Frequent Miler on the Air - Best $95 travel credit card combo | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep358 | 5-15-26

Episode Date: May 15, 2026

We talk a lot about the ultra-premium credit cards with expensive annual fees, but there are plenty of people interested in credit cards with more modest annual fees. Luckily, there are some great $95 credit cards that can be supplemented with fee-free cards for a great travel rewards strategy. Giant Mailbag(01:20) - Melissa writes in with a question about locking in Hyatt prices before May 20th(04:48) - Jonathan writes in offering a few key data points to update our Hyatt points advance article, which you can find hereCard News(08:48) - American Express adds $300 in ChatGPT credits on The Business Platinum Card® from American Express and American Express® Business Gold Cards(12:40) - See our updated resource for the best cards for Priority Pass hereCrazy Thing: Priority Pass Restaurants(16:04) - Priority Pass RestaurantsAwards, Points, and More(18:02) - Mastercard Launches Mastercard Airport Dining Experience (‘Taste By/Of Priceless’ Airport Lounges)(22:13) - JetBlue and United Unlock Reciprocal Loyalty Benefits(25:51) - Read Nick's post about Citi Travel for rental cars here(30:49) - Read more about Sixt offering prepaid fuel for $49.99 for rentals in the US for Sixt ONE members here(34:31) - Points Path Pro now shows United discounted cardholder pricing(36:23) - Read more about how to keep airline miles and hotel points alive hereMain Event: Best $95 travel credit card combo(37:37) - We'll focus on which combination of credit cards might make sense for someone to use, but we'll stick to a $95 annual fee budget. We'll focus on transferable points and include cash back that can be converted to transferable points(40:27) - Capital One(42:21) - Chase(47:54) - Citi(52:03) - Wells Fargo(56:07) - Other considerations(1:01:05) - Best Mixed-Bank $95 Wallet(1:10:40) - Nick's pick for best $95 wallet(1:13:39) - Greg's pick for best $95 walletSubscribe and FollowVisit 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 – “Ocean Deep” by Annie YoderMentioned in this episode:Check out all of our other travel podcasts from around the worldThis podcast is part of Voyascape, a podcast network that brings together the world's best travel podcasts. You can find all of our podcasts from around the world at Voyascape.com. If you are interested in advertising or sponsored content on any of our shows you can find out more at the link below.Voyascape Podcast NetworkFrequent Miler's Best Offers Pagehttps://frequentmiler.com/best-credit-card-offers/

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world atvoyescape.com. Today's main event, the best $95 travel credit card combo. Frequent Miller on the air starts now. We talk often on the show about the increasingly expensive ultra-premium types of cards that cost $5.95, $6.95, $7.95, $8.95, and probably will be, more than that by the time this podcast is released. But some people, a lot of people, I'd say, aren't too interested in picking up cards that have, you know, annual fees that are through the

stratosphere like that. So we're going to look at the low end today and say, are there some great $95 cards that can be supplemented with fee-free cards to make a really awesome travel wallet, basically. So for a traveler, can you get a lot of great features all for $95 in total? And it's amazing. You really can. We'll talk about how you can go about that. You can do really well without a lot of annual fees. So if you want to come back to that or you want to jump around to something else in the show, feel free to expand the description box. You'll always find the timestamps there. And wherever you're watching or listening to this, don't forget to give us a thumbs up, a like, leave some stars for a review. We appreciate your feedback.

on that. Let's drag out this week's giant mailback. All right. We have two pieces of mail this week about Hyatt's upcoming devaluation. If you'll remember, the Hyatt award charts change on May 20th, as well as some

category changes. So there's a lot of talk about trying to book things while it's possible. And we've talked on a recent show about is it possible to book now? and make changes later, that kind of thing. And so both Melissa and then Jonathan have input into those

topics. So first up, we have Melissa who wrote in saying, I reached out to my Hyatt concierge, who many people say is one of the best, and I definitely feel like I got extremely lucky with her. I told her that we planned to visit Malta in March 27, but we're still unsure of the exact check-in and checkout dates. I asked whether we could make a reservation now, and later adjust the dates by shaving off a day at the beginning or end of the stay while keeping the same points price. She told me that no, any change would reprice the whole stay. Then I asked if I should make several separate one-night reservations and later cancel the nights I do not need. Instead, she suggested a workaround.

She said that she could book the stay for me directly rather than through the website or app, and she would book several nights as individual line items, but all under the... the same reservation confirmation. She explained that once I finalized my travel plans, she can modify the reservation by removing individual nights without affecting the original points price, even after the May changes go into effect. It's interesting. That's believable because I know that, well, for instance, with Hyatt pay my way, you can, you could reserve some nights with free night certificates and some nights that are paid, and they all stay together under one confirmation. or if you happen to just book them under separate bookings yourself,

I know it's possible for the hotel or concierge or somebody at Hyatt to tie them together sort of on the back end. So it seems believable that it's doable. I don't know about you, but personally, since I know you could just tie them together later on if they were separate, I wouldn't take somebody's word for it on that. I would book them separately because there's no harm.

Why not? The hotel can tie them together later on if they need to. Whereas if later on, your concierge comes back, and they're like, oh, no, I actually can't do that. Or if she quits and leaves and goes somewhere else and you end up with a different concierge, then what? Yeah, no, good points. Good points.

What if you wanted to apply a suite upgrade, though? Because if you book individual nights, you can only apply one to a single night, then, as opposed to the whole stay. Did they say that they could do that also? No, that wasn't part of the scene. Yeah, see, I think if they're booked as separate line items, I'm going to bat, I don't know.

I'm going to bet two frequent miler bucks. that it probably can't work that way, but I don't know for sure. So maybe. I guess that would be the reason, the argument for why you might try that and see what happens, but be prepared if it goes up in price that and you need to change it. Maybe it'll reprice. I mean, if you have a good concierge and you have faith in that, by all means, go for it. Personally, I'd play it safer unless I wanted to use that sweet upgrade.

I think that's a really good point. Yeah, I think that's good advice, Nekad there. Next up we have an email from Jonathan, which is about booking Hyatt Hotels when you don't have enough points in your account. We call that points advance. And we talked about that on previous show and had some back and forth about details about that. But what Jonathan has is some contributions to that whole topic. Jonathan writes, as a long-time reader and seven-year recurring Hyatt Globalists here, I'm offering a few key data points to update your Hyatt Points Advance article,

which many globalists will find useful as they try to book prior to Hyatt's May 20th repricing date. Per my conversations and personal bookings with Hyatt customer service in the past week, one, Hyatt's reservation system will not allow attaching a sweet upgrade award to a points-advanced booking until the points are available and collected from your Hyatt Rewards account. As you know, the May 27 booking window is now open, but guaranteeing a suite requires suite upgrade award earned in 2026, valid through February 2028. Yeah. Okay.

So it's just sort of giving some clarification about if you want to apply a suite upgrade to a confirmed reservation, then you need to make sure that the expiration date of your suite upgrade award is past your stay date. And then he goes on to say, height is enforcing a maximum of two points advanced bookings per property. This eliminates the idea of booking more than two single night reservations. So you're stuck with the exact nights you booked prior to the May 23 pricing date. Good ideas will limit the number of nights booked to a level of points you'll reasonably accumulate by then. Okay.

