Frequent Miler on the Air - How to amass Chase Ultimate Rewards | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep271 | 9-6-24

Episode Date: September 6, 2024

We love Chase Ultimate Rewards primarily because of the ability to transfer to partners (and we specifically love the ability to transfer to Hyatt.) Chase Ultimate Rewards is actually one of the best ways to get Hyatt points, in fact. We'll talk more about amassing Chase Ultimate Rewards (and why you would want to) in this episode of Frequent Miler on the Air. (01:18) - A reader experiences an issue with a price on his Etihad award that was not as advertised... (08:43) - Read more about the Chase Ink Business Unlimited card here. (10:21) - Read more about the U.S. Bank Smartly credit card here. (19:47) - Read our Guide to Credit Card Application Rules by Bank here. (21:29) - Double Elite Night Credit on Marriott Homes & Villas (Targeted, Book by 9/20, stay by 12/31) Read more about the double elite night credit here. (32:34) - 30% transfer bonus from Amex Membership Rewards to Hilton Honors (thru 9/30) (33:24) - Reminder: 30% transfer bonus from Amex Membership Rewards to Avios (thru 9/30) (33:40) - 20% transfer bonus from Capital One to Air France / KLM Flying Blue (thru 9/29) (35:20) - Preferred Hotels now up to 118,000 Choice points (not long ago 55K max!). Read more about great value preferred hotels, bookable with Choice points here. (40:03) - We all know that Chase Ultimate Rewards points are super valuable... Learn more about Chase Ultimate Rewards sweet spots here. (41:55) - How to get the Chase Ultimate Rewards points... (42:04) - Chase Ultimate Rewards welcome bonuses Read more about Chase's best credit card sign up offers here. (42:22) - What are the rules for applying for Chase cards? (What is the 5/24 24 month, 48 month, etc): See our Complete Guide to Credit Card Application Rules by Bank here. (42:59) - There are lots of Chase cards available... Again, you can learn more about Chase cards here. (45:29) - Which Ink Business card is not like the others (and will not earn you points that can be transferred to partners)... (48:59) - Earning Chase Ultimate Rewards via referral bonuses (51:06) - 2 Player Mode for Chase Ultimate Rewards (54:28) - What can you earn as you spend on Chase cards? Learn more about spending options here and here. (1:05:12) - Chase's shopping portal (and other miscellaneous ways to earn Chase Ultimate Rewards points) (1:07:12) - When does it make sense to credit paid flights to a different airline's frequent flyer account (within the partner airline)? (1:10:23) - Learn more about our 40K to Far Away challenge here. (1:11:59) - Learn more about wheretocredit.com here

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did City do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event. Frequent Liler on the air starts now. Today's main event, how to amass Chase Ultimate Rewards points. So we love our Chase Ultimate Rewards mainly, mainly because of the ability to transfer to partners. And specifically, we love the ability to transfer to Hyatt because Hyatt has a great award chart, lots of great value ways to use points, including booking suites outright for good value and so on. And through Chase Ultimate Rewards, that's one of the best ways to get those Hyatt points kind of indirectly because we earn them from Chase and then we transfer them to Hyatt.

Yeah, we'll talk more about all of that stuff today. But before we get further into that, I want to remind you that you can always find the timestamps in the show notes. So if you want to jump ahead to listen to a segment about that or you want to return to a segment in the future, you can always find the timestamps just by expanding the description box. Wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to like this, give us a thumbs up, leave a comment, leave a review. We always love to hear from you. If you agree, disagree, have a different idea, please do share with us in the comments. All right. On that note, let's drag out this week's giant mailbag. Today's giant mail comes from Jameson and it's a a cautionary tale so we've mentioned on the show a

number of times i think that sometimes you can save a lot of points by booking an airline with partner miles rather than that airline's own miles uh so you know for example you might save uh points by booking an Air France flight with Virgin Atlantic miles. That's just an example of where that would happen. So Jameson, he found an example where a domestic American Airlines flight was cheapest when booked through Etihad. So what he did is he transferred city points to Etihad.

And here's what Jameson has to say. I recently tried booking a domestic American Airlines flight via Etihad. And I'm curious if my experience is an anomaly. I should mention too, that I've drastically cut down his email to just what I thought was key here for this discussion. I saw a flight from DC to Charlotte for 6,000 Etihad miles. And I figured I'd go for that instead of paying 8,000 directly with American Airlines. So he's saving 2,000 per passenger. I created an account with Etihad, transferred 12,000 city points, and tried to book for two people. At the final checkout screen, it told me i didn't have enough miles and the

price was 12 068 miles no explanation as to why and i'm going to say as an aside we've heard this from at least one other person that this happens with eddie hod that for some reason they add you know a few extra points to the price, but they don't show that on the initial screen when you're, when you go to book. So that's just awful. Okay. So he called and asked, he says, I called and asked what was happening and if they could book with my 12,000 points because he was deceived. That seems like a reasonable request. Nope. No explanation on the 12,068 number. Oh, and any booking over the phone would cost an extra $30. I went back and foolishly moved an extra 1,000 city miles to have enough to book and be done with it. And then he

