Frequent Miler on the Air - 120K Chase points vs 160K Amex points. Which is better? | Ep148 | 4-30-22

Episode Date: April 30, 2022

Would you rather earn 120K Chase Ultimate Rewards points or 160K Amex Membership Rewards points? It turns out that the answer may not be as simple as you think. 00:48 Giant Mailbag: Newcomer to the show books round the world with ANA. 2:45 What crazy thing . . . did Nick do this week? https://frequentmiler.com/cashing-out-why-nick-is-dumping-a-chunk-of-points-today/ 10:38 Mattress Running the Numbers: Nordic Choice 2-month pass https://frequentmiler.com/nordic-choice-hotels-offering-all-you-can-stay-deal-this-summer/ 18:32 Main Event: 120K Chase points vs 160K Amex points. Which is better? 53:29 Host Roast 54:44 Question of the Week: Is it worth playing the AA Loyalty Game to move on from Gold to Platinum? Music credit: Annie Yoder

let's get into the giant mailbag what crazy thing did city this week it's time for mattress running the numbers ready for the main event the main event frequent miler on the air starts now today's main event 120 000 chase points verse 160 000x points, which is better. It sounds kind of obvious if you just look at the big numbers, right? Maybe it's not. It's not as obvious as it sounds. And we'll talk about why this question came up and we'll talk about the answer. We'll decide an answer. It may not be the same answer, but we'll decide an answer. Right. We probably won't have the same answer. We'll see. the same answer, but we'll decide an answer. Right. We probably won't have the same answer. We'll see. Okay. First, of course, we have the giant mailbag and today's

giant mail comes from John RCLT via Apple podcast reviews. So, you know, I haven't seen this one because I'm not an Apple person. So I have no idea what this is about. Right. We know Nick has not seen this one. He always likes these from the. So I have no idea what this is about. Right. We know Nick has not seen this one. He always likes these from the Apple podcast reviews. John says new to the show, new to your show and really like the information you guys provide. Your recent Amex podcast was very helpful. I just moved my Amex points to ANA to book two business class tickets on their around the world program.

One bit of information I learned, if you book with points through ANA, you do not have to have minimum amount of stopovers. He says two stopovers are required if you are paying cash. Didn't know that about paying cash. I've never looked at paying cash at all for around the world, but it's great. It's great to hear someone not just liking the show, but actually getting this like tangible real world benefit out of something that they learned on the show. Yeah, that's fantastic. And that's one of the best sweet spots that there

absolutely, that there is. I mean, it's, it's an incredible sweet spot if you're able to leverage it. So I'm jealous, very jealous that you're using it. I can't wait to someday put that one to good use. Yeah, yeah. And just to summarize really quickly. So ANA allows you to book around the world business class for as low as about 115,000 points. And those points can be transferred from Amex membership rewards one-to-one. So that's just an unbelievable deal. More likely you're going to be paying more like 145,000 depending on your route, but it's still phenomenal. If it's still, you stop in like eight cities.

This is around the world business class on Star Alliance carriers, not just on ANA. So yeah, it's just incredible. It gives you like 26 or 27 different airlines you can fly. I mean, yeah, that's a great deal. Right. right uh moving on so let's get into what crazy thing did nick do this week me i didn't do anything crazy what'd you do nick everybody else is crazy i'm the same one well i i i wrote a post this week about cashing in membership rewards points at 1.1 cent apiece, redeeming them for a deposit into our Schwab brokerage account. And the reason for doing that was twofold.

Number one, because we've got a surplus of Amex points. Amex keeps throwing more points at us. Lots and lots of opportunities to earn points over these last couple of years. And number two, there was a short-term opportunity. Well, I guess it's not necessarily short-term. The reason I did it this week was because I-bonds have a good interest rate right now. If you're not familiar with Series I bonds, these are US Treasury savings bonds. And so the interesting thing about these bonds is they have a sort of variable composite rate that changes every six months. And so until the end of April, you could have bought bonds and locked in a rate where for the first six months you earn 7.12% interest.

And then starting in May here, the interest rate is going up to 9.62% interest. So that'll be for the next six months. You have to leave the money in for at least a year. So that'll be for the next six months. You have to leave the money in for at least a year. So there's some more detail about it. It's all in the post. But the bottom line is the opportunity to lock in 7.12% APY for the first six months and 9.62% interest for the second six months for a year. There's a penalty of three months when you cash in. But at the end of the day, I figured that I could cash out. And I used a number just for the sake of illustrating it for the post. I didn't necessarily, I didn't cash out this number of points, but the number of points

I used in the post was 909,000 points. If you were to cash those out, you'd have $10,000 basically. And if you put that into I-bonds for just a year and then withdrew the money after a year and lost the penalty three months, then you'd have around $650 in interest that you would earn. And so I looked at that and I said, well, these points are going to sit in my Amex membership rewards account unused for the next year. I should cash them out and get a great return. I mean, it's seven, eight, 9% guaranteed. I mean, like as guaranteed as you can be, these are US savings bonds. That seems like a great deal. What's crazy about that, Greg? So you said in that same post that points are worth or a reasonable redemption value for the points are, what, 1.55 cents each, something like that.

