Frequent Miler on the Air - 750,000 points from one card. Is it worth it? | Coffee Break Ep53 | 4-22-25

Episode Date: April 22, 2025

The Capital One Venture X Business card is out with a massive welcome bonus of 750K points...but the devil is in the details. Is this card really worth it? (00:27) - Capital One Venture X Business card details Read our Capital One Venture X Business card review here. (03:47) - The welcome bonus is broken down into two pieces: 150K after $30K in 3 months, then 200K after $200K ($170K more) in 6 months (04:52) - What's the total earnings with 2x for spend? (05:25) - Is it worth it? Visit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media. Music Credit – Beach Walk by Unicorn Heads

Welcome to Coffee Break, where we focus on a single topic related to miles and points. And each coffee break is limited to 20 minutes or less for your money back. 750,000 points from one card. Is it worth it? The Capital One Venture X business card is out with what appears to be an absolutely massive welcome bonus. But the devil's in the details here. We'll see. We'll see. I mean, three quarters of a million points from a single card is potentially

a pretty incredible opportunity for the right kind of person, but not necessarily for everyone. So let's talk about the basic card details to start. So the Venturex business card is very similar to the Venturex consumer card. So if you're familiar with that card, most of this will not be a surprise. But if it's new for you, the basic details are that the annual fee on this card is $395. So it sounds kind of expensive at first, but turns out to be a pretty good deal actually at that price, because at a base level it earns two miles per dollar everywhere. So it's a 2x everywhere. You can transfer to all of capital ones airline and hotel partners in the card comes with a $300 annual travel credit for bookings made through capital ones travel portal and

10,000 bonus miles starting at your first anniversary So on an ongoing basis, you've got those two benefits the $300 travel credit when you book through capital one travel in the 10,000 anniversary miles to kind of offset the annual fee and we'll talk about whether that does or not effectively in a little bit. You also get Capital One lounge access. So there are several Capital One lounges. They just opened another one I think pretty recently and they've been expanding. So that's one of the benefits.

You also get priority pass so you can visit other lounges as well. And of course, like I said, you can transfer your miles to airline and hotel partners, or you can use them to erase any kind of travel charges at one cent per mile. I say any kind, any kind that seems to qualify through the port. Basically, if you've booked some travel, and as long as it codes through travel,

you can use your miles, or codes as travel, I should say. You can use your miles at one cent per mile to erase the charges. Yeah, and I think it's totally fair to say that anyone who travels a fair amount at all can easily annually get back the annual fee. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I agree.

There are limitations to booking through travel portals. We often talk about how we don't prefer booking through a travel portal for a lot of reasons. And we've discussed that on the show before. However, you probably can get close enough to face value out of that. I wouldn't call it face value, but $250, $270, how much you want to discount it because you got to book through Capital One is a personal decision but then the 10,000 miles, if you transfer those to partners, you could easily

get one and a half cents or more if you've cherry picked even halfway decent redemption. So pretty easy to get more than your $395 worth. And then if you also use the lounge access, it's a pretty easy card to justify keeping. Yeah, I mean, I think of it even simpler, just just I say, you know, if you if you book $300 or more of travel using that $300, you know, travel credit. And then even if you just paid yourself back with the 10,000 miles, that's $400 of travel that you could book each year. And you would get back the annual fee basically as a rebate. So anyway, so it's a good card to have

for all the reasons, the benefits it has, the fact that it kind of pays for itself annually with its perks and that it earns two transferable points per dollar for all spend is not something that you see a lot of, especially in business cards. So that combination, I think very solid card, especially for those who travel. But now let's talk about the Welcome Bonus and see what we think about that. So it's broken into two pieces.

The first part, 150,000 bonus miles after you spend $30,000 in three months. That's kind of their typical welcome offer for this card, full stop, and it's good, but you know there are better offers out there for some other cards, but still, you know, if you have $30,000 spent getting that $150,000 bonus is pretty good. Where it gets up to 750,000 points total, you have to kind of bear with me here. There's a second part of the bonus, which gives you another 200,000 miles

after you've spent a total of $200,000. $200,000 in six months. Right, right. This is for big spenders. Right, right. So now we're up to 350,000 in six months. Right. This is for big spenders. Right. Right. So now we're up to, to 350,000 bonus points after 200,000 spend. Well, that's not 750,000.

Where did we get that number from? Well, it's from the fact that this card earns two miles per, for every dollar spent. So when you spent $200,000 on the card, you earned 400,000 miles as that's what you'd always earn from $200,000 spend with this card. But on top of that, you get 350,000 from the welcome offer that adds up to 750,000 miles. Yeah. So, I mean, that's a lot of miles. It's also a lot of spend.

So a I mean, is it worth it? And if it is, who's it worth it for? Yeah. So, and the other sort of question is, is it worth it to spend just to the 30,000 and then stop there? So, you know, at that point, so there's a welcome bonus for the business platinum card from American Express floating around. That's as high as 250,000 points after $20,000 spend. So if it was like one or the other, obviously the business platinum one would be a better deal for the welcome bonus.

Might not be the right card for you for ongoing, but for the welcome bonus, the business platinum would be a better deal. But you might already have that or you might not be able to find that offer. So, you know, I think for those who have $30,000 in spend that they can do that 150,000 bonus is pretty solid. What do you think? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so what it comes down to is you have to keep in mind the 30,000 spend is going to earn 60,000 miles.

So you're really talking about a total of 210,000 miles after 30K spend. Now, if you were able to get that 250K AMEX business platinum offer, you'd have to spend 20,000 and you'd earn 250. And if you're spending that 20,000 in one X categories, then you're only going to end up having 270,000 miles. I say only. That's obviously still more than what you'll end up with with this card.