goes on, he had other issues with the booking. So it was a little unclear to me from the email whether he finally got it done or not. But the point is, I wanted to alert people that, first of all, with Etihad, there's that weirdness where the advertised price might not be what it actually is. But also, more generally, just because you could save a few thousand points doesn't necessarily mean that you should. So there's some other things to remember about Etihad, right? Like don't they have an awful cancellation policy, Nick? Yeah. So my first thought when hearing this was like, I hope the flight was like tomorrow and you know, you're going to take it because if it was anything in the future and you're not 1000% sure you're going to take those flights, then transferring to Etihad wasn't worth the 2000 mile savings. Of course, easy to play Monday morning quarterback. I don't mean to

critique, but the reason that that came to mind right away is because of their terrible cancellation policy, as you said. So if you cancel more than 21 days in advance, then the cancellation penalty is 25% of the miles. So you'd lost 1500 miles a person if you'd canceled more than 21 days in advance. Between eight and 21 days, that fee goes up to 50%. So you're going to lose half the miles for canceling anywhere between eight and 21 days in advance. If you cancel within seven days of departure, you lose 75% of the miles. You'd be losing 4,500 miles a person. So you'd only get back 1,500 miles each if you cancel within seven days of departure. And if

you cancel within 24 hours of departure, it's just 100%. You don't get anything back. You don't get any miles. You probably get the taxes, presumably, but you won't get any miles back if you cancel within 24 hours. It's just a horrible, horrible policy. So I mean, in this case, it was a relatively small number of miles. So you may not lose a lot of sleep over losing the miles in that case. But it's certainly a reason why I would never consider a big booking with Etihad Gas Miles, again, unless it's for departure, like within the next day or two. And I know there's no chance that my plans are going to change. But anything further out than that, I know that things could change. And I would be very hesitant to use that to add miles, unless I'm saving like a hugely substantial number of miles. And I know I'm going to take

the flight. It'd have to be a really big savings and a really high level of confidence for me to book through that. Totally. Now, one thing I think you said that if you only got 25% of your points back, you'd get back 3,000 miles out of those 12,000. But remember, he would have spent 12,068. So he'll get back 3,017. Whatever. Yeah. Whatever. They'll lose. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Well, you know, and that stinks having to transfer over the additional miles and then orphan those miles. And so your savings is even less. That really stinks. I wasn't aware of the fact that the price changes in the final checkout screen.

That's so annoying. It's just evil. Yeah, it is. It is. For practical purposes, it's like the advertised price is actually a thousand points more. And I'm saying that because most of us are going to be transferring from a transferable points program where you have to transfer in minimum thousand point increments. And so, yeah. Yeah.

And for that reason, it's probably worth the mention that Capital One, unlike most others, allows transfers to most of their partners in increments of 500 miles. So most programs require, if you're transferring from the city, of course, it'd be a minimum of 1,000. But with Capital One, I think it's a minimum of 500 for either most or all of their partners. So if you just need a few hundred more, that's something to keep in mind if you have Capital One miles. But yeah, yeah. Terrible. I feel bad for that. That stinks.

And keep that as a good warning that anti-head gas is just not generally going to be a good program through which to book much of anything because of those awful policies. Right, right. And so for a play at home game, any mathematicians out there, try to figure out how many passengers

you would need to get the final price to be an even thousand. There you go. There you go. Well, I'm sure you wish that you had used the 8,000 per person to just book through AA. And that's the thing. So maybe that's also worth a mention that we book through partners all the time. I mean, there's lots of times I'll use partner miles to save miles on a flight. However, when it's a really small difference like that, there's some value in booking directly through a program that's easy to use because like American Airlines, I already have the miles there. I know I could just book it without having to transfer and wait and potentially what if the transfer gets caught up and blah, blah, blah. I can just go right now. I have the miles there. I could just book it and I know that I can cancel up until a few minutes before departure

and get the miles back. The convenience to me in that case would be worth the 2,000 additional miles probably per person. So that's something worth considering when you're making your – even if I didn't have a horrible cancellation policy, I might just spend the extra 2,000 a person and book through AA for simplicity's sake. That's just me. All right. So that's our mailbag. Let's talk about card news.

So for card news, we've got some hot new offers out this week yet again. Well, in particular, we want to talk about the Inc. Business Unlimited card, which has a raised up offer of 90,000 points after 6K spend. So that's up from, I think it was 75K before that. Yeah. Yeah. It's great to see a 90K offer back on that card. A card with no annual fee, no foreign transaction fees.