Right. And yet you cash them out for 1.1 cent each. I mean, what is the deal with that? That just seems so insane. You should be able to get better than our reasonable redemption value with our points. So what are you thinking? It's true. I should be able to someday, eventually, potentially, depending on what happens in the future. And the fact is I've got a lot of points right now. I've got a lot of

Amex points. I've got some Chase points. I've got a lot of American Airlines miles from the Simply Miles Bonanza that we wrote about in December, where they had the 240X for donations to Conservation International. I've got points in some different programs now from transfers and canceled bookings and whatnot, like most of the rest of us. So I've got enough points to cover my travel for a while. So yes, those points could potentially be redeemed for 1.55 cents or more, but I have to actually redeem them to get that much value. And I just don't need to redeem all of my points anytime soon. I'm not going to, I'm not going to travel enough unless

Greg ups my vacation to like six months out of the year. You know, then I, I'm not going to travel enough to use all those points. So they're going to sit there doing nothing in my Amex membership rewards account. And you know, the point I made actually in response to a comment or who mentioned this, as I said, well, if you look at it from a different perspective and you say, okay, well, I could cash those out and make $650 that's basically more or less guaranteed, or leave them in Amex Membership Rewards and I don't get any money. So basically, if I keep them in Membership Rewards, I'm paying a fee of 650 bucks to keep that money there over the next year. And if I would keep the bonds longer than that, then that goes up because I would lose less

in the penalty when I eventually withdraw. So it costs even more if I can afford to keep the money in the bonds and want to keep it there because the interest rate stays up for a while, then the cost only increases of keeping those unused points and membership rewards points. So, I mean, would you pay a $650 a year fee to have 900,000 points to keep, to keep almost a million membership rewards points? Yeah. I mean, normally you wouldn't, but if you knew, oh, you're, you are going to use those a year or two later towards, you know, 10 first-class international flights that are worth, you know, probably combined $100,000. And that would seem like a pretty small amount to pay. And especially when you're talking about giving up like the opportunity value of moving it, it seems less than actually paying it out of pocket, even though I get your point.

Yeah. Yeah. No, it's true. It's given us so many opportunities to earn more, you know? No, exactly. I think that this really illustrates why understanding what points are worth is so darn complicated. You know, we've talked before about how there's different ways to look at this. One is that once you have over a certain number of points, the extra points in that program become worth less and less because if you don't have a near-term need for those points, they might never get used, especially if you're still earning lots of points in that program, as we both are with membership rewards. And hopefully most of our listeners are as well. Then the downside of cashing out some, especially if you've left enough to handle any near-term needs is almost nothing. And so the upside is it's all upside really to cash it out. I think

in that example, I think so too. I mean, it's hard to do initially, right? It's hard to wrap your mind around taking the last buy. I mean, it, it hurt last year when I cashed out, I cashed out most of our membership rewards points last year before it changed to Schwab used to offer more. And I cashed out most of them and we've got well over a million again now, like eight or nine months later, if it's even that long, it's been so, uh, so, and we just keep earning more. My wife recently opened the business platinum. And once she finishes the spend on that, that'll be 175,000 points total back, you know, back in the account, so to speak. And they keep sending these offers for a hundred thousand points of the business gold. I mean,

we could make those points back in the next six months conceivably. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it just occurred to me, you said you wouldn't pay about $700 to keep almost a million membership rewards points in your account, but you would pay $700 to get 150 or 160,000 MX points in the first place, which is what the annual fee costs to sign up for the card, but you get that huge signup bonus. So it's kind of an interesting coincidence. It is. It is. I thought the same thing. I was like, well, I figured somebody was going to say, well, I pay $700 a year to keep the platinum card to keep my points alive. But of course, you don't need to keep the platinum card in order to keep the points live and transferable. You could just have a no annual fee card. So, but yeah, you're right.

You're right. If you keep the card alive, it's if you keep paying manual fee, it's for other reasons, not the not to keep your points alive. That would be silly. Right. Right. All right. So that's, that's the craziness. Let's talk mattress running the numbers. We've got a good one this week. We do. Although it's not really about mattress running at all. That's true. What we're talking about this week is a really interesting hotel deal, right? Yeah, that's a great way to say it. So Nordic Choice Hotels are offering two different packages where you can, for €3,000 euros buy unlimited number of stays this summer

between June 24th and August 21st at Nordic Choice Hotels. There are some restrictions, like for example, at a hotel, you can stay at most five nights in a row so this is really for someone who wants to be hopping around to lots of different places in the nordic countries and um at most 15 nights in a single hotel so you can say five nights go somewhere else come back to that hotel later um but only uh for a total of 15 nights. If you max out, if you stay the entire summer at Nordic Choice Hotels, then it's going to cost you about 55 US dollars per night is how it works out. If you don't really, I don't know how many people would realistically do that. If it's more like 30 days that you use the, this deal,

then that comes to a hundred euros per night, which is about $105 US per night, which is still, you know, for a hotel stays at many hotels. That's a great deal. Certainly at many hotels in Scandinavia, let's be clear. That's a great. Yeah. And then the other offer. So that's the big package offer for the whole summer. The other offer is seven nights for 595 euros. And that works out in US dollars about $85 per night. So that one, a lot easier to max that out, obviously, and only $85 per night on average. So that's pretty compelling. Both these deals advertise as including breakfast, but as far as we know, Nick and I talked about this before the show, we think most Nordic hotels, if not all of them, offer free breakfast as part of the regular rate.