And then the next and final tip is each property sets their policy on whether to require points to be in the count by a certain number of days prior to check-in. Your article is incorrect that it's seven days for all properties. In my experience, in making these bookings, it's seven days for the Hyatt Regency Grand Cyprus and 14 days for the Hyatt Regency Coconut Point and the all-inclusives like secrets. Yeah, that's good to know. This is the first that I had heard of that, but it actually doesn't surprise me to hear that now that you've said it. If nobody had said it, I wouldn't have thought twice about it. But some properties have cancellation policy. that are as much as, I think, at least seven nights, some of them. I've seen that just recently. I've seen some longer than I expected cancellation windows on different properties. So it would make

sense that they would probably require the points a little bit further in advance. So that's good to know. Excellent info there. I had heard about the inability to attach suite upgrades to points of advance bookings before. If that wasn't in our post, it should have been. So I'm glad that that we learned that so we could update it. But I had read that before that you couldn't attach a sweet upgrade without enough points to sort of ticket the award, so to speak, to confirm the award. So I knew that would be a limitation. The two points advance bookings per property, that might be new and it wouldn't seem unreasonable to me so that somebody doesn't go and make 365 points of handbookings going to scoop up all of the avail.

I'm kind of glad that they're doing that, to be honest. So that makes it a little bit more possible for you to find the awards you want. But all good information because there's only going to be a couple days left by the time you hear this. If you're listening to this, as soon as it gets released, to be able to do this before this year's category changes take effect. So hop on that now. I'm going to make a couple myself, actually, just this morning I came across the situation where I'm not even sure if I'm going to need the reservation. So it's the perfect situation for a points of. where I don't need to transfer and commit the points yet.

So that's going to work out really well, I think. Great, great. And thank you to Melissa and Jonathan for those very helpful tips. Absolutely. Okay, let's talk about card news. And this week's card news, the American Express Platinum, excuse me, the American Express Business Platinum and Business Gold cards have added a new credit. They've added a $300 chat GPT business credit on both of those.

What do you think about this? Chat GPT business. Were you a subscriber? Are you interested in subscribing? Is this a big benefit? What are your thoughts here? Yeah. You know, for anyone who pays for chat GPT, you know, I guess this is a way to get it paid for by your

credit card, except that you have to get the business version of chat GPT, which costs more. And so the $300, if I understand things right, is only going to cover about half a year. year. So, you know, if I'm going to try it personally, I think I would start it in July. Like, if you only had one qualifying card, it started in July, let it go through end of June next year. And that way you get the $300 back twice, covers the cost, then decide then whether do you have other cards that qualify? So you could switch the payment type. Or, um, do you want to just cancel it at that point? Yep. Yeah. So to clarify Greg's point, it's a $300 credit per calendar year. And you have to sign up for a minimum of two people on the business account.

It's $25 a person for those two people if you pay monthly. So that'd be $50 a month. So if you start in July, you'll use your $300 credit up in December for the first six months. And then starting in January, it's a new year. So you get a new $300 credit. So you'll get another six months. So that's the way to keep it. So the key things to know here are that it's $300 per calendar year. And if you have more than one qualifying card, obviously you could just switch that up to keep it free however long you're going to keep those cards open. Or if you've got maybe a business partner or someone else you know that's got the card and interested in partnering up with you, I suppose you could just switch the payment method halfway through the year and keep it rebated for the two of you. So there's some ways to play that. However, something that someone brought up in the comments that I wasn't familiar with because,

I have not paid for the paid version of one of these before. If you migrate from the personal paid version, so there's a consumer version that's $20 a month, I believe, and we don't think this credit will trigger with that, the credit terms specifically say business. So if you have that consumer version and you decide to move to the business version, it will migrate your data and your information so your conversation so your conversation. So if that's important to you, that works in that direction. However, it doesn't work in the other direction. So if you leave business and go back to consumer, it will not migrate your data over to back to the consumer side. So you'll lose whatever stuff it knows about you or you've discussed or blah, blah, blah. And so if that matters to you, be aware that you're either going to be roped into continuing to pay for the business version or you're going to lose the history that you have with it for whatever that's worth.

As someone who's not a very frequent user of these things, that doesn't necessarily matter to me. but I imagine someone who's highly invested in this stuff, it might matter to you. Yeah, for sure. That's a good warning. I thought you were going to say that if you migrate, you can do it with just a single person. And so keep the cost down.

No, no, you apparently cannot migrate. And that's based on what somebody commented. It wasn't something I was familiar with. So maybe there's some way to split it out or something that I just don't know about. I'm going based on a reader comment there. Yeah, because I don't have personal experience with that. Okay. Well, anyway,

You know, if you're into chat GPT, this might be a great opportunity to get some more value out of the gold or platinum business card from American Express. Very good. Next up, we've got updated best cards for priority pass. You made a big update to a post this week, I believe, right, to update with the best cards out there if you want priority pass access. Yeah. A few years ago, the first version of this post was basically mostly about the Ritz Carlton card. Because the Ritz Carlton card used to just so clearly have the best version of priority pass. The Ritz card by itself, you can't get new directly, but you can, if you have a Chase consumer Marriott card, you should be able to upgrade to the Ritz card.

And the card kind of pays for itself with its regular benefits and then throws in priority pass, which used to offer unlimited guests and used to offer unlimited guests and used to offer. and used to offer the full power of priority pass, meaning it would allow you restaurants, priority past restaurants and experiences and everything. And it still offers free authorized users for the Ritz card so each authorized user can get their own priority pass. That's still true. That's still a good feature of it. But now it's down to the version of Priority Pass it has no longer has restaurants as a feature, and now limits to two guests.

I should add, though, that it does still include experiences. That's something I had missed when they got rid of the restaurants. I had missed that for a long time. And then last summer when I was doing the JetBlue thing, I found that I can go to the Gameway place, you know, priority pass place at Terminal 5 at JFK. So you can get a free snack and a drink. And if you want to play video games, you can play video games.

If you don't, you can just get your free snack and drink. So it's good to know that the Chase Priority Pass does. Yeah, yeah. Or if you want to go to one of those be relaxed spas and get a chair, you know, one of those chair massage things, that's included as well. So what I did, I overhauled the post to be more just these quick reference tables that for every card shows what does the priority pass entail? Is it have, you know, two guests, unlimited gas, does it include restaurants? Does it include experiences? Are there other lounges that you get into? for having this card. So that kind of information is all there for a quick reference. And so definitely check it out. The link to this post will be in the show notes. Okay, save me some time, Greg. What's the best card for priority pass? You'll have to luck. There's no single answer. There are some cards that are extremely good because they offer both, you know, restaurants, experiences and unlimited guests. There's only a few of those, though. And like one of them is the Bank of America.

travel rewards premiere i think it's called car or no elite travel rewards i don't know yeah there's there's definitely an elite version it's like 500 bucks a year for the card right somewhere in that range yeah yeah so so that's a good one that that actually lets you um gift for priority past memberships to whoever so you're one of the people that can be gifted it um but then uh you can give to you know three other people besides yourself. And yeah, each one has unlimited guests and restaurants and experiences. So it's a pretty good one. Very good.

All right. Excellent. Check out the post for more. Next up, what crazy thing did priority pass restaurants do this week? Who is this one on? I don't know. But what's up with this? Yeah.

Well, it's really what did priority pass do. The someone noticed or some people noticed the other day that, suddenly if you had priority pass from having a built palladium card or a city strata elite card, you are suddenly seeing the ability to go to into airport restaurants that take priority pass. That was not a feature of either of those cards before. And I should say restaurants and experiences were showing up. Yeah, it was. So, you know, we and others posted about like, hey, this is a great.

news or these cards now offer you know a great version of priority pass but it was a glitch that's unfortunate that's too bad so who is this glitch on is this like built glitching out again or what's it i mean city city had enough fiasco with their strata elite already i mean is this like a computer thing yeah who made this mistake right let me say as as we're recording this we haven't gotten we we have confirmation that it was a glitch about the built palladium card we believe it's a glitch regarding the Strata Elite card, but we don't have confirmation of that yet. But I'm confident that the glitch was on the Priority Pass side because of something that has changed about MasterCard World Legend cards. So both built Palladium and CityStraud Elite are

are MasterCard World Legend cards, which is a new, like, you know, used to be the high end of MasterCards was World Elite, and now there's World Legend. So that's next up in Awards Points and More. All right, so Awards Points and More. What's up with MasterCard? MasterCard has launched their MasterCard Airport Dining Experiences.