So a decent card that has very little opportunity cost, so to speak, and carrying in your wallet. And that's a really, really nice welcome offer on a card with no annual fee. Yeah, and especially since this card doesn't have any rules about it has to be 24 months or 48 months since you last got a card like this. And even if you currently have it, there's no rule against getting another one. So that's not to say you'll be approved, but it is possible to get it. The bummer is that if you're in two-player mode, referring your spouse or whatever, the referral bonus has dropped from 40,000 points previously to 20,000 points for referring a

friend. That's still, you know, much better than nothing, but I wanted to point that out. Worth taking advantage of that and getting the extra 20,000 points if you are in position to do that, though. We don't recommend referring yourself. Self-referrals are probably a bad idea with all of the issuers. So you don't want to risk your points that way. So don't do that. But your significant other, spouse, player two, brother, sister, friend, whatever, certainly that would be a-okay to refer as far as we know. And we've done it ourselves.

So that's the first bit of card news. So next bit of card news up is U.S. Bank has a new card coming. Not quite out yet, but we know a bit about it and it looks pretty interesting. So next bit of card news up is U.S. Bank has a new card coming. Not quite out yet, but we know a bit about it and it looks pretty interesting. Yeah. U.S. Bank is apparently coming out with a new card called the Smartly credit card. Smartly. They have a web page. It's a smart name.

They have a web page that shows the card and the basic details about it. You can sign up to be on the waiting list to be alerted when it is actually available. We have no idea when that'll be, but it earns a base 2% cashback, which by itself, that's not too interesting. There are lots of 2% cashback cards out there. What is potentially exciting is that

if you have deposit accounts with U.S. Bank, they give you an extra reward based on how much you have with them. And if you have a full $100,000 saved with U.S. Bank, then you're supposed to get an extra 2% cash back on your spend. So that means in total, you'd be getting 4% cash back everywhere unless there's some hidden gotchas, which I almost feel like there has to be some hidden gotchas because there's nothing else like that out there. No. And like presumably your investment accounts would count, right? Because U.S. Bank, they have a self-directed investment account. And so that seems like, yeah, it seems like it can't be the case because if 100K in investments would get you 4% cash back in your credit card, that would just be an unprecedented rate. I mean, let's say this, if that is indeed what they come out of the gate with, then it may be worth taking advantage of that for as long as it lasts, because I can't imagine that 4% everywhere will last forever.

If, if that is how, how it gets implemented. Now, you know, like I said, we don't know a lot yet. We don't know, for instance, if this card is going to have an annual fee, what the annual fee is going to be, you know, what kind of gotchas they're going to have about the money that you have on deposit with us bank. I, whether it's going to have to be new money that comes in or who knows, we don't know yet all of the details, but it could be very interesting. I mean, we've talked a lot about the Bank of America, Platinum Honors status or the preferred rewards program, and how if you have the Bank of America premium rewards or the unlimited cash rewards, and you have Platinum Honors status, then you can get

essentially 2.625% back everywhere and how that's a great deal and makes you have to consider, well, do I want to earn, you know, one and a half or two transferable points versus 2.625% cash back and how, you know, we've both leaned more, I think, towards the 2.625% cash back in recent years since we've earned a lot of transferable points. But it can be a close comparison. It can be a sort of a, you got to think about it a little bit. At 4%. Like I'm happy to earn either way.

Either way, right. Between those two, earn two transferable points or 2.625% cash back. It's like buying transferable points for 1.3 cents each, which is pretty fair. Yeah, exactly. It's like, okay, I'm not going to cry myself to sleep over the fact that I quote unquote paid that much if that's the cost for earning points. However, at 4%, boy, I'd have a hard time using a 2X card if I could get a 4% card, right? Right. Yeah. I mean, it would be choosing to use a 2x everywhere transferable points card instead of 4% cash back would be like the equivalent of buying

transferable points for two cents each. And I mean, you can get more than that value from transferable points, but I would never buy points for that high i mean unless i had an upcoming uh trip that where i needed those points right away but otherwise uh no way that's way too high to to be buying points right right so i mean we'll see we'll see what happens if the card has a good welcome offer when it comes out um and uh and if it you know actually works the way that it sounds like it might, what do you think? Do you think this is really going to be 4% back that you could just trigger with 100K? I mean, I say just trigger with 100K investments.

I know that's a large amount of money, but because U.S. Bank does allow the self-directed accounts, I think you can move an IRA in probably. And so if you've got retirement savings, that's not necessarily as huge. A lot of people can do it. Yeah. Yeah. So what do you think? I mean, 4%? Is this going to happen? I mean, they have to make it happen in some way now that it's public, but it seems to me like either they have some kind of caps on how much you can earn maybe per month or I don't know. Or there's got to be some kind of gotcha to this. Or I'll say I just think that U.S. Bank, if there's not a gotcha, U.S. Bank is in big trouble because people are going to be there's lots of really big spenders out there.

And so on the plus side, they're going to get the business of those big spenders on the negative side. They're going to be losing a lot of money. They don't earn anywhere near 4% on those kind of credit card transactions. And so when, you know, when they have people spending millions of dollars, that's going to be a big problem for them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We'll, we'll see what happens there. But so would you get it if it comes out that way and it's like an unlimited 4% back, you need to a hundred K us bank, would you move money there and get this card? If it comes out, like as we, as we would like hope and imagine and get excited about 4% everywhere, like, would you do it? I mean, would you be like, nah, it's not going to last. I'm not going to bother. What would you do?