So that doesn't seem like it's really part of the deal, but that's how it's advertised. And it's a reason to choose Nordic choice hotels one way or another, because if you've ever paid for a meal in Scandinavia, you know that every free meal you can get is a good meal. So that's, you know, it's an expensive place to eat and sleep and everything else. So these deals, while you might be like, well, $89 a night for like a clarion or a comfort in like that doesn't necessarily scream. This is worth talking about for an entire segment. I'm right. I'm on the air, but, but it is look at the prices in Scandinavia. They're going to be like, oh yeah, 89 bucks a night. That's a deal. So I have to tell you though, so before the show, I took a look at Gothenburg, which has a lot of

Nordic choice hotels, which is why I picked that city and i picked seven night stays various seven night stays in july and august to look for what are the prices what's the availability first thing i found uh until is that all of the um hotels that i want to stay at were, were booked up during the periods I looked at. I could not find a seven night stay, um, at, at the main ones that I was interested in. Uh, so, so in the Nordic choice website, you know, it, it's, it sorts, I guess, by the ones closest to your destination that, that you're looking at. And those were all like sold out. And then there were some available below that, um, that are nearby and uh and of those the prices range from about 120 a night to yes there were some that were a little over 200 a night uh once you convert to us dollars but

my point is uh maybe it's not a deal you better do your homework. I haven't been to Sweden, truth be told. So maybe the prices there are more reasonable than what I have become familiar with, thanks to Oslo and Norway. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. So anyway, point is, look for the cash prices and availability before you book this package. Good point. And if it's saving you a lot, then great. Jump on it. It has a pretty good policy about when you can cancel a particular stay and book something

else and everything. So it's pretty flexible once you have it. Does it have blackout dates? I don't think it does. It has a few blackout properties though. So there are a few including like, I remember I have a post about Nordic choice hotels and booking them with choice privilege points, which is different. And I remember The Thief in Oslo was one of the hotels that I highlighted in there. It looks really cool. That's one of the blackout properties. You're not allowed to book at that property. So also take a look at those, of course, if you're interested in one of those, then this is not a good deal. Won't work for that. Yeah. All right. So interesting. I mean, two months in Scandinavia for what is it?

Like basically a little over 3000 bucks or something that it comes out to. Right. So exchange rate is, is not far from one to one. Yeah. Yeah. Which I mean, I,

I hadn't even realized that until yesterday that the exchange rate was so good with euros right now. So, uh, so that's, uh, it seems like a very solid deal if you're interested in spending a couple of months there and you want to just kind of have it all set and done. I think it's kind of neat

because deals like this often encourage me to seek out places that I wouldn't have found otherwise, because I could go to Oslo anytime, so to speak, or I go to Stockholm whenever. But if I'm looking for opportunities for, you know, where am I going to use these nights that I've already paid for and I can pick a place and I'm going to look for those small little towns in the middle of nowhere, far up in the North of Norway or whatever, where there's a choice privileges property that I can check out. So I think this kind of deal is fun from that perspective that it gets you off the beaten path a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. I just, I do want to correct. Nordic choice is not choice privileges. Those are different things. So just, I know it's very

confusing. They're different things. Even though you could use choice privileges points to book Nordic choice, you can't do the opposite. You will earn Nordic choice points on these days. Those cannot be used to book choice hotels worldwide. They can only be used to book as far as I know, Nordic choice properties. Yeah. Very good. The last point we should make for those few people who aren't familiar is that Nordic choice properties, also some of them, the Clarion Collection properties offer not only free breakfast, but also free dinner. So if you're able to book in at Clarion Collection Properties, you get a free evening meal also, which again, my experience is dining out in Norway anyway, have all been, wow, it's expensive. So getting a free dinner

so you could enjoy lunch out or maybe a night or two of free dinner and then splurge on something nice. I think that could work out to be a good deal if you're going to spend a month or more in Scandinavia. So, all right. Very interesting. Well, that, my friends, brings us, I think, to the main event. The main event, 120K chase points versus 160K, 160,000 Amex points. So that's the question in our private team Slack group, Tim asked this

question of, should his wife go for the Amex business platinum card, the 160K offer? It's like you get 150,000 and then you could get 10,000 more by adding an employee and spending a certain amount on each of the cards. So the 160K with Amex Platinum, or does he refer his wife to the Chase Inc. Business Preferred card and she would get 100,000 points from the spend on that signup offer and he would get 20,000 points for the referral. So a total of 120,000 points and the, you know, so 120 K versus 160 K. And we, it, the answer was not obvious to us. No. And I think the, the, the interesting thing here, the thing that makes us even more or adds a little bit of intrigue is that the spending requirements match up.

You have to spend $15,000 on either one of them. So it's the same exact spending requirement. And you do have that for the $160,000, you have an authorized user, but their $1,000 spend could be part of the $15,000 that they need to do. So $15,000 spend either way, which do you want to earn? And so, I mean, of course, I looked at it and I said, why not both Tim? But I think the idea of figuring out which one to go for first or which one might be more valuable is a really interesting question. So, I mean, what are the arguments for and against? What should we be looking at here and trying to determine the answer? Preston Pyshko Yeah. And let me first say that this is not just a question for people who can sign up for business cards because even though it's framed that way, there are similar situations frequently on the personal card side. So right now, if you're looking at picking up points on the personal side, you could get 80,000 Sapphire preferred points or 90,000 Amex points with the

Amex gold card. So you have the Sapphire preferred 80K offer, the Amex gold card, 90K offer, 90K offer also comes with $250 back in restaurant rebate sort of. So, you know, it's a similar question. So my point being that like, you know, don't tune out if you're not into signing up for business cards, because I think this is a relevant question to a lot of people for a lot of situations. For sure. For sure. And there'll be other situations like it moving into the future. So, and if you want to compare the Sapphire reserve, for instance, you can compare that against the platinum card and be in the same kind of situation. So I totally agree with you that this is applicable to a lot of people. So where do you start figuring it out? Yeah. So, you know, part of the, part of the question has to be around around your Chase 524 strategy.

So- Not just status, but your strategy. Your strategy. So 524 is Chase's rule saying that if you have signed up for five cards from any bank in the past 24 months, we're not gonna approve you for a new card. And that applies to all the new accounts that show up on your credit report.