What's that? Yeah. Well, at the moment, what it appears to be is two airport lounges and soon or sometime in the future are going to be three that are called taste by priceless or taste of priceless airport lounges. So, and it's not that I don't know which is which. It's just that they are named differently at different airports, oddly. And currently the two that are open, one's in Hong Kong and one's in Sao Paulo.

and Mexico City Airport is up next. These are available for free entry for all world legend cardholders. So you and up to three guests can go in for free. And they feature things like a la carte dining, chef curated tasting menus, you know, and then all the usual stuff you'd expect in lounges. So, you know, I don't think it's a... Oh, and in order to prove you have the right card, you could either show your credit card

or the Priority Pass that comes with that credit card. And that's where I think things got wonky. I think that Priority Pass, you know, was trying to update what lounges and things were available to World Legend cardholders and kind of messed up. Somebody flipped the wrong switch there, huh? That's my assumption. of what happened. I mean, it just fits the circumstances, right? So, you know, if you're,

listening, you're thinking you're going to be passing through Hong Kong, South Paulo, or Mexico City, wondering which U.S.-based credit cards are World Legend cards. I mean, the two that are guaranteed to be are the City Strat Elite and the Built Palladium. We've heard that some City American Airlines Globe cards are issued as world legend, but definitely not all of them. So you'll have to check your card to see what that looks like. Yeah, that'll be interesting. So people who just converted over from Barclays haven't yet received probably their Globe cards. Yeah, at least we haven't in my household.

Same here. So when I say converted from Barclays, I mean from the Aviator Silver card. That's the card converting to Globe. So if you had that card, yeah, you probably haven't received it yet, but you'll have to take a look. when it comes in the mail and see if you are a world legend or not. We'll find out which of us is legendary. Yeah. So what do you think, Nick, are you excited about these taste of buy priceless airport lounges? I mean, they're in such convenient connection locations. So I mean, I guess Hong Kong is a pretty convenient connection location for, you know, a lot of international trips. But, you know,

I can count on no hands the amount of times I've been through the Hong Kong airport in the last couple of years and same for Mexico City. South Paulo. I mean, we did that party of five. I guess we were in maybe we were in both Hong Kong and South Paulo on that trip. But otherwise, they're not places I go to often. So we weren't both though. We were like you said, we were both in the same trip. So who knows? You never know. Yeah. And I don't know off the top of my head about Sao Paulo or Mexico City airports, but I know Hong Kong is filled with priority past lounges. So, you know, having another one, I mean, it sounds like these might be better for dining than your typical lounge. So that'll be nice.

But to me, it doesn't add like a super exciting thing. Like, it'd be super exciting if one shows up in an airport that doesn't have any good lounge options. Right. Or just an airport in the United States, even. That would be good. I would take that probably where some place where you might actually connect more than once this year.

So, you know, most people aren't going to connect multiple times in those places. So, yeah. So minor, minor plus. but maybe it'll lead to other things. Maybe we'll see a whole bunch of these open and they could compete with other issuers. So moderately interesting. Next up in awards points and more,

we've got JetBlue and United set to unlock or maybe already unlocked by the time you hear this. Reciprocal elite benefits. So the reciprocal loyalty benefits of both programs. So if you have elite status with one or the other, you'll have access to things like priority boarding, complementary access to extra legroom seating, check in, again, depending on your level of status,

it'll define when you have access. So if you're a United Elite, you can potentially have even more seating on JetBlue or United Economy Plus when you're traveling on United if you're a JetBlue elite member, priority check in and security, complementary preferred seat selection after booking. We'll come back to that in a second. One free check bag plus priority bag handling and same day standby options. So it'll all depend again on which level of status you have with which program. We won't get into the weeds here. But I mentioned we'll get back to the complimentary preferred seat selection after booking because this was announced on Thursday of this week, May 14th. And so as soon as the email hit my inbox, I pulled up the United app because I am flying United next week. So I wanted to see, hey, can I finally pick a preferred seat? Because I booked this flight and another recent United flight that I already took expecting reciprocal elite benefits to be in play by now. And they weren't for my last one. And so literally this week, I was like, am I going to get benefits next week when I fly United or not? Because I wouldn't have booked United if not.

But anyway, so short story, let's shorten that up and say, I couldn't pick a preferred seat for free. So the day this got announced, the moment it got announced anyway, it still wasn't free for me, despite the fact that I do have my JetBlue account information attached to the United Flight. We went back to the press release and it said starting this week. So maybe by the time this podcast publishes, it'll already be live. it isn't and you're looking your united app or your jet blue app or whatever whichever airline you have status with or you're flying if you don't see it yet check back because it should be launching sometime within the next couple of days i would think from when you hear this if it's not

already live so i look forward to that for all of those little mini benefits for sure um question for you nick uh i assume you double checked that on that reservation you have you have your jet blue number and not your united number so i mentioned that yeah i said yeah i have my jet blue number attached and i had it attached to the last one and and i wondered for a moment is it because i paid with united travel bank credit but i don't think that's going to be a limitation because i flew united last month and i booked it with united travel bank credit and uh attached my jet blue number to it and i still earned jet blue tiles and jeb blue points on the flight as expected so i expect the same with this next one Okay. Okay. So for those who weren't following us last summer, Nick flew to 25 JetBlue

destinations in order to take advantage of a JetBlue promo that gave him and his family 25 years of JetBlue status. So if JetBlue lasts that long, that means 25 years of preferred seating and stuff on United. So hopefully, hopefully. We can all, we can all hope. I have my fingers crossed. I'll take even just the priority boarding and check-in for now, but the priority boarding would have come in handy on my last trip. I had to gate check my rolling bag because I had a low boarding position. So this time around, I'm hopeful that at least I won't have to do that, if nothing else. And maybe I'll get lucky and get some extra leg room. We'll see.

All right. Next up in awards points and more, I wrote a post this week. And the purpose of the post was to compare car rental options across a bunch of different channels. And I was really surprised. I found that city travel often has really good pricing on car rentals. And I don't usually think about booking through credit card portals at all because in general, past experience has taught me unequivocally that credit card portals have horrible car rental pricing compared to what I can get elsewhere.

And that assumption was challenged because city came out ahead in most of the scenarios I threw at it. And I was looking for actual trips I'm taking. I wasn't just trying to put together a post and cherry pick examples. These are five different cities, three domestic and two international, that I actually need a rental car in and I need different types of cars in the different places. So I spent the time to compare against AutoSlache and Costco travel and booking directly and considering Capital One cashback and all that. And cities still came out ahead most of the time. Yeah, that's really, that's really great to know.

And the Strata Elite card gives you 12X for cars booked through their travel portal. so it's very rewarding to book that way. But you had a hesitation about the insurance when booking in the U.S., right? Well, that's the big problem. That's the drawback because cities travel insurance, their rental car collision damage waiver insurance, is secondary within the United States.

It's primary outside of the United States. But within the United States, it's secondary, which means if you have to make an insurance claim, it'll have to go against your personal auto insurance first. If you don't have personal auto insurance, well, then it's essentially like your primary insurance. It's going to go to city. So it's not a problem at all, I guess, if you don't have a car.