Well, that's an, that's a really interesting question. That second part in general, I don't like when people say I'm not going to do this amazing thing because it might not last. My, my approach usually is no, you should, you should jump on it right away. If you don't think it'll last and, you know, get in while, while it's good. I, I've known too many people who and you know get in while while it's good i i've known too many people who you know looked at things you know i'm going way back in time now you know target had this red card that'll let you basically uh earn credit card rewards for free and and a bunch of people said that i'm not gonna bother because it's not gonna last it's true it didn't last but i i heard for a while i heard huge numbers of rewards while it did last.

And so I think that's a mistake. This is a little more than just applying for a card because it's also moving $100,000 around. But yeah, I mean, if there are no gotchas, no obvious gotchas, totally. I mean, you know, like I was saying before, imagine you're earning 4% cashback. Imagine you treat it. Imagine what you really wanted was transferable points. Well, you've got these pennies become amazing transferable points because you're earning, you know, most types of points you can buy for less than two cents each, at least when they're on sale, like almost any kind of airline mile when it's on sale. So wait for those sales and use this cash back to be essentially earning over two points per dollar in whatever that currency is that you want. With programs like IHG and Hilton, where they often have sales for half a cent each, it's like you're earning eight points per dollar for all of those types of points if you buy those points when they're on sale. So let me back up with one more thing.

I don't want to spend all show talking about this one card, but as you were talking, it just dawned on me that we're both sitting here saying, this is crazy. It can't last if it happens. There's got to be some gotchas. We're very, very skeptical of this. And we're like, oh, US Bank is in trouble. They're going to lose a bunch of money on this, blah, blah, blah.

And how did we not, either of us, talk about the fact that US Bank already has a card that essentially earns 4.5% back, quote unquote, everywhere? I mean, the Altitude Reserve card offers three points per dollar spent on mobile wallets. So any money you're spending in person, where you can tap your phone to pay or tap your smartwatch to pay, you can be earning three points per dollar and then using those points at one and a half cents per point to book travel through U.S. Bank or to book qualifying travel and redeem real-time mobile rewards. So that's not the same, I know, as 4% everywhere where you swipe the card anywhere, use it online, et cetera.

But it's also not all that different necessarily. Like maybe this is going to work out. Yeah. I think it is different because some of people's like biggest expenses that they're paying taxes, paying rent or, or you know, buying, buying a new car, buying a, buying a yacht, whatever it is. A lot of those things tap to pay isn't available, but you might be able to pay with your credit card. Maybe, you know, you might have to go through a service like plastic or Melio to pay with a credit card, but you can. And, and yeah, so you could be looking at some big numbers. I mean, we, we have people write in, right? Like with huge tax bills, like, you know, towards a million dollars.

And so, you know, this is a crazy amount of money to get for paying your taxes this way. True, true story. True story. All right. So we'll see what happens there. The U.S. Bank Smartly card, which is smartly named or named smartly, depending on how you look at it. We'll see.

We'll see if it works out to be as good as it sounds. All right. Last thing in card news, we've got the updated guide to credit card application rules by a bank. Tim updated that this week and what was new there that we added to the guide. I just wanted to point out that it's there. I don't know how many listeners know that we have a guide. So, you know, when you're going to sign up for a American Express card or a Chase card or, you know, city, whatever, you might have questions about like, well, am I eligible? I just signed up for a different Chase card three weeks ago. Do they have any rules that will prevent this? And they all do have various rules or sort of guidelines in some cases about like how often you can sign up for cards from the bank a

lot of them have very specific sometimes very complicated rules and Tim put all the major banks into one guide about so you could look up what those rules are the guide also includes things like phone numbers and web links so that you can check your application status after you've applied. Also phone numbers for calling for reconsideration if you've been denied, which is something I don't know that we mention often enough. That when you apply for a new card, if you get denied, that's not the end of the story. You can often, often call the bank, explain why you want the card, offer to move credit

from other cards if you have any from that same bank. And often you can get the denial reversed. So that's something to keep in mind. And this is a resource that you can look up to get all that information. Great point for some more points. So definitely take a look at that. We'll have a link in the show notes. All right, next up, Mattress Running the Numbers.

This week's Mattress Running the Numbers, we've got a promotion from Marriott Homes and Villas. You can earn double Elite Night credit on your Marriott Homes and Villas bookings. You need to book by September 20th. And I should say, this is, I believe, just for Marriott Elite members. So it's somewhat targeted. If you need to have Marriott Elite status, I think, to be targeted for it.

So you need to book by September 20th and stay by December 31st. And Marriott Homes and Villas, as a reminder, is their vacation rental booking platform. So this is properties like what you might find on Airbnb or VRBO, Verbo, however you pronounce it. So anyway, you have to register first in order to earn the double elite night credit. And you have to stay a minimum of two nights and spend a minimum of $1,000 in order to get the double elite night credit. So Greg, is it worth booking some Marriott homes and villas vacation rentals to earn double elite night credit? So when I saw the headline for this, I was kind of excited about this because last year I earned some Elite Night credits. They were doing a promo very short time where they offered 40,000 points for a four-night stay.