However, if you're not, well, however, let me put it this way, if you're going to continue to spend heavy heavily on a card, if you're looking for a card that you can continue to use after that, then over the long haul, it won't take very long for this card to become a better card for you in terms of your ongoing spend because this is one of those cards. There's a lot of cards out there. People ask me, what's the best card? And I usually say, well, the one with the best offer is the best card. But there are so many people that'll open a card to get a great welcome offer, but then

just continue spending on it, even though it offers a poor return on everyday spend. So getting this card and continuing to spend on it is a decision I wouldn't feel badly about. I'd be happy. I'd say, okay, well good, you're getting a good return and you're ongoing spend. You're getting a card with benefits that easily outweigh the annual fee. That's not necessarily true for everybody on the Business Platinum card. That one's a lot harder to pencil out than this one is. This one I think is a pretty easy win for anybody who travels a few times a year at least. you know, then I think you can probably do well with this card. So is it the best offer? No. Can you do much better if you're

willing to open three or four or six different cards? Yeah, you could earn a lot more miles if you're willing to open multiple cards. However, I think when it comes to like value for the money and a card that's a good keeper card that you should and could and should continue to put everyday spend on. Yeah, I mean, this is a good offer card that you should and could and should continue to put everyday spend on Yeah, I mean this is a good offer not gonna knock your socks off and you got a bus down the door to go get 150 after 30k, but it's a good one to have long term And there are only so many business cards that are good for all of your everyday purchases. This is one of the few Yeah, yeah, so it's it's a solid offer

And as Nick said not the best, but it's it's a solid offer. And as Nick said, not the best, but it's a great way in to this very solid card to have and to hold and to use for your business spend and everything. So that part's good. What about the next part of the offer, the spend $200,000? You know, if you're going to spend $200,000

on a single card, probably better this one than any other business card, if they're not going to be purchases that would be in bonus categories, they're going to be unbonus purchases, this is as good a card as any, so you may as well pick up the rest of the miles. That said, is it really compelling? I think if you're going to be spending $200,000 in the course of six months, you should really be considering multiple cards because at the end of the day, you're going to have spent $200,000 and end up with 750,000 miles. That's not bad, but it's only three point, I don't know, I can't do the math in my head

real quick, but it's less than four miles per dollar spent on average. And if you're going to be spending 200K in six months, I think you should probably consider opening two or three cards and you'll probably do far better than three or four X on all your spend with other welcome offers. But if you've got $200K spend to do and you only want to do it on one card, then yeah, by all means, why wouldn't you? That would be crazy. Yeah, no, totally.

That's where I think it comes down to. If you have a business that has a lot of spend and so this 200,000 would not be hard to achieve, then I could totally see why you wouldn't want to necessarily be juggling a whole bunch of different welcome offers. And I know for my own business, I like to keep... I have two primary business cards that are solely for my business, the frequent miler business. And I wouldn't, you know, I might separately open a bunch of business cards and use other spend to get there.

But to the extent that I'm using frequent miler business spend, I'm just gonna put on those two cards. So if I actually had $200,000 spend, which I don't, luckily, then I think that this would be an excellent card to put it all on. Yeah, I think of people. Somebody I went to high school with reached out at some point to ask about miles and points.

And he owns a construction company. And I said, well, I imagine you probably spend a lot of money on materials because you're owning this construction company. If that's the case, you could probably earn a lot of miles from the spend for that. He's like, oh, yeah, I'm buying materials all the time at Lowe's and this and that, blah, blah, blah. And and so I think of somebody like that and I say, well, this would do pretty well for

you. Now, some of you might say get the Lowe's card for five percent back or go buy gift cards somewhere where you can get a bonus. Yeah, there's a lot of other ways to play it. But for somebody who's like just going to get one, this would be a great choice for someone like that who probably is going to spend $200,000 over the course of six months on purchases that their customers are going to essentially fund. So why not take the three quarters of a million miles that you could earn on this?

You're going to do pretty well. So yeah, I think it's not something that I would recommend to someone who's going to struggle to meet 200k spend. And it's not something I would recommend to someone who's going to struggle to meet 200k spend. And it's not something I would recommend to someone who's willing to juggle a whole bunch of cards. But I recognize that the number of small business owners who have enough of a business to be spending $200,000 in the court over the course of six months, probably don't want to juggle six or eight or 10 or 60 cards.

And so, so I think it's a really good fit for its target market because it pencils out to be a good value, gives you good return in everyday spend. And that is a fair number of bonus miles. You can redeem these miles for one cent each to pay yourself back for travel spend. You just use the card to pay for travel and redeem the points that way.

That would be worth what, $7,500 worth of travel. Or you could learn from podcasts like this one about how to transfer to airline and hotel programs and make your points go much, much further. And I don't think it's unreasonable to say that you could be looking at $15,000 worth of travel or more out of that one welcome bonus. Yeah, I mean, I think that's really

what it all comes down to, that if you are willing to put in a little bit of effort in learning how to use the miles, you can get so much value out of 750,000 miles. And miles become in some ways more valuable in mass than they do in small quantities. Of course, there becomes eventually an amount where you have so many miles that additional miles don't necessarily help you. But I think

starting from zero, that 750 is a really valuable carrot to get to if you do have the spend to do it because you could easily take a family vacation that probably blows all the other vacations you've taken out of the water if you've not used miles before and even if you have Like then even more so you probably know exactly how to put those 750,000 miles to use so I probably do really well There you have it. It's actually a good deal for the right people Don't forget if you've enjoyed this and you'd like to get in our email list You want to go to frequentmiler.com? Subscribe to join our email list follow us on all the various social media and check out our frequent mylar on the air episodes dropping

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