If you do have a car, then it depends on how much risk you're interested in taking in terms of it being against your personal insurance. And I've always avoided secondary car rental collision damage waiver. Part of me thinks that's kind of silly because, I mean, I obviously, if I get an accident with my personal car, which I drive almost every day, it's going to go against my personal insurance. And luckily, fingers crossed, I haven't had too many claims over the years. So I don't expect to have one when I ran to car either, although we recently had a trip with the frequentiler team where somebody else kicked up a rock on the highway and cracked the windshield, right? Yeah. Yeah, we're driving a minivan with the whole team. And, you know, this was like 15 minutes into driving this rental.

It's like crack, big old crack in the windshield. Luckily, I had reserved it with a chase card that has primary coverage, and it was really easy to get that all covered. So no cost to me out of pocket, which was good. And it was easy to do. And no claim against your personal insurance, which is the concern if you book through City, that that would have had to go on to Greg's personal insurance first. Well, yeah, and I would have paid deductible or whatever, you know, whatever the situation is with my personal insurance. So it was nice to have that.

But you're right. On the flip side, it's like, well, I drive my own car. Like, why would I be more likely to get a rock hitting the windshield when I'm driving a rental than my own car? I don't know. Yeah. You're not. I mean, I guess maybe you're more likely is if you're driving in an unfamiliar area. Maybe it's more likely you'll make a mistake and get it in an accident.

But overall, I'm running about the same rate in terms of rental car accidents and personal car accidents. So I don't know. I mean, I think that that's going to be a piece. of math you're going to have to do for yourself. I'm not trying to talk you into booking through city. I've not considered using a city card for a rental until I wrote this post this week for years because of the fact that it hasn't been primary. So I've been in that boat for a long time. Then I got looking at the pricing and I was like, well, I don't know. Maybe I can consider that after all. We'll see. So there you have it for whatever it's worth to you. Yeah. Anyway, that's really

good to know. It kind of mirrors a while ago when the Strata League came out. I looked at hotel prices through the portal compared to other sites. And it wasn't always the best, but it was often the best price beating, beating others. And so, you know, their portals come a long way because when I looked at it like, I don't know, three or four years ago, it was awful. It consistently had the worst prices. Then at some point they moved to Agoda, I guess, as their portal travel portal engine. And prices are much better. through that. Yeah, and funny enough, I have a need for a two-night hotel next week, and city also has better pricing than most other channels. So again, yeah, like you said, it's been kind of surprising

because I am definitely not in the habit of going to a credit card portal, but especially if you like the bonus multipliers on booking through city, then it's probably worth considering anyway, taking a look at the city portal and price comparing. Speaking of rental cars, our next piece up for this is 6th, that's S-I-X-T, sixth is offering prepaid fuel on rental cars for $4999 for a full tank for rentals within the United States for 6-1 members for rentals that are reserved and picked up by May 31st. So this is only a short-term thing. It's only going to last for a couple more weeks, I think.

But if you're picking up a rental car soon, you could prepay for a tank of gas at $50. I don't know. What do you think about that, Greg? I mean, with gas prices going higher and higher, that could be significant savings. It's always tricky to me to, like, when you prepay for fuel, you ideally want to return it almost completely empty. And that, to me, adds a level of stress. Like, you know, anyway. So because the flip side is like, even if the price for refilling and prepaid is cheap,

that's based, you know, even if it's cheap, if you're only using, if you're only going to use like a quarter tank of gas, it probably would cost less to refill it yourself. And so it really, really to get, to make this $50 worthwhile, I mean, you have to first rent a car that has a big tank and use most of the gas in order to get the full value of that. Yeah, and then the part that I hesitate about often is if I'm going to do that, then if it starts to get low, then I'm obviously not going to want to fill it all the way up. So am I going to be perpetually putting one more gallon in and like, you know, biting my nails over it? Like, that doesn't seem like fun to me. Yeah, I've done that too.

Yeah. Yeah, it's like, you know, at the end of like sort of a road trip around a state where I rented a car, you know, it's like, oh, I don't think I have enough to make it back to the end of. you know back to the airport so fill up like one or two gallons yeah yeah that wouldn't be worth it to me for like you know if you're looking at a tank that has like 15 gallons and i think the national average of gas right now is 450 but let's call it five dollars to make the math easy so you're looking at 75 dollars it would cost to fill that up so if you're reasonably confident that you're going to return it pretty close to empty then the savings there might be enough to make you say okay you know that that that's pretty good if you know you're going to

to drive about the amount of distance car can go. What might make this a little better is if you have a good targeted Capital One shopping offer. I don't know for sure that the prepaid fuel would be included in the cashback you got. But like this week, I had 45% back at sixth in Capital One shopping. And so maybe I'd consider that and think, well, if I get 45% of that bag, we get like 20 bucks back or whatever the 45% is, then it starts to get where, well, okay, the savings is maybe worth it to me.

If it's going to be $10 savings, nah. If it's going to be a $50 savings, well, maybe. Right, right. I think it's clever of six to, you know, capitalize on their way on the higher fuel prices to make people, you know, attracted to that option. Yeah. Well, and especially because if you like it, then you have a positive experience and you might consider it in the future when it's not $50. And so, yeah, you're right. Really smart.

Really smart for them to do. I don't have a sixth rental that's going to take advantage of that one, though. So goes that. We'll see if they continue something new in June. I assume they're doing a short period of time because they don't know where the price of gas is going to be. And we'll see what happens. Maybe they'll renew this in June. All right.

Points Path Pro now shows United Cardholder discount pricing. This was a limitation we talked about before, but that limitation is now gone. Yeah. So this is exciting. And hopefully other award search tools will be doing this very soon as well. as you know or you probably know United Credit Cards now unlock both discounted award pricing and better saver award availability for business class United Flights. And so Points Path, as long as you have the pro version now, it'll show you that better

pricing, which is fantastic. because before, like, if you're a card holder and you frequently use an award search tool, there was no way of knowing when United had a really good price, especially for the, like, Polaris business class that you're interested in. So now at least this one tool has that. One thing I'll mention, there's two cards, the United Gateway Credit Card and the United Debit card that supposedly require $10,000 spend in a calendar. year to unlock the capability of seeing better discounted award pricing.

But Tim has the United debit card, and he's already seeing that discounted pricing through United. So I don't know if that's a temporary glitch that it's doing that. I think most likely it is a temporary glitch. But anyway, you know, if you have one of those two cards, take a look, log into United and do some searches, and it'll show you whether the prices it's showing or discounted or not. Very good. Yeah, good tip there. And glad to see Points Path add that in. I think that's really going to be valuable for a lot of people. And finally, under Awards Points and more, we've got how to keep your airline miles and hotel points alive. That post has been updated. It had fallen

out of date and Tim did a full update with it this week. And so now if you're curious about how to keep them alive, that post will tell you, can you just transfer in some points? What does the expiration clock look like, et cetera, to give a, for instance, something that's worth knowing, I've mentioned this probably on a recent episode, but Avianca Life Miles has an expiration policy that's different than a lot of other airlines that have a similar policy anyway, in that there are many airlines with an activity policy. If you have to have activity once every 18 months or once every 24 months, but Avianca is once every 12 months.