The business cards don't show up on your credit report, including Chase cards. So while Chase will stop you from getting a Chase business card, if you're over 524, when you get one, it's not going to add to your 524 count. So it won't make it harder to get a new one. And same thing, the Amex business card isn't going to, 524 doesn't matter to it in any which way because Amex doesn't care about your 524 status. And of course, it's not going to add to your 524 count because it's a business card. It's not going to show up as a new account on your credit report. So the reason I'm bringing up the 524 thing now that I've explained it is that at some point Tim's wife or whoever's considering

this is going to go over 524 and not be eligible for more chase cards. And so, um, if you're considering, um, anything, if you're considering signing up for some personal cards of any type in the near future, then go for the Chase Inc. card now while you can before you go over 524. And it sort of doesn't matter what you do about the business platinum as well. Maybe you sign up for that as well if you can manage to do twice as much spend. But point is, if you think you're going to be going over 524 at some point, make sure you grab as many chase business cards

as you can before then. It's not going to be an option once you go over or you'll have to wait till you drop under again. Yeah, that's a great point because, you know, if you're at four 24, then I think probably it would make a little bit more sense to go after the ink card because you don't know when there's going to be some crazy offer tomorrow, but there's going to be a mistake in the, you know, Hilton Aspire card comes with no annual fee for the first year. All of a sudden it's only out for a couple of hours and you want to jump on

it. You don't want to be in the situation where that's going to prevent you from getting the, the ink card down the road. So if you're 424 and you're the type of person who's going to move and strike when the iron is hot, then I think I would probably lean towards opening the ink business preferred sooner rather than later. But you know, if you're 224 or 324, you get a little bit of space, a little bit of breathing room, then presumably you couldn't do either card. So now we're back to square one. Right. Right. So let's just talk about then which points are more valuable, which would you rather have? So is it obvious? I mean, it seems obvious to me, but here's the thing. If I tell you that Amex points are more valuable, you're going to say, yeah, but Nick, you just cashed out points

at 1.1 cent each. What are you thinking? They're clearly not more valuable than Chase points to you. But I think it depends on your use, right? And it depends on your use case as to which ones are more valuable. In general, I find Amex membership rewards points to be more valuable for international premium cabin travel. If you want to fly in business class or first class, you got a lot of options to do it with membership rewards points. And that tends to be what excites me the most about the game is redeeming for those types of things. So I would be more interested in Amex membership rewards points, all other things equal.

What about you? Yeah. So, you know, first, I mean, this does tie back. We can't talk about this without tying back to our earlier conversation about how if you already have a lot of points or if you're earning a lot of points other ways, that the additional points become less valuable. So the point is if Tim's wife or Tim and his wife are already sitting on a million membership rewards, but have like zero chase points, then the equation is completely different than if it's the other way around or if both are zero. But let's just talk about the value of points as if you didn't have any to begin with. So the question is just starting from zero, getting either 120,000 or 160,000, which are more valuable. Yeah, no question in my mind at all for international premium cabin awards,

Amex points are more valuable. For flight awards in general, I'd say, since we're talking about more Amex points, I think you're safe to say, if you're going to be using it to redeem for flight awards, you're probably going to do considerably better with more Amex points and less Chase points, especially because Amex offers transfer bonuses frequently. Chase does occasionally. And so you're much more likely to get even better than one-to-one with Amex when you transfer to an airline partner and book an award flight. Now, the story changes when we talk about hotels. It does. It does. It changes very

significantly because Amex does not have any really good hotel partners or booking situations. There's really like no way to get consistently good value out of your MX points for hotels. Right. Right. So, you know, they transfer one-to-one to Marriott, one-to-one to Choice, both of which are worth less than a penny each in general, on average, not, you know, you can do better on either of them, but, but, um, you know, during sales, you can buy each of those points for less than a penny each. So it would be like a shame to transfer one to one to those. You could transfer one to two to Hilton, but we found that on average, Hilton points are worth about 0.4 of a cent each.

So you're talking about getting about on average about 0.8 cents value from that transfer. Now, Amex does frequently do transfer bonuses to Hilton. So you might be looking at getting over a penny per point value when the transfer bonus is included, even if you're only getting average value from your points. So there is some value to be had there. Not a huge win though. Chase though, so we've talked about a billion times, they transfer one-to-one to Hyatt and Hyatt points we found on average being worth about 1.6 cents per point,

but often seeing far better than that. You can get great value transferring to Hyatt. Chase will also let you transfer one-to-one to Marriott or IHG. I wouldn't do either of those. You're not going to see good value in those compared to what Chase points are otherwise worth. So if you're interested in Hyatt bookings, I would totally take 120K Chase points over

160K Amex. And I think it's worth mentioning that Hyatt points, when we talk about them being valuable, it's not only when you're staying at like the Park Hyatt Vienna or, you know, whatever the hot new Park Hyatt Maldives or the Lila there, the Ventana, like you can get amazing value in those types of situations if you're going to seek those things out, but you can get very, very good value at the Hyatt place along the side of the highway also. So it ranges the gamut there. And what I really like about Hyatt right now, we've mentioned it a number of times in recent episodes, is that it's very easy to book suites using your points. So if you value a suite rather than having to hope and negotiate and social engineer at the desk, you just book it with a few more points and assuming it's valuable. So that to me makes the points even a little bit

better in that regard. So if Hyatt fits your needs, for sure, I think that the 120,000 or rather chase points could certainly be worthwhile because there aren't a lot of other great ways to get good value for hotels using your points in general. Right, right, right. So now what if you want to pay for travel with your points? So we're not talking about transferring to loyalty partners, but actually just using the bank's travel portals to book travel and pay with points. Which is better then? I mean, I know that the academic answer here is Chase because Chase gives you opportunities to get more than one cent per point in value. And with that Chase Inc. Business Preferred card, you'll get 1.25 cents per point in value towards paid travel.