And I found multiple four-night stays in South Africa for four nights for a total of about $200. And so I earned multiple of those 40,000 point bonuses and also earned regular like one elite night per night for those. And that helped me get to titanium status with Marriott. And I've been earning titanium status for many years in a row now. But this year, it's not looking likely. I'm at like 54 nights now. I think I have on the books maybe six more nights that I'll spend.

So that would get me to around 60. And so I still need 15 more to get to titanium, which regards 75 nights. I could choose my 50 night choice benefit to be five nights. So I need 10 nights. So I was looking at this thinking, oh, could I just book a five night stay for around $250 in South Africa, which, by the way, I was able to just email the people who ran the condo that I had rented and just say, you know, because they had emailed me asking for when I was going to arrive and everything. I just said, actually, I'm just doing this for the points. Can you just check me in whatever is necessary to check me in? And you don't even have to do anything or clean the place or anything.

So they were very happy to do that. So, you know, I figured five nights for about $250. Then I saw that minimum $1,000 spend. And suddenly I'm like, oh, I don't, I'm not willing to a mattress run for that much. Right. But so you're right. You're absolutely right. And that was my thought when I saw this. But as you were talking about what you did last year, I was like, wait a second.

Hang on. So you said last year you were able to book, what was it, four nights stay for around 200 bucks? That's what you said, right? Yeah. So sorry. Stick with me here then. So if you're able to book that same place instead for 20 nights, presumably five times that, right, it would cost a thousand dollars. And with this promotion, if you spent that thousand dollars and your 20 nights stay,

you should presumably end up with 40 elite nights. So now you don't need that because it would be overkill to get to titanium status. But for somebody that has, you know, 25 nights or 35 nights, I guess we've got 35 nights so far this year and you're eligible to sign up for this. Is it worth spending a thousand dollars to get to titanium status? The problem is that titanium status just doesn't offer much above what platinum status offers and requires, you know, 25 more nights. So, so, you know, would you spend a thousand dollars to get, you get United silver status, which is nice. United silver, you'd get a category where a free night certificate up to 40 K when you hit 75

nights. I forget about that. Yeah. So, so you get silver status and that, is that a choice benefit or is that one you just get at the 75? No, that's a choice. So that would be instead of a nightly upgrade awards. But I think that's probably the one that we would advise most people to take. So free night certificate worth up to 40 K points and United silver for

a thousand bucks. If somebody were sitting at around 35 nights what do you think is that worth it is it worth it yeah and and don't forget they will get a choice benefit at 50 nights too all right because of this so a little more value there but it's a little harder to quantify because you don't get the uh free night as one of the options it's i i put it on the fence. That seems like a lot of money to spend, but at the same time, it could be.

I'll mention something, a couple things. Amex frequently has Amex offers for married homes and villas. So if there was one that required $1,000 spend, it's often more than that. And we'll'll give you, you know, two hundred dollars back, something like that. That would help a lot. Another thing is when I saw this, I started browsing the, you know, places in South Africa and and I got a email from Capital One Shopping saying, how about having, I forget what it was, something like 12% back at Marriott Homes and Villas. So, you know, that would be another reward.

So, yeah, I mean, what do you think? This is looking potential. Yeah, I think it's got some potential, particularly if you weren't already going to hit 50 nights. If you're already going to hit 50, then you're talking about 12 or 13 or something for $1,000. I don't know. I'm not sure. It starts to get a little more hairy to me as to whether or not it's worth spending that much money. But I think if you were going to be under 50, so you weren't going to make it to platinum status even, and you have the shot here to get to all the way to titanium uh for that price i mean so if you figure the free night certificate that's up to 40k points i don't know exactly what our value on that is but i'm gonna say it's probably more than 200 anyway that we value the 40k cert hat right it's gotta be gotta

be more than that so so 200 bucks let's say for the 40k cert yeah um and then you know you get what let's say 100 bucks from capital one shopping yeah yeah and i mean if there were an amex offer then then i think that definitely puts it over the top but yeah but if there's not an amex offer yeah so let's say 100 bucks from capital one shopping 200 bucks out of the cert was there another benefit i just i forgot about a second ago i thought there was something else, Jim. Oh, your 50 night benefit. Yeah. You get the nightly upgrade awards, which are hard to quantify because they're, they're not, they don't always clear, but when they do, I mean, it's some, I've had them clear and it can be, it can be valuable.

Yeah. So, I mean, I think that, I think it's potentially worth it. Obviously you get a free breakfast, you're gonna get lounge access at, you know, both of those things at most sort of Marriott places, but not all brands. It depends on where you're planning to stay next year, I guess, and how valuable that status will be. It's not totally unreasonable. I guess let's you have that status, that could drive some things. So, for example, one of the benefits of titanium is it makes you eligible for suite upgrades at Ritz properties, whereas platinum doesn't make you eligible for that. And so if you're going to be staying at Ritz, you know, that makes potentially the stay a little better because of that. Benefitor might make it more aggravating when you don't get upgraded.