So it's a shorter window. And so it's worth knowing, are my miles in whatever program going to be? valid for 18 months from last activity and what creates new activity, what counts as new activity in order to keep them alive? If I redeem points, is that going to keep them alive? Or do I need to earn more? Can I transfer them? Do I need the credit card? Etcetera. Really important stuff. Because we love our points. Don't like to lose them to expiration. That's for sure. That's for sure. All right. We'll be back right after this with our main event. Hey, Nick, I just got a text from my cousin. He's asking me about a credit card.

offer he just got in his email and asking if it's any good. Yeah, well, your cousin ought to go to frequentmiler.com and click the link at the top of the page for our best offers page. That's the best way for your cousin to know whether or not they're getting a good offer because we're committed to publishing the best publicly available offers. So if you see an offer for a credit card anywhere on the internet, you should always compare and make sure you're getting the best possible offer. And we're back with today's main event, the best $95 travel credit card combo. We're going to look at which combination of credit cards would make sense for a frequent traveler

to use, but we're going to keep the total price of all your cards down to $95. And we pick that because there are a number of really attractive cards on the market that cost $95 a year. and there's also a lot of attractive fee-free cards that can be useful for supplementing a $95 card to give you even more capabilities. For this roundup, we are focusing on cards that offer transferable points, first and foremost. You know, we love transferable points because when you find really valuable awards available, either for flights or hotels or whatever, you might not have the exact points needed to take advantage of whatever that deal is with transferable points. There's a decent chance that you'll be able to transfer to a program that, to a program that could book that valuable award.

And so, you know, the ability to have a wallet that earns transferable points plus some other features we'll talk about is, I think, really important if you want a great travel wallet. Absolutely. So our rules here, basically, like sort of our outline here, is to pick the best $95 wallet by bank with one $95 card and then whatever supplemental cards that have $0 annual fees. So we're going to identify the one core card that you should pay an annual fee for or should consider paying an annual fee for. And then the complimentary cards that I say complimentary and I don't mean free complimentary. I mean like going together well, complementary cards that have no. annual fee. So we'll look at that by bank and then maybe even a mixed bank wallet, where you pick, again, $1.95 card and then other cards with no annual fee that could play well with that.

Yeah. Yeah. As we go into that, note that in several cases, there are, we're going to talk about cash back cards or cards with rewards that are not transferable on their own. but where you can move the cashback or those points to another card that does allow transferring those points. And so that's one key way of making like the no annual fee cards more valuable by making whatever they earn transferable. So we will include those types of cards in this roundup. Very good. All right. Let's start with Capital One.

So Capital One has two $95 cards to consider. They're basically identical in most ways the venture or venture business card. They both $95. They both earn two miles per dollar everywhere. And Capital One miles are really points that are transferable. And they both, neither has any foreign transaction fees. So you can literally use that anywhere. around the world and get 2x everywhere.

Catalan has some, A, really good option for supplementing that 2X everywhere earning rate, which is the saver card. The saver card is a cashback card. It earns 3% back on dining, grocery, entertainment, and select streaming services, but you can move that cash back to your venture card and make that cash back, turn that cash back into transferable points. So in summary, for $95 with those two cards, you would get 3x for dining, grocery, entertainment,

select streaming, and 2X everywhere else. Yeah, that's pretty good. And that, you know, that saver card with no annual fee, bonus is a lot of the categories that a lot of people will spend the largest amount of money in. I mean, dining and grocery are going to be big categories for a lot of people, and entertainment is potentially close behind. So it's interesting and unexpected, I think, for a lot of people that don't know it, that you can move that cash to become miles. You cannot move miles to become cash back with Capital One.

Let's be clear on that. When you go into your rewards, you will have the ability to move from your Sabre card to your venture card, but you can't do that in the opposite direction. You can't cash out miles in that way, just so you know. Okay. Yeah, good tip. So that's a Capital One strategy, just two cards. Let's talk next about Chase. What is Chase's ideal combo?

Yeah, with Chase, there are two $95 options to consider. Let's start with a Sapphire preferred. It offers 2x for all travel, 3X for dining, and 3X for select streaming services, and 3X for online grocery, which we've talked about before can also be used, like if you have a grocery app, like Kroger or Publix, or one of those where you can pay. in the app, then you can, you still get the 3x, even if you're picking up, you know, getting the groceries in person as long as you're paying through the app. So that's one really good option and it allows, makes your points, by having this card, your points are transferable. Another one is the Inc. Business preferred card, which gives you 3x for all travel versus the SEPR preferred's 2x, but also gives you 3x for shipping, internet, cable, phone, and advertising with social media sites.

to 150K spend per year on those 3x categories. So the probably the biggest differences here that that will impact most people is like the ink business preferred does not have the 3X for dining. And but it has an additional 1x for travel because it's getting 3x instead of saffair preferred 2x. The insurance coverage is very similar. The travel protections that both cards offer. The Inc. Business Purrard has a little bit, has less cancellation coverage, like a lower limit. And it also is when renting domestically, it will only give you primary coverage if you're renting for business purposes. So how they would know that, I have no idea, but just something to keep in mind if you're considering that. And there are a number of cards within the Chase ecosystem that you can tack on here.

Chase has a whole bunch of fee-free, no annual fee cards that earn ultimate rewards points like the first cards I talked about, but where on their own, those ultimate rewards points can't be transferred to hotels and airlines. So if you get any of these other cards, what you want to do is move the points from those cards to your Sephora preferred or ink business preferred so that they become transferable. And first up in these supplemental cards is the ink business cash card, which offers 5X at office supply stores and also for cell phone, landline cable. So like, you know, your home internet kind of thing on up to $25,000 in total purchases in 5x categories. It also has 2x on 25K in combined purchases at gas stations and restaurants. But that's not, that 2x is probably not something we'd be looking at in the combo. Like you focus on the fact that there are abilities, ability to get 5X with this Inc Business Cash, which is really great. Freedom Flex is the next one, which it offers 3X for dining and 3X at drugstores and 5X in rotating categories on up to $1,500 spend per quarter.

and then you have the Freedom Unlimited card, which also, like the Freedom Flex, gives you 3X for dining and drugstores and 1.5 points per dollar everywhere else. You alternatively could get the Inc. Business Unlimited to get 1.5x everywhere, but it doesn't include the 3X dining and drugstores the way the Freedom Unlimited does. all of these free free cards do have foreign transaction fees. So if you're going with this, chase only combo and you are traveling outside the U.S. a lot, keep in mind that you're going to be limited to the bonus categories that the SEPA preferred or Inc. Business preferred have. Yeah. So that, that I think is an important point with the Chase wallet.

If you do travel abroad a lot, then you will have to consider that. So in summary, again, 5X office, sell landline cable with the ink card there, the ink cash card, 3x dining, drugstores streaming an online grocery with the Freedom Unlimited card, 2x travel with your Sapphire preferred or 3x travel if you want to go with the ink business preferred. And then 1.5x everywhere else with those foreign transaction fees. I mean, that's a pretty good combination. That's pretty solid. And again, if you do the business side, you can pick up 3X on travel, but you would

give up, potentially the 3x on streaming an online grocery from the Sapphire preferred. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, so it's a pretty good combo. You know, I'd say it's kind of missing some things like a really good multiplier for grocery outside of the online grocery category. It's missing a good, better than 2x gas. You know, a lot of combos have like 3x gas options, but, overall, it's solid.

And I'd say the biggest downside, though, is being limited to 1.5x as the everywhere else category. So if you spend a lot outside of the bonus categories, 1.5 is not very high. Right, right. It isn't. So, yeah, that's definitely the limitation there. If you do spend a lot on your everywhere else type purchases, then you might consider a combination from a bank like, I don't know, maybe city.

