 17K points plus $11.20. A savings of 6758 points!!!!! Wooooo. All because you were smart enough to transfer your points to the airline in question instead of booking through the Amex portal. You’re a genius!

What is the credit card rewards portal?

It is different than the credit card shopping portal. It’s where the magic happens, baby.

This is the area where you can transfer your points out of the credit card portal and into the program you want to book travel with (see the option in red above). We’re going to show some tutorials of this on our Youtube in the near future to help you do this.

This is also where you book travel using the credit card’s portal (if you must), which acts like an OTA (online travel agency) system. It’s the option in red below. It works a lot like Priceline or Expedia where many different results will populate, some of which are not direct transfer partners of your credit card.

When you must use the portal to book travel

Sometimes you can’t transfer points to the program you need and you have to use the portal to book your travel. Or you can’t use points at all and have to pay cash for something. When using the portal is unavoidable, it can be to your advantage if your card has an annual credit for stays booked in their portal.

Another reason it might be worthwhile is because when you use your card’s portal to pay cash, you often get a really high point return for your purchase. Within Chase’s portal, spending on travel gets you 5X points per dollar, so don’t fret too much if you need to stay at Clint Clodhopper’s Clubhouse in Clarence, Colorado and can’t find an outside redemption, at least you’ll get 5X points by booking through the portal.

WARNING: MATH AHEAD

You’ll need to do the math to figure out when it’s the best option to book outside the portal versus book within the portal, and also whether it’s better to earn miles or spend miles. If you go to United’s site and see a flight for $239 or 30,000 miles, if you divide 239 by 30,000 you see your mile value would be .008 cents/mile! In this case, it’s definitely better to pay cash directly with United because their miles are worth a LOT more than that even in the credit card portal. You are choosing to spend cash in order to get airline rewards miles rather than spend points for a bad redemption value.

If you pay cash through United as a general member of their program (AKA you don’t have status with the airline) you’ll earn 5 miles per dollar pre-tax. This flight is $194 PRE-TAX. That amounts to 970 miles (194*5).

In the Chase portal, the flight costs the same amount in cash, $239. In the portal, because you’re getting 1.25¢/pt, that same flight would be 19,120 points (239/1.25¢/pt) instead of the 30K on United’s site (.008¢/pt). In that case, it’s obviously better to spend the points via the Chase portal.

Your other option is to spend that $239 cash in the Chase portal and earn 5pt/$1 (239*5), thus getting you 1195 points towards a future redemption. You need to essentially decide if you’d rather have United miles or Chase points, or burn United miles or Chase points. In this case, it may be more useful for you to book in the portal if you’d rather have flexibility than United status. If you care about earning miles in United’s program for the chance to get to Silver Status, then perhaps you pay cash directly via United so the spend counts towards earning more miles for free future flights and towards your status.

As we mentioned, you can’t get rewards points/miles for BOTH programs, so you have to decide which you want.

Worst ways to redeem points

The WORST way is to redeem your points for a credit card payment. This is because the redemption value blows compared to what you could get using it for a trip you have to take. Please do not do this unless you’re going to have a late payment, and if that’s the case you should really consider putting that card in a drawer until you know you can pay it off in full every month.

The SECOND WORST way is to get a gift card through your credit card. Again, this is a horrible redemption value compared to what you can get by learning to strategize your redemptions from our podcast!

Just a disclaimer that I did both of these when I was first starting out waaaay back in the day so don’t beat yourself up if this has happened to you. It’s the only way to learn! And you can do more of that here at the Freeway Philharmonic! 😀

Good no-fee credit cards

The best no-fee credit cards are the ones that appeal to you and your lifestyle! Here are some we like:

If you’re a gas-guzzler:
1. Wells Fargo Autograph Card (3% travel, dining, gas stations, transit, streaming, phone plans; 1% other)
2. Chase Freedom Flex (5% rotating categories each quarter up to $1500, including gas!)
3. American Express Blue Cash Everyday Card (3% supermarkets, 3% gas, 3% online retail; 1% other)

If you’re always flying/hotelling for auditions:
1. Wells Fargo Autograph Card (3% travel, dining, gas stations, transit, streaming, phone plans; 1% other)

If you’re a food dude with a ‘tude:
1. American Express Blue Cash Everyday Card (3% supermarkets, 3% gas, 3% online retail; 1% other)
2. Chase Freedom Unlimited (3% dining, drugstores; 1.5% other)
3. Chase Freedom Flex (5% rotating categories each quarter up to $1500, 3% dining/drugstores!)

If you’re a renter:
1. The Bilt Mastercard (Only card you can use for rent; 3x dining, 2x travel, 1x other)

If you have spend that doesn’t fit into any of these categories:
1. Capital One Saver Cash Rewards (3% back on dining, grocery, entertainment, some streaming)
2. Chase Freedom Unlimited (1.5% back on everything)

Notice we didn’t recommend hotel or airline-specific cards because we’re covering that in our next Credit Card Series episode!

Good low-fee credit cards

The best low-fee credit cards are the ones that appeal to you and your lifestyle! Here are some we like:

If you’re a gas-guzzler:
1. Costco ($65/130 a year) Listen to Episode 2 where we discus the benefits of a Costco membership!
2. American Express Blue Cash Preferred ($95/yr) (3% gas, 3% on transit (including taxis/rideshare, parking, tolls, trains, buses and more), 6% groceries and select streaming, 1% other)

If you’re always flying/hotelling for auditions:
1. Chase Sapphire Preferred ($95/yr) (3x on dining, select streaming services and online groceries)
2. Capital One Venture ($95/yr) (2X on everything)

If you’re a food dude with a ‘tude:
1. Chase Sapphire Preferred ($95/yr) (3x on dining and online groceries)

Word of advice

Don’t go out and get 3 credit cards after this.

First off, you really should take a few hours to go over your options before getting any credit card. Second, you may not get approved for them all because that’s a lot of activity. Third, or C for alphabet enthusiasts, your credit score will take a temporary hit with all these hard inquiries, so your credit may dip, making you ineligible for a new credit card immediately. Fourthly, you don’t need three credit cards if you had zero a minute ago. Pick the best card for covering your biggest expenses and see how you do with that. Don’t forget we have a free, zero-pressure, credit card consultation you can book here.