Although I've always got to put the asterisk there because you get that much against whatever price Chase shows you, which for flights is going to be probably the same price you're seeing in other places, especially if you have access to like AAA rate or some sort of corporate rate, et cetera, where you could book directly and pay less than whatever Chase's price is. Cancellation policies may not line up. If you mostly book boutique hotels or B&Bs, then Chase might work out to really be 1.25 cents per point for you. But otherwise, I'm a little, I don't know, less enthused about using Chase Points to pay for travel, though not less enthused than I am about using membership rewards points to pay for travel. Well, with one big exception, right? So the credit card that Tim's wife was thinking of getting is the business platinum card, which comes with this ability to get a rebate when you use points against flights booked on your preferred airline. So that would be even an economy. You get this rebate. What is that? 30%, 35, 35% rebate.

Sorry. Or on any airline you book through them, if you book a premium cabin, you get that 35% rebate, which works out to getting a little over 1.5 cents per point value. So obviously if you're going to use your business platinum points for flights and it fits within those parameters, then you're much better off with the Amex offer than with the Chase offer. Because Chase, in order to get 1.5, you'd have to transfer your points to the Sapphire Reserve card and book that way, but you'd still have fewer total points to work with, 120K instead of 160K. So that's the better deal. Amex, when booking travel otherwise, sometimes gives you one cent per point value, sometimes gives you worse than one cent per point value.

More often than sometimes gives you worse. Yeah. It seems. But let me now look at, so the business preferred has the advantage of giving 1.25 for any kind of travel you book through the portal. 1.25 cents value. The Chase card does. So if you got 120,000 point signup offer and you spent all of it on travel in that way, that's $1,600 in travel. I'm sorry, that's $1,500 in travel. 120K spent at 1.25 cents per point value, $1,500 in travel. If though you use your Amex points, and I'm not

saying you should do this, but if you use your Amex points to book travel at 1 cent per point, that's $1,600 value because you had 160,000 points. So that 1.25 advantage over Amex does not wipe out the difference in those signup bonuses. Yeah. Yeah. That's really interesting because even if you're accepting suboptimal value, even worse than my Schwab cash out at just one cent per point, you're still doing better because of the additional points. That's a very interesting metric there. Now, you may consider, well, okay, how many points am I going to earn on the spend for the welcome bonus? Because with the Inc. Business Preferred, you may be more likely to spend at

least some of it in 3X categories, depending on the type of spend you do. Whereas on the business platinum, you're pretty unlikely to earn anything more than maybe one and a half points per dollar if your charges are over $5,000. So I think it depends on what kind of spend you're going to do, because you may end up with enough points to close a lot of that gap, right? Right. And conversely, we have to know that Tim has a Sapphire Reserve card, which means that his wife could transfer her ink chase points to his Sapphire Reserve card, and then he could book travel at 1.5 cents value. And then suddenly the 120K points is worth more than the 160K points for that use. So it all depends on what kind of tools you have in

your belt. You know, I think that this though, to me, this just enhances the value of membership rewards points. If your main goal is premium cabin international travel, because you have access to a better group of partners than Chase for premium cabin international travel. So you got a more airline partners and be in general, better airline partners than Chase has. So you've got a lot of sweet spots that you can take advantage of, but then even when there is not award availability, you can get even a little bit better than one and a half cents per point towards paid business or premium or first-class flights. And the nice thing is I found lots of situations lately where I've looked at it and said, well, wow, actually, after you, you know, factor that in, you get that rebate back,

you're paying as many or maybe even fewer points than you would transfer to book an award, and then you're not bound by award availability. So, you know, if you're going to book premium cabin flights anyway, that could work out to be, yeah, it actually, it actually gets a little better than that. And, and keep in mind, we are talking specifically about the business platinum card now. This is not a feature on other Amex cards, but business platinum has that rebate when you use points. It also has a, a international airfare discount that shows up on some flights, not all of them, but frequently when looking at paying for flights through the portal, through the Amex travel portal,

as long as I'm logged in, I'll see that there's actually a discount. And so you could use your points to pay. It'd be fewer points from the outset because of that discount. And so you could use your points to pay. It'd be fewer points from the outset because of that discount. And then you get the rebate. And so if you're comparing to the price before the discount, you're actually getting more than that 1.55 cents per point value, which is pretty terrific at times. That is a great point because I've actually just been running into that lately in a number of situations where I'm looking for a flight and a couple of specific routes. And I found some of those insider affairs and said, wow, that's a few hundred dollars for my family. Anyway, a few hundred dollars less than what it would cost me otherwise. So that is a nice benefit

to have there too. So I feel like that just strengthens Amex's position because it gives you more versatility. You've got all of these airline transfer partners, and then you've also got the ability to get good value towards premium cabin travel when you're on a paid ticket. And then you also get these insider fares that can make it an even better deal. So I think that, again, if your goal is premium cabin international travel, Amex is a pretty clear winner. If your goal is hotel points or using your points for paid travel outside of that premium cabin international bubble, if you're mostly going to stay domestic or mostly going to stay in economy, et cetera, then I think Chase could be better if you've also got the Sapphire Reserve or if you're going to spend a lot of money in the 3X category.

There's still a few ifs there, but it could be better. I don't think we have to hedge it if we just say, if what you want is to use it for Hyatt. Hyatt, yeah. Then there's no hedging. Chase is better. Well, all right. You know what?