Let's talk about city's combination here. So City, you could have the Strata Premier, which has a $95 annual fee. That card earns 3X on grocery, 3X on dining, 3X on gas stations and EV charging, 3X on flights, hotels, and travel agencies. I mean, that's a really strong 3x card for $95. Then you can supplement that with a few cards that have no annual fee, but do have foreign transaction fees. that have, and these cards have lesser transfer options if you didn't have the Strata Premier. That's why you need the Strata Premier so that you can get the Strata Premier's good transfer ratios to all the various airline and hotel programs.

But you get a custom cash for no annual fee, and that earns 5x on purchases in your top eligible category, each billing cycle on the first $500 in spend and then one X thereafter. And so the categories you can pick, you pick one of these and spend $500 in that category to get 5x. So you can pick from restaurants, gas stations, grocery stores, select travel, select transit, select streaming services, drug stores, home improvement stores, fitness clubs, and live entertainment. So I'm sure that most people probably spend $500 a month in at least one of those. So you could up your earnings there a little bit. Right. And quick tip there. You know, if you get a custom cash card, just pick a category that you use it just for that and try to,

try to keep your spend each month within the $500 so that you're getting the full $5x. But you could even do stuff like just say, well, I always shop at this particular grocery store. So I'm just going to go buy $500 worth of gift cards with the custom cash once a month and use those gift cards for my purchases at the grocery store. For example, to make it easy because otherwise it's pretty hard to manage this card if you don't. Just zero in on one good category. Yeah, it'd be pretty onerous, I think, to track all the separate purchases, but pretty easy to potentially make them just a one and done one shot deal, just like Greg described there. You get the city strata card. That's not strata premier, just the plain old strata card.

That'll give you a three X on select transit, including car rentals, ferries, commuter railways, subways, taxis, limousines, et cetera, stuff like that. So you would have secondary insurance, if any at all. I'm not sure if that card offers rental car insurance. we did mention, though, earlier in the show, that City only has secondary, even on the cards where they have it. I'm not sure that they even have that on this card. So I don't know if that's that I'd use for car rentals. But you could use it for some of those other travel and transit type things. Parking might come in handy, bus lines, et cetera. 3X on a self-select category as well on this card.

You can pick something like fitness clubs or streaming services, live entertainment. There's a few other options in there that you might spend some money on there. So 3x on your self-select category. And then, of course, you can get the no annual fee double cash card for 2x everywhere else. That card earns what they market is 1% back when you purchase and 1% back when you pay. So an effective 2% back, which of course can become two transferable points per dollar. You just line up your rewards with your Strata Premier and then transfer on to partners from there. So again, in summary, city, you get 5x on that one category with the custom cash.

3x on a broad range of categories with the Strata Premiere. And then 2X everywhere else. That's right. That's right. That's right. Yes. And Strata 2. And then 2X everywhere else with a double cash.

But the double cash, keep in mind, does have foreign transaction fees. So it's not a great card for making those everywhere else purchases when you're overseas. Yeah. Yeah. But it's a pretty darn compelling combo other than that overseas thing, which was also a problem with the chase card combo. All right. Next up, we have Wells Fargo. We start with the autographed journey card, which is $95. It offers 5x for hotels, 4x for airlines, and 3x for restaurants, and travel. So, you know, it's really focused on the traveler, you know, the top types of things a traveler does and spends on, which is pretty cool. And you could supplement that with the no annual fee autograph card,

which is also good for the traveler, and that it offers 3X for travel and transit. So transit, that's different from the travel that the autograph journey offers. So you're getting more. You're getting all those like trains and buses and ferries and parking and all that stuff. So that's good to get 3X for all that.

And phone plans is another 3X addition above what the autograph journey offers, as well as streaming services, another 3x option. And gas. I think you jumped over gas, maybe. Oh, I did miss gas. That's an important one. Yeah. So the autograph's pretty compelling. And it has no foreign transaction fee.

So you're getting all of that extra stuff with no foreign transaction fee. So I would actually see this as like, because it is. It has 3X, I don't think I mentioned restaurants because that's duplicative with the autographed journey. But I would see it as like when I'm traveling, my primary go-to card, except for where I need like, you know, where I'm concerned about insurance coverage or where I could earn better with the autographed journey, which is like paying for a hotel or paying for airlines. Because otherwise, it is a super set of the other than those two things, it's a super set. of the bonus categories that the autograph journey has. Now there's two more cards that you might want to add in that have no annual fee, but these do have foreign transaction fees, unlike the autograph.

The Attune card, 4% cash back in a huge number of categories. I'm not going to go into them, but the categorization of the categories are self-care, sports, recreation, entertainment, planet-friendly purchases. And then if you dive down on the next level, categories of categories underneath that level and then and then sort of line item categories. The categories have categories. They do. It's just insane.

And this is cashback, but that cashback can be moved to the, to either autograph card to make that cash back transferable. And then you have either the active cash or the signify business cash as a 2% cash back card. So if you want to get 2X everywhere, you can use. one of those, again, you have to watch out for those foreign transaction fees. So with that one. Yeah, you know, Wells Fargo has such an interesting combination here. I think the journey and the autograph card together cover lots of very common expense categories at very good multipliers.

And then you mix in an attune card. And it looks really good until you look at the limited selection of transfer partners that Wells Fargo has. I think if Wells Fargo had a competitively large set of transfer partners, this would be a go-to combo for a lot of people. I think it'd become really popular. And I mean, they're growing. We recently talked about programs that are, you know, on the upswing, so to speak, that are on the rise. And Wells Fargo is definitely moving in the right direction. They've added a couple of transfer partners in recent times here, but they need to do more, I think, to look as good as everybody else at this point, look as attractive in terms of a card collection. Yeah. Yeah. I'd also like to see

some way to get a good bonus on grocery spend, which we're not seeing right now. But other than that, they've got a really good collection, I think. Yep. Okay. So what else? I mean, these aren't the only combinations, but we don't necessarily have other huge combinations to consider. But what are our kind of honorable mentions here?

Yeah. So, you know, there are some other cards that are worth considering in this conversation, but that where the bank doesn't have like a collection of cards where it can build its own, like, you know, great travel wallet. So one example, at least for that $95 price point, one example is American Express. So they have the Blue Business Plus card, which gives you 2X everywhere on all spend up to $50,000 per year. It does incur foreign transaction fees, but the points earned are transferable. So if you like the MX membership rewards set of transfer partners, it's just something to keep in mind as one of the fee-free 2X Everywhere cards.

options. Built, as far as $95 cards go, there's the obsidian card, which is, which gives you three X points on dining or grocery, like you have to pick one. If you pick grocery, you're limited to $25K in purchases per year. And then it also gives you $2x on travel. Then there's also ways to earn even more than that if you pay rent or mortgage or some other options with built cash to earn even more than this 3x and 2x. So this is also a card worth considering in a $95 collection, but doesn't fit as its own collection because there aren't other cards within Bilt's ecosystem that you can add on. Finally, I have to throw in one card that doesn't have transferable points at all, but it's something I think every traveler should consider

if they don't have a premium card because, like a much more expensive card, because the U.S. Bank Altitude Connect for no annual fee gives you, well, first of all, it gives you Forex rewards for travel, gas stations, and EV charging. But more importantly, for this conversation, it includes priority pass with four free visits each year. And that includes like restaurants or experience But you only get four a year. You could either bring in a family four once or you can yourself go four separate times, whatever. But I mean, you know, a lot of people rarely go to priority paths, lounges or restaurants or whatever. So having one able to go even just once a year could be worth picking up this card just for that.

It also give you up to $100 in rebates for TSA pre-check or global entry up to, you know, once every four years. and it has complimentary five-gigabyte gig sky internet. So when you're traveling, if you don't want to pay the roaming charges on your plan, you can use this gig sky benefit. So it's just a really cool, interesting card that you can kind of tack on to any card collection give you some travel benefits right there. Yeah, it's interesting because we often talk about getting ultra-premium cards specifically for their benefits, not necessarily to spend on, but for their benefits.