One or the other. One or the other. Yeah. but something that might not be entirely unreasonable if you're, you know, if you're hyper aware of where to set your expectations and, and what you think you're going to try to do with the status. So maybe, maybe, but be aware of all those things. Oh,

one, one other thing that we should have mentioned that we didn't, I forgot. I mentioned this in the post. Oddly, the terms say that the bonus elite nights are going to post three to six weeks after you check out and that they'll count for status in the year in which they post. Now, I'm a little confused about the way it's written, which I want to emphasize. I don't know that it's going to work the way it's written.

The way it's written sounds like they're going to post three to six weeks after you check out and they'll count in that year. So if you stay in November, it's possible they won't post until January. And then they wouldn't, again, the way it's written, count for status this year. They'd count for status next year as the bonus nights. So you would get like soon after checkout, you should get the elite nights in this year. But the bonus nights is a bit of a gamble if you wait too long to make your stay. Now, for all I know, I would have expected that when the bonus elite nights post, they're going to post backdated to the day of your stay. That was what I would expect, but that's not what

the terms say. I don't know whether it's going to happen the way I would really expect it to, or whether it's going to happen the way the terms are written. Either way, know that if you don't check out of your stay until sometime in like November or December, it's a gamble as to whether those nights are going to count for this year or next year. So know that you're doing it that way. That's big. So we don't know. I mean, it could be a good thing depending on how you want to plan it. But I need to mention one more thing as well, which is I did look to see if I could find a 20 night stay for exactly the reason that Nick said. In South Africa, I could not find anything anywhere near that price that I'd gotten before. My previous stays were in May,

which I think must be very much off season. In South Africa. It was in the Cape Town area. Again, I couldn't find anything near that price. So you're going to want to look further afield to maybe somewhere in Indonesia or somewhere that you might be able to find cheap rates. But at least I wasn't able to find it in South Africa. The Homes and Villas website has a AI companion now, and I actually found it kind of useful

to actually ask it, find me a place for 20 nights in a row that's less than this amount of dollars. It wasn't able to actually find that um for south africa but maybe it can elsewhere i don't know interesting very interesting good to know all right so there's your mattress running the numbers let's talk about points of view so we got a segment here called points of view what's this about greg i just renamed points talk yeah i like it points of view i didn't like points talk. Let's talk about points talk.

Nah. Okay. So points of view. We've got a bunch of kind of miscellaneous things to talk about here. First up, just a notice that right now there is a number of transfer bonuses going on. So we've got a 30% transfer bonus from Amex membership rewards to Hilton. Now Hilton normally, I mean, Amex to Hilton transfers are usually one to two. You get two Hilton points for every Amex point. So now with this 30% transfer bonus, you get 2.6 Hilton points

for every one Amex point. That goes through September 30th. And as a reminder, there's another one from Amex that's ongoing to all September 30th. And as a reminder, there's another one from Amex that's ongoing to all the different Avios programs that they support, like British Airways Avios and Iberia Avios and so on. You get a 30% transfer bonus through September 30th as well. And there's a new bonus from Capital One to Air France KLM Flying Blue, 20% though, through September 29th. So you got some opportunities to get potentially outsized value with your points. We always tell people that we generally don't recommend speculatively transferring, but rather taking advantage if you have a near-term use in mind. Now, that said,

there are some instances we've talked about more over the last year and a few previous episodes about why you might consider a speculative transfer bonus in certain situations. And those are two programs that I think we've both said are ones that maybe we would consider a speculative transfer to because they are pretty widely useful. Yeah. Although my optimism for transferring to Avios prospectively has decreased now that one of my favorite uses, which is the Qatar Avios short haul flights, was devalued. They've made those more expensive. They're no longer the best way to book short American Airlines flights, unfortunately. So yeah, I, I, I've moved from the probably would do it if I, if I didn't have a healthy balance of obvious to,

nah, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna do it prospectively anymore. And you see for me, like I've never, I never made that redemption and it wasn't really on my radar. And so the devaluation there was like, I mean, it stinks for people who are able to use it, but it wasn't something that would affect my perspective on prospectively or speculatively transferring there. So anyway, it just depends. It's going to vary person to person. I'm not going to probably make any speculative transfers on these, but more discussion on that another day, probably. But anyway, let's talk about preferred hotels because preferred hotels is something you've written about quite a bit. So you can use choice privileges points to book preferred hotels. And for a while,

this was very, very good value. But now all of a sudden I saw some headlines this week, right? That this is really drastically increased in price, or at least some of them have, right? Big devaluations in some cases. Yes. Some properties. It wasn't long ago that the most expensive preferred hotel book through In some cases. than 30,000 points per night for the top end preferred hotels that were available to book through choice. Preferred hotels, by the way, preferred hotels and resorts is a marketing group of hotel, independent hotels, very much like small luxury hotels of the world. It's just another one, preferred hotels. And so what happened is they are now, the top end ones are now 118,000 points. So that's an incredible increase from the 55,000.