Let's back up the truck on that and say, wait a second. Hold on. Is that true? So I haven't done the math on this. It just popped into my mind. So we've done a bunch of if this, then that type of situations. So let's say that you get this business platinum, and let's say that Tim's wife also has the Schwab platinum card. So she could actually cash that 160,000 points out at 1.1 cent a point. So that's what? $1,760. So how much Hyatt travel could she book with that?

That's got to be pretty darn close to our reasonable redemption value of those Chase points, right? Well, so, I mean, I don't think it's farfetched at all to say that she could easily get two cents per point value by cherry picking her awards. So that'd be $2,400 in Hyatt Chase, I believe, if I did my math correct. Yes, yes. $2,400 in high end sales, I believe, if I did my math correct. Yes. Yes. If you're going to use it better than our reasonable redemption value, then absolutely.

But at our reasonable redemption value, it's close. It's close. It's close with the shop. I mean, you'd be a little bit ahead because I think our reasonable redemption value for high end points is like 1.6, right? So 120K has got to be more than $1,800. Didn't do the math right off the top of my head, but it's not that far off anyway. So, so, and then, you know, we haven't, okay, you know what? I got other points, but let's, let's, let's, let's close that one up.

So what do you have next for us, Greg? What's the next comparison point? Um, that that's it for you. Okay. So what about, So what about, so I have a couple different things in mind here. So first thing, this might be kind of easy, but what about the ability to earn some referral points? We know that obviously we have a very privileged position in the sense that we're bloggers and we write about this stuff and we can pick up referrals very easily.

But the fact of the matter is a lot of people could probably pick up a single referral. And the nice thing is that Amex has been offering good referral bonuses, even for that single referral. Sometimes you can get 20,000 or 30,000 points for referring somebody to like any Amex card, basically from your business platinum. They could get an annual fee free, so to speak,

card to card that doesn't cost them anything at all to open apart from a new account on their report, I suppose. And even that, it could be a business card that you refer them to. So it's very easy to trigger, I think, at least one referral bonus for most people. And then sometimes they run these offers like they have right now where you refer one person and not only do you get the points, but then you also get the plus five points per dollar dining. I don't know if that applies on the business side now that I said that out loud, but they have consistently run

these offers where you can earn additional points on your spend. I think that Amex's ease of referrals is a point in their favor. I think that's a great point. And to expand it a little but it's just the ease of earning more points. You know, that the Amex has all kinds of things all the time. They're going to offer you more deals for adding more employees if you want to, you know, get more points that way. Yeah, I mean, when was the last time Chase offered an employee bonus, an employee card bonus? I mean, they used to offer little bonuses like that for authorized users years ago, but my goodness,

I mean, that went the way of the deal years ago, right? I mean, we haven't seen those in a long time. Right. It just seems endless with Amex. Now, Chase, not so much with Inc. Business Preferred, but the Inc. Cash Card has the ability to earn 5X at office supply stores and some other categories. And that makes it easy to pick up easy points, especially when Staples is selling Visa gift cards fee-free, which they have that promotion pretty frequently. You can earn five points per dollar getting gift cards that you can then use for your regular spend. And so there are things in the Chase ecosystem that you want to make sure you have available to you like that. But yeah, if you're just talking about the two cards that we started with, I think that's a really good point that Amex is going to give you more sort of bonus opportunities.

Yeah. And on that train of thought with the more bonus opportunities, retention offers. We've seen Amex offer pretty good retention offers for people who keep the card after the first year. If you ask for it, you just have to ask. We've seen a lot of people get good retention, generous retention offers. I've never heard of anybody getting a retention offer on an ink card, although I don't know very many people who've asked for one, but I don't think you're very likely to get one on there, whereas you probably will get something to renew. Now, I say that and you can't say that without saying, okay, but there's a huge difference in annual fee here. And so how does that play in to the conversation? Yeah. I mean, the business platinum is a, what, $695 a year investment. The ink business preferred is a $95 a year investment. I mean, it's a $600 difference. The business platinum has all kinds

of perks that could pay back the annual fee if you fully leverage them, but that's work and you might not get the full value out of it. So it's something to really figure out on your own by going through the benefits and the costs and say, does this really make sense? In a way, even if you plan on canceling the card after a year, then you could think of it as like you're paying $695 for one year of two offers and say, is the extra $600 worth the extra 40,000 points? Right. And that's questionable. It's not clear. There's not a clear answer there. Though, if you value any of the additional perks on the business platinum card, really anything, then that starts to close the gap on that, right? I mean, you get $400 a year in Dell credits. And if you value that even at half at $200, then that knocks out 200 of the difference. Now you're talking about a 40,000 point difference,

$400. Now you have to go back to all those other arguments that we've had so far and figure out which ones apply to you and where you stand on those and whether or not that $400 is going to make a difference. And of course, obviously there are other perks with the business platinum card. It's got all sorts of typical platinum card perks, a very different suite of benefits than the Inc business preferred. So if you don't otherwise have a priority pass or access to lounges, blah, blah, blah, or I wouldn't otherwise, Well, the example I was going to give there was poor, the fine hotels and resorts, but I guess there's lots of different preferred partner programs you could probably take advantage of. So maybe that's not a perk worth considering, but maybe we should

mention Amex offers because Chase has their offers, but in general, they're pretty weak. I mean, they're usually captive getting five or $10 back here or there. And I just don't focus enough on those tiny, tiny wins like that. Whereas Amex, I mean, sometimes they have some really nice Amex offers that you can leverage. So I'm much more likely, I think, to use a few Amex offers a year than I am to use a few Chase offers a year. And so that may help to chip away at whatever costs there is involved in keeping the card. Yeah. Yeah. So in general, just sort of wrap it up. I think if you pay attention to the business