And this is at the other end of the spectrum. This is a no annual fee card that's worth getting just for his benefits, even if you don't ever spend on it. You know, the points that are when, you know, Greg mentioned 4X travel gas stations, need to be charged. Those aren't transferable points. So it's like 4% really back on those categories. But the 4% is still good on those categories.

But even if you didn't use it for anything ever, again, the complimentary four visits to priority pass. I think it's a great point that that might be enough for people. It's worth highlighting that that Gig Sky deal that Greg mentioned, other Visa signature cards get one of those 15-day 5-gigabyte passes. This one, it's not limited. You can do it again and again. So you get a 15-day pass good for up to 5 gigabytes. Then if you take another trip the same year, you can do it again. So that's, I think that's amazing for a card with no annual fee that you can do multiples of those and the TSA pre-checker global entry and the priority pass. You can live like an ultra premium card collector with no annual fee. You know, if you're only taking a few trips a year, you know, one or two trips a year, I think that that is an indispensable thing that probably ought to be in everybody's wallet.

Again, especially if you're looking to not spend the money on a premium card, that's what I think Greg's point there. Because if you are, then you probably already have priority pass. You don't necessarily need these four visits. Although even if you do, you might not have restaurant access. So might still be worth this one. But, you know, it's not as compelling if you don't, if you have other cards that offer a TSA pre-check credit and other benefits like that. But if you don't have those cards, you should probably have this one. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Now, moving on. So we talked about combinations of cards within each bank. And then we talked about some other miscellaneous other cards. let's talk about what if you're willing to mix and match? Because it's fine to earn transferable points in multiple different programs, especially because a lot of transfer partners are in common.

So if you need to use, if you want to use Air France, KLam Flying Blue miles, you can transfer to that program from any transferable points. Similar thing with Virgin Atlantic, with British Airways Auvius. I don't want to say any, I mean like almost any, really. But, you know, so my point is like, you don't have to just pick a single program. So, you know, so let's back up and say, all right, if you're open to whatever program, then let's look at each of the $95 cards we talked about and talk about their strengths and weaknesses because you'd have to pick just one of those for your mixed combo.

And then we'll talk about how you can supplement those with some of these free-free cards. Because you can't do all of them. So, for example, if you don't pick Chase, one of Chase's $95 cards, you can't say, I want, for example, the Capital One Venture $95 card and the Chase Inc. business cash for its $5.X. power. I mean, you could do that, but, but then it would basically just be a 5% cashback card because you're, those, what you're earning from the Chase Inc. card is not transferable because you don't have a Sapphire preferred or Inc. Business preferred to move those points to, to make those points more valuable. All right. Let's look at these $95 cards and talk about their advantages and disadvantages. All right. So Capital One, you've got the venture card that earns 2X everywhere. So it's

strong everywhere earnings, every single purchase. You're not sacrificing much on your everyday spend. You go to the mechanic or the veterinarian or some other category that's not probably bonused on most of your other cards. You're still going to be doing pretty well at 2X everywhere. And no foreign transaction fees. I think, if I'm correct, I think Capital One has no foreign transaction fees on any of their cards, to my knowledge. So that's a nice little benefit to have. And you can transfer to Japan Airlines, which is something that none of these other cards have. So Japan. Airlines, except for the built obsidian card we mentioned before, built has Japan Airlines. But none of the other $95 cards that we talked about in single bank combinations anyway have

that. So that's a nice little superpower that the venture cards have. What about Chase? Yeah. So, you know, Chase, whether you're talking about Sapphire Preferred or Inc business preferred, you have excellent travel protections. With a Sapphire Preferred includes, you know, primary rental car coverage within the U.S., regardless of whether you're renting for business or not. And with either card, you can transfer points to Hyatt and United. I mean, I'm not listing all possible ones, but those are both interesting. Even though Hyatt is devaluing, I think we're still going to see great value from the Hyatt program. So I think it's really important if you, you know, if you ever book Hyatt stays to have a

way to transfer points to Hyatt. And United has become much more interesting if you have a United credit card because the ability to get Polaris business, saver awards more readily becomes more interesting. And of course, you need to get those points. And one way to get points is to transfer them. So having that capability, I think, is really key. All right. What about the strata premier? Oh, yes. The city strata premier is obviously terrific for its three X categories. It covers a lot of the major categories where you're likely to spend money at 3x, and you can transfer to American Airlines, which is something that nobody else here can do. So that would open up AA transfers. If you're a big fan of American Airlines or you want to be able to supplement the miles you have

on the American Airlines side, then the city strata premier will be the obvious go-to there. Yeah. Then the Wells Fargo Autographed Journey, you're getting the 5X for hotels. That's, I can't think of any card that offers anything like that. I mean, there's other cards that offer really great earn rates if you book through that cards portal, but this is for paying direct at hotels, which is terrific. Forex for airlines is also terrific. It has a few, it's pretty limited in transfer partners, but ability to transfer one to two to choice or Wyndham is very nice to have.

So if you want to transfer it to a hotel program, the choice and Wyndham hotel points don't tend to be worth a ton, but when you're getting two of those points for everyone Wells Fargo point, suddenly it can be a good deal. Yeah, and I'm going to add in maybe a wild card here that we kind of left out out of our wild card, other consideration cards, and that is the built obsidian card, because what I think is unique about that, number one, they obviously have a really unique set of transfer partners. You're familiar with built. They've got programs like Alaska that nobody else has. And then some of the best programs from other card combinations. So you get a really good set of transfer partners. And if you're spending enough, maybe you're spending enough at grocery

or dining each year to be able to hit the first tier of elite status with built. And if that's the case, then you unlock one-to-one transfers from Rackaton. So your shopping portal earnings there can come into play and potentially be a factor. So I can see where that, for somebody who does a lot of online shopping and there's a lot of portal stuff that could potentially be a real superpower of the obsidian card it really can yeah that's that's really good and um yeah all right we'll talk more about that later um okay so um let's talk about the cards that you can tack on to this now um so the we talked a lot about the wells fargo autograph card which has no annual fee no foreign transaction fees and 3X and some really good categories travel on transit, gas, dining, phone plans, and streaming

services. That's, I think that's a really strong contender as a fee-free add-on to anything you choose here. The Capital One Saver can be an add-on even if you don't pick the Venture card, but only if you also pick a card like the Venture 1, which has no annual fee, but has my earns Capital One miles so that you can move your saver cash back into miles and then it all becomes transferable. But so tacking on the saver is more complicated because it requires two cards. But then it'll give you 3X on dining, grocery, entertainment, and select streaming. You can get, you can, if you want a like 2X Everywhere card, you can tack on the Amex Blue