That's more than double. So pretty awful at the headline news. There's some good news in terms of not everything has gone bad. So I didn't notice any going down that would be really good news but um what i did notice is that a number of properties did not go up or did not go up much at all um so i re-ran an analysis i had done previously where i looked for all the hotels that that would always give you at least around one cent per point value with your choice points.

So that would be around two cents per point value with Citibank or Wells Fargo because of the one to two transfer. So these are really good values. And the way I did this is the Preferred Hotels website lists for most of their hotels a starting at price. So I used that starting at price and I matched it to the Choices website where they list all the preferred hotel point prices and then was able to calculate the minimum value you'd get on season. You know, the hotels will be more. So if you could find availability of points, your value would be even more. Anyway, good news is there's quite a few.

In the U.S., you've got one in Laguna Beach, California. You've got one in New York City. And you've got one in Santa Barbara. So we've got three always good value properties in the U.S. Now, the if you could find availability is important. Some of these, you have to tab through the US. Now, if you could find availability is important. Some of these, you have to tab through the calendar and you only see a few littered around the whole year of upcoming availability, but that varies a lot by property, how much availability there is. In Europe, we have a lot. We've got in Cork, Ireland. We've got in Edinburgh, Grenada, Lisbon, Malta, Oslo, Zurich.

So lots of options in Europe. And then beyond Europe, we've got one in Costa Rica, one in Tenerife, one in Singapore, and one in Franschhoek, South Africa. So, yeah, I was encouraged by that analysis. It seemed like there may be more than there were before that are sometimes available. So when I'd done this analysis before, a lot of the ones I had found showed that they were just not available. That meant nowhere on the calendar was there any availability. And I put those all in a separate section because they really weren't. But these are all at least sometimes available.

And I think there's more than there were before. So that's good. Yeah. All right. So some less bad news than what the headline communicated anyway there, that there are some that are not. There are still opportunities for good value, even if not as good as everything once was. But that's, that is relatively good to know because it means that

you can't hunt through for good values. And, you know, we, we like to live on those edges where, you know, we find those good values. So that's great to hear. And those are awesome destinations that people will probably be interested in. Unfortunately, the 118,000 points, that's tough to stomach and the ones that went up that high. Oh, yeah. I just wouldn't even look at booking those, I don't think. I mean, I can't think of a situation where I'd say, oh, that's good value. Right. Right. Yeah. Okay. All right. I think that wraps up our points of view and makes us move on now to this week's main event. Main event time, how to amass Chase Ultimate Rewards points.

So let's start with why we would want to, just real briefly. We can and probably will do a whole show on this, but Chase points are really valuable. First of all, if you have the Sapphire Reserve card, you can redeem your points for travel through the Chase portal and get 1.5 cents per point value. Just booking flights, hotels, whatever is available through the travel portal, you'll get that value. than 1.5 by transferring points to transfer partners like Hyatt, like United, Air Canada Aeroplan, British Airways Avios, Air France KLM Flying Blue, Virgin Atlantic, and there's several others as well. I just pointed out some that I personally frequently use. Yeah. I mean, I think

between the two of us use a lot of these very often and get far more than one and a half cents per point in value. Just yesterday, I was looking at hotels in New York City, and I don't know if there's an event going on or just rates have gone up so much. But one after another, I was looking at three or four or five cents per point in value or even more than that. I mean, there was one standard room that was 29,000 points or a cash rate of $1,900. Not necessarily a super luxury property either, just the fact that prices have been high in many markets for lodging. And so Hyatt often offers opportunities like that to get great value, but certainly all those airline programs too. So yeah, so we like our ultimate rewards points because they make those things possible.

Certainly most of my Hyatt points come from transfers from Chase Ultimate Rewards. But that means I need to have Chase Ultimate Rewards points available to transfer over. And my balances are getting lower than I like. So how do I get more of them, Greg? What do I do if I want to amass lots and lots of ultimate rewards points? All right. Well, no one's going to be surprised to hear this, that the best way to earn a lot is through credit card welcome bonuses. Sign up for a new card when they have a big welcome bonus and meet the minimum spend requirements and you get a big chunk of points. Of course, there are rules involved in applying for these, like the Sapphire Preferred and the Sapphire Reserve applications each say if you've received a welcome bonus on this card or the other Sapphire card in the past 48 months, you're not eligible.

It says if you have either of those cards currently, you're not eligible. You can look at our guide to all the application rules to see what those are. But to the extent that you're able to navigate those rules, there's lots of cards available where you can earn a welcome bonus. Sapphire Preferred and Reserve are you got to kind of think of together because you can only apply for one or the other at a time and then have to wait 48 months after getting the welcome bonus. So with those, I would just look for whichever one

has the bigger welcome bonus and go for that one. There are two freedom cards, the Freedom Unlimited and the Freedom Flex. And with those, I'd particularly watch for when they have like special welcome offers, like sometimes like Freedom Unlimited, we've seen earn an extra one and a half points per dollar. And since that card earns one and a half points per dollar

as their base earning rate, that meant 3x everywhere going forward. And in addition to the Freedom Cards, you've got three different Chase business cards, Inc. cards, the Inc. Business Preferred, the Inc. Business Unlimited, and the Inc. Business Cash that are all options. And they tend to have fantastic welcome bonuses. And they are not subject to 24 month rules. So there's a lot of opportunity there with those ink cards. Yeah.