platinum perks and you take advantage of them, make sure to spend those Dell credits. Even if you don't want stuff from Dell, there's probably something there that has some value to you, or you could get as gifts for other people. Go through a cashback portal when you're buying stuff, then you get some real cashback that you could definitely use for whatever you want. And take advantage of the airline incidental fee rebates. So $200 per calendar year, which you could easily turn into $400 for the 12 months you have the card. If you just sort of plan on maxing those out, then I think it's fair to say, okay, the annual fees are roughly similar after these rebates. Yes. The business platinum is more work to get, to get it

to, to roughly even. So then, then you could go back to just comparing the signup offers and, and think more and, and, but don't forget to think about your chase 524 situation and where you are with that. Cause as Nick said, if you're at 424, I mean, I'd almost automatically just go for the Chase card first because if you're at 424, get all the Chase business cards that you're interested in first and then get any Chase personal cards that you're interested in, get one Chase personal card that you're interested in before getting other personal cards outside of the Chase ecosystem. Yeah. And this offer, this 160K offer that we're talking about is targeted. The 160K business platinum offer is targeted, but it seems to be pretty widely available. There's a link

where you can check and see whether or not you're targeted for it. It's 150,000 points after the 15K spend and 10,000 for adding an employee card at the time of application and then spending $1,000 on it. So anyway, my point there is that this is a targeted offer. So not everybody's going to have access to the 160,000 point offer. And you might look at it and say, wow, that's a huge offer. I mean, until the pandemic hit 160,000 points is something that would have been a really big deal that probably would have been the entire show. And it just isn't now because we've seen so many great offers. But the thing with Amex right now is that I don't feel like we've seen any indication of the points parade slowing down. I mean, they have not put on

the brakes, I wouldn't say, by any definition here. I mean, we just keep seeing great offers. So I'm not super concerned that an opportunity like that, even if it's not exactly the same, won't be around at some point. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so, you know, I do think they were driving 120 miles per hour in a 60 mile per hour speed limit area. I think they have, they've tapped it down to maybe a hundred miles per hour now, but they are still exceeding the speed limit. And, and yeah, that appears to

be, you know, they seem to see open roads ahead. Yeah, it definitely seems that way. And the radar detector is not beeping. So, you know, right. I mean, I think that's a terrific analogy. It's basically it. And I said, and we're all hoping that they got that tune up and are ready to just, you know, let it rip. They're gassed up and ready to keep going. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. It's amazing. I think it's exciting because when they, when they pulled back to a hundred miles an hour, as you say, it's still like a hundred miles an hour. It's still far above where they were before. And usually, I mean, we see, we see offers ebb and flow all the time, right? Because in order to make a splash at some point, you need to have some room

to increase the offer. So we frequently see, for example, the Southwest cards are a great example. They go back down to 40,000 points because they want to be able to increase it to 60 or 80 or whatever it's going to be when they increase it. So they got to pull it back at some point for a little while so that they can introduce a new offer and everybody can be like, oh, wow, looking at all these points. So I think the fact that Amex pulled back to the a hundred miles an hour is a great sign because at some point they're going to hit the gas again. Right. Right. Right. So it's, it is a great sign and it's going to be very hard for them to pull down from the current rate. So like their platinum them to pull below those numbers, at least in the short term, because people would look at that and say, well, wait a minute, that's less

than you were just advertising recently. And it's been that way for like two years now. So at this point, it's been long enough. You could do that if you pulled back like six or eight months, maybe after starting, but you know, now that it's been like two years or even closing in on three here, in some cases, I feel like, you know, it's much harder to pull back. So, so, all right. Right. Bottom line, which one would you open? I mean, we talked about all these different things on both sides, but what's the real answer for you, Greg? I mean, when Tim asks, what would you advise him? Should it be the Chase Inc. business preferred or the business plan and with no qualifiers?

What would you pick? I would pick the Chase card. I would, and again, mainly it's because I'm flooded with membership rewards points. I am quickly spending my chase points and so would love to get more in my wallet for specifically for Hyatt. Yeah. I guess for me right now, well, right now, because I just redeemed points, maybe I would still say the Amex business platinum, but that describes my situation to a T that we've had lots and lots of membership rewards points and they're coming in like candy here. So I have no trouble generating more of those and I can't seem to get enough Hyatt points right now. So, um, so from that

perspective, because I need Hyatt points, I guess I would go with the ink business preferred, but my, my first reaction on this was it's not even close. Get the business platinum. Because I like those premium cabin sweet spots. So I think for any normal person that's not in that situation of having more points than they can use anytime soon, I would go business platinum. But don't you think most of our listeners are in that situation of having lots of membership rewards points now? They certainly should be. If you're not, it's your fault. Get with the program. Or you spent them quickly,

which would be great if you spent them for great value. Great. Good job. That's the best way to have them and to get them and then actually use them. So good. All right. Well, very good. All right. Good luck to Tim's wife. We're going to have to hear what they ended up doing. What did she decide? All right. All right. Good luck, Tim's wife. We're going to have to hear what they ended up doing.

What did she decide? Yeah. What'd she do? All right. So that brings us to the post roast. Got a post roast? I have a host roast of sorts. Oh, you know what?

Yeah. Okay, go ahead. It's more of a podcast editor roast. Oh, yes. All right. Okay. editor roast. So a couple of weeks ago, during the recording of our show, something happened really briefly with your internet where you said, uh-oh, and then my internet's going out. And then it came back and you said, I'm going to edit that out.