Business Plus or the Wells Fargo, either one. of Wells Fargo cashback cards, all those options have foreign transaction fees. So I don't think there's a really good 2x everywhere, no fee option. Except maybe, built blue. So built blue has no annual fee. It earns 1% for all spend plus 4% back in funny money, built cash. But the built cash, can be used if you have housing payments, rent or mortgage, that you can pay sort of through built, then that 4% built cash can turn into 1.33x, 1.33 points per dollar on your spend. But it's only true if you have like very high housing payments relative to your spend. And then basically, if you do, if you have very high housing payments relative to your spend,

then you can actually earn 2.33 for all your spend with the built blue card and no foreign transaction fees and you're earning the most valuable transferable points currency. Yeah, I think that's a little more complicated, but it's a very interesting solution for somebody who's willing to put up with the potential complication of doing the math to make sure that you're going to do well on that. And I say potential because, I mean, once you figured out that that's a good fit for you, I guess it's probably not that complicated overall, but it seems more, it's a more complicated story to tell anyway, at the very least. So you do have that going there. But interesting. I think that's a really interesting point. And the fact that it has no foreign

transaction fees could be a real benefit if you do spend a lot of money overseas. Yeah. And finally, as an add-on, we talked in length about the US Bank Altitude Connect for getting Party Pass, Global Entry, and Gig Sky, all included. So we don't need to believe for that. All right. With all that said, it's time to put Nick on the spot. I want you now to describe your ideal $95 traveler's wallet. What is your... your $95 card? What are the companion cards that go with it? Are there other fee-free cards that you're going to tack on? All right. So I am going to say that I think if you're in a position where you don't want to spend more than $95 on a credit card, I'm going to make the assumption

that you're probably not spending heavily overseas. If you're spending a lot of money when you're overseas, you're probably traveling more often and or in a position where you would consider multiple cards or a more expensive card. So I'm going to guess that you're probably primarily a domestic traveler if you want the $95 fee, which might be an incorrect assumption. And I'm sure someone will chime in in in the comments to let me know. Please do. But I'm going to say then that the foreign transaction thing is not a deal breaker for you. So I'm going to suggest maybe you can keep your $95 in your pocket. Get yourself a blue business. plus. So you get 2x everywhere on all your domestic purchases anyway. Get a capital one venture one card that

has no annual fee so that you can transfer to partners and get a capital one saver card because then your saver card, you'll get three X on grocery rather and on dining purchases, which are going to be your probably your major spending categories for most people. Now you could get things like gift cards at the grocery store potentially and use those and other places. places to be able to maybe amp up your earnings a little bit on your everywhere all stuff if, you know, you do need that, although those won't work overseas for the most part either. So it's not going to be a way out of the foreign transaction fees. But I would look at that and say it's a relatively simple solution.

I mean, if you get the venture one and the saver, you don't have a lot of complicated stuff to worry about. There's nothing rotating or changing. It's a pretty simple setup. You get that blue business plus for anything that's not covered by the Capital One categories. I think that's a really good three-card combination that costs absolutely nothing. If you really care about the foreign transaction fee thing, I might say the obsidian card should be your $95 card. And you should use the built cash that you're earning in that 4x category to pay for the accelerator so that you can earn 2x on your base purchases.

Because again, I think you're probably going to stay under the bar for the accelerator there in terms of the amount of spending you're doing if you're looking for this relatively cheap wallet. and probably your expenses are not super high. So I would think that that would actually potentially be a good fit because assuming that you spend enough to be able to earn enough built cash to enable that accelerator on at least a good portion of your purchases anyway. So I'm going to go a little unconventional there, but I'm going to say that once Wells Fargo ups their program, my recommendation here would change.

That's where I'm going, though, for right now. Yeah, yeah. That's really interesting. Okay, so I had a really hard time picking what's my favorite wallet here. And I think, you know, Nick was trying to pick like, what's best for maybe the most people that care about this, whereas I was trying to think through,

I was thinking from a slightly different way, which was if I was limited personally to a $95 wallet. So it's a little bit different. So my decisions are more based on, you know, what matters to me. And also I'm probably more. more willing to go for complexity than I would recommend other people go for, right? So take that for what it's worth.

But so I thought hard about the built obsidian card as a $95 card because it really is a powerful card and able to earn better, considerably better than the 3x and 2x categories that it has. but and I also like really tempted by city's ecosystem with its like huge number of 3x categories but the thing that actually every one of the things we talked all of the $95 cards we talked about were really attracted to me but I keep coming back to I like the Sapphire preferred cards good travel protections and that it has primary rental car coverage and maybe this is important to me because it just happened to me recently that I needed to use the primary

coverage with a rental car, but it's on my mind. So it's the only one in the Roundup that has that. Although you could, Chase is the only one that has it. You could argue that the Inc. Business Preferred also has it, but that requires it being a business rental theoretically. Anyway, so I'm going with the Sapphire preferred is my $95 card that I'll give me 2x for travel, 3x for dining, and 3X for select streaming services, and 3X online grocery. My companion cards, you know, I'll throw in the Chase Inc. Business Cash to get 5X for certain categories. I'll throw in the Freedom Flex to get 5X in rotating categories plus 3x at drugstores. And I will throw in other fee-free cards. built blue we talked about. So I will go through the whatever works involved to get,

to make housing payments through built, which I'm not doing today, but I'll figure that out, because then I'll have a card that will be able to earn 2.33, if I play it right, and this is where complexity really comes in, if I play it right, it should be earning 2.33 points per dollar for all spent. So that's my great like everywhere. else card when I'm not earning a 3x multiplier somewhere else. I'll throw in the Wells Fargo autograph card because of its 3x for transit, gas, and phone. I'll throw in the U.S. Bank Altitude Connect for the Priority Pass, Global Entry, and Gig Sky. So there you go. That's my $94 wallet. That's really interesting. And I think the way you framed it at the beginning is,

absolutely true. I think we looked at it from very different perspectives. I think that if you're willing to go through that complexity, Greg's got a fantastic collection there and cards that would certainly be a fit. And I think, like he said, if Greg were limited, if you told them, you know what, next year, Greg, you can only pay $95 for annual fees, then that's absolutely what he would do. So I think that was a really good point. I think my combination, I definitely was thinking about it from the perspective of, okay, someone who only wants to spend no more than $95 per year is probably not willing to jump through as many hoops as the people who have the ultra premium cards because you've got to jump through hoops in order to make those make sense, right? So I mean, that obviously only appeals

to the hoop jumpers among us to do all of the ultra premium cards. So I shouldn't say only. Primarily appeals to those of us who are hoop jumpers, jumpers anyway. So I definitely was like me more of a broad thing. I left out and I meant to mention that the reason I said Blue Business plus was both for the 2X everywhere and because Racketon can still become membership rewards points. So your online purchases could still become a good return on those through that. Though, of course, you could make the argument. You could shop through Chase as a shopping portal as well as just Rackettin tends to have better payouts. So that's why I highlight that with the Blue Business Plus strategy. And the 3X entertainment on the, the saver card,

can be relatively broad, though not as broad as some of that Wells Fargo stuff that Greg was talking about. So I think if you're willing to juggle multiple cards, I will wave the white flag and say that Greg has got the superior combination. If you're looking for simplicity, I think that I have a pretty competitive wallet. But there you have it. So what do you think? What would be your wallet if you're listening to this? I'd be curious to hear from multiple readers on this. Yeah. There's no single right or wrong answer here. It's, you know, different commos will work for different people. And, you know, I think Nicara could easily argue for 10 different combinations.

I'm sure. That we'd all, like, you know, say this is definitely better than the last nine that we just mentioned. This episode was produced and edited by Carrie Yoder, music by Annie Yoder. If you've enjoyed what you've heard today and you'd like to get more of this in your email inbox each day or each week, go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media, join our Frequent Myler Insiders Facebook group. And wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to like this or give it a thumbs up. If you have a question that you'd like to be considered for a future question of the week, or a piece of feedback that you'd like to be considered for our giant mailbag.

You can send that to? Send it to Mailbag at Frequentmiler.com. Hey guys, Aaron Miller here from Armchair Explorer. And I just wanted to let you know that our new series is out now. We've got kiteski across Antarctica. Aboriginal storytellers and the craziest whitewater race in the world. We're going on a bucket list hike across Italy. We're going to the Fjords of Norway in search of the Northern Lights and lots, lots more.

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