And I didn't. I listened to that the other day on the official release of the podcast. You didn't edit that out. You said you were going to edit that out. Fire that editor. Fire that editor. Okay. I'll make sure that the editor is on point this week because hopefully you didn't notice the little edit that I had to do this week. So if you got this to this point and you didn't hear an edit, then that means I did better this week than that time. Exactly. And that much is good news. You're right. All right. Well, I am going to, I had a roast of myself actually, when you said that, I was like, Oh, there was something from last week that I wanted to roast

myself on. And now I've forgotten it. So I'm going to move into the question of the week. So we'll have to hold off on myself roast for another time. So question of the week here. Uh, and I, I think I didn't ask you this one yet. I, there was another one I was going to do. And then this just popped into my mind. I said, I don't think I actually use this. I meant to. So if I did then stop me. But, uh, Zachary writes in and said, hi fellas. I recently hit American airlines gold by playing the loyalty points game and not flying a single segment. Thank you for that. Seeing that I need 44,000 more loyalty points to hit platinum feels like a slog, especially given the lack of multi-thousand point deals on the shopping portal that I haven't yet completed.

I know I won't. And so what he's saying is there aren't very many multi-thousand point deals that he hasn't completed. I know I won't fly enough segments to make platinum pro worthwhile. We're having a baby next month, but do you think going for Platinum is still worth it versus staying at Gold and using other shopping portals and not spending my nights taking those darn surveys? Thanks for helping us travel, Zachary. So is it worth going after Platinum status? Yeah, no. So there's two reasons in that question that I'm going to say no and just be flat out no. One reason is he says just had a baby. So presumably that means not much travel in his near future. He's not going to get much value from American Airlines elite status anyway.

The other part of it is he described the earning of loyalty points as a slog. So he's not enjoying the game. If you remember, the main reason we talked about going for American Airlines platinum status or platinum pro or executive platinum through shopping portals and all these things was because to us, it's a game. It's like, Hey, here's something we could try to achieve. We might get good value from it. It might not, but that's not our main, at least for me, it wasn't my main intent. It was more like, here's a game where there's, there's someone else keeping score, which is American airlines. And they're going to give me some stuff if I fly them that might be rewarding. So that's great.

But it's more like to play the game. And he's not enjoying the game. So don't do it. Just stop with your win. You got gold status. If you do fly, maybe you'll get something. You get some seat selection and stuff like that. I mean, you got a couple of benefits at AA gold status.

So it's not totally worthless. But yeah, there's not very much at platinum status that would draw me in either. Even if you were enjoying it more and totally agree with Greg, if it's the slog, then stop now. Don't do those surveys.

Stop now for sure. I'm going to keep going to try to hit platinum pro here. And I'm hoping to do it sooner rather than later. So I'm going to keep going to try to hit platinum pro here and, and I'm hoping to do it sooner rather than later. So I'm hoping to, you know, take a page out of Amex's book and hit the gas here pretty soon, uh, to try to, to make a play for this, because I think I might fly British airways and I'd like to be able to get access to their first class lounge. Uh, so, uh, so anyway, I'm, I'm excited about potentially trying for that. But yeah, that next 44,000 points

has been slow because I haven't seen very much that interested me either, though I did come across this week. I noticed, and I think it's been this way maybe for a few days or a week already, that Verizon Business is now up to 14,900. Now, of course, you're gonna have to check because the time we're recording this, it was 14,900 miles for a purchase. And so I don't know exactly what has to be purchased. It wasn't clear from reading the terms. So I looked through and I saw they have some refurbished cell phones that I could probably buy and resell for most of the cost that they're selling them for. So I'm going to, by the time this publishes, I'm going to have given that a shot. I hope at buying a phone and seeing if I can pick up 14,900 miles for it. That'd be amazing. Do it more than once. So, so that that's my next play to try out for that,

to pull in a bunch of points that wants to make it a little bit faster, but yeah, otherwise I don't, I don't think you're, I think Greg's right. You're not going to see a ton of benefit, though. I will mention, he said you recently are about to have a baby. And so you're probably not going to travel much in the near term. And that's probably true for the first month or two, but I'm going to tell you what experienced travelers are going to tell you. And I'm going to tell you, you're not going to believe it, but the first six months are going to be the easiest time to travel.

So of course, pandemic aside, I, who knows? I don't, don't, don't take any advice from me on that. Cause I know, I don't have the answers about whether you should travel or not, blah, blah, blah. But if you're comfortable traveling with your newborn baby, anyway, it's not going to get easier than it is in the first six months. And you're not going to believe that the first time you get on a plane, you're going to hit about 18 months and you'd be like, Oh, wow. Yeah. It doesn't get any easier than that first six months. Does it? So, so that's my piece of advice, Zachary. Enjoy the

trips while you can. So yeah, good advice. All right. That brings us to the end, I think for this week. So thank you guys for being out there listening with us. We always enjoy having you. If you enjoyed this and you'd like to get our posts in your inbox each day or each week, you can go to frequent miler.com slash subscribe. Again, that's frequent miler.com slash subscribe to join our daily or weekly email lists. You can follow us on, that's frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our daily or weekly email lists. You can follow us on all the various social medias. We're on Instagram and Twitter and Facebook. You can join our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group where we did a big giveaway this week. You're a couple of days late if you're joining now, but hey, there's lots of

great reasons to be in there because people are asking and answering questions all the time. So please check all of those things out and wherever you're listening to this. Subscribe, enable notifications so you find out when we publish a new episode or new content. And please leave us a comment, leave us some feedback. We always love to hear from you. Thank you guys very much. And we will see you again next week. Right. And don't forget, if you have feedback that you're hoping to get featured in the Giant Mailbag segment, or you have a question of the week candidate that you you're hoping to get onto the show, send your comment or question to mailbag at frequent mylar.com. And we'll see you next time. Bye everyone.