And so two other things that I think are worth mentioning in the same breath as everything in this section of the show so far. Greg mentioned the Sapphire Preferred and Sapphire Reserve. He'd go for whichever one has the better welcome offer at the time you're going to get it. And if you're hearing that and you're saying, well, doesn't it depend on which card is better for your situation in terms of the bonus categories? The reason that Greg is kind of ambivalent towards that is because the welcome offer will probably mitigate whatever additional earnings you might have on one card versus the other. And because Chase generally

allows cardholders to product change between different cards in the same family. So if you get the Sapphire Preferred today, but you ultimately want to have the Sapphire Reserve long term, a year from when you get approved, you will likely be able to product change. Now, sometimes there's minimum credit limits required in order to do that. It's not a guarantee, but by and large, I have never run into an issue trying to product change or move credit lines around to be able to accommodate that. So that's something worth knowing that you're going to be able to product change between those and the Freedom Cards or between the various different business cards, most likely, if you decide that a different one is a better fit for you. So that was thing number one to know about those.

And number two is that Greg mentioned three of the Chase Inc. business cards, but there actually is one other Inc. business card that he didn't mention. It's worth, I think, mentioning what that is and why that isn't part of this discussion. So we've got the Inc. business premier card, right? That's right. That's right. Which is confusing. Yeah, it's really confusing. In order to explain that, I also need to explain something else,

which is that each of the fee-free cards or no annual fee cards, the Freedom Unlimited, the Freedom Flex, and the Inc. Business Unlimited and Cash are all advertised as cashback cards, but under the covers, they earn Chase Ultimate Rewards points. And those points then can be moved to, for example, the Sapphire Preferred or Sapphire Reserve card or the Inc. Business Preferred card, so that those points then become more valuable because they can be transferred, they can be used to book travel through the Chase portal at better than one cent per point value. I'm glad you mentioned that because we'll get an email every now and then that's like,

oh, I heard you talk about the Inc. Business Unlimited card. And I thought you said that you get 90,000 points, but I'm only seeing $900 as the option for the welcome bonus. And that's because the $900, if that's what you're seeing, is being awarded in the form of 90,000 ultimate rewards points. So that's what you're seeing, is being awarded in the form of 90,000 Ultimate Rewards points. So that's just to add on to it. Yeah, that's really important to understand.

All right, so now getting to the fourth ink, the Ink Business Premier. That's a weird one because, frustratingly, Chase still calls the points earned on that card ultimate rewards points but they do not allow those points to be moved to another card they don't allow them to be transferred to uh transfer partners you can only use them well you the only good value use of them is to redeem them for one cent per point. And so that card is really best thought of as a cashback card, as opposed to things like the Inc. Business Cash, which should be thought of as a points earning card. Yeah. And I apologize if I've made this confusing for somebody who's new, but I thought it was worth mentioning because we hear from someone periodically who was interested in the Chase Inc. Business Preferred card because that's what they've heard us talk about.

But they accidentally applied for the Premier card, which you probably don't want. So if you find the rest of this conversation interesting about Chase Ultimate Rewards, the one reason I brought this up is so that you don't get confused and apply for the Inc. Business Premier card When you really want the ink business preferred card, the card we're going to be talking about for the rest of today's episode. If you hear us talk about an ink card that has a P in it is the preferred one. So all of the cards we're talking about here again, one more time, quickly, the list, Chase Sapphire preferred and reserve freedom, unlimited and freedom flex chasing business preferred unlimited in cash,

all earn Chase Ultimate Rewards points that can be combined. And that's what this is all about, amassing those Ultimate Rewards points. Yeah, yeah, great point. And if you accidentally sign up for the Inc. Business Premier, it's not the end of the world. You still will earn a big cash welcome bonus if you meet the spend requirements. And it won't stop you from being eligible for signing up for other Chase cards. So don't worry if you make that mistake. Okay. So you can earn points from the welcome bonuses from all these, but that's not it, right? That's not it. Another way you can earn points is through referral bonuses. Refer your

friends. So once you have these cards, you can then get your own little referral link and send that to your friends and get more points. The Freedom cards only offer you 5,000 points. The Sapphire cards, 10,000 points. And the Ink cards, 20,000 points. That's the usual rate. Sometimes Chase has promotions where they'll offer you more than the usual rate for referring friends so that's something worth keeping an eye out for now these points are not exactly as good I mean they're good right but it's not

exactly as good as earning welcome bonus points. Do you want to explain why? Well, okay. So keep in mind that these points are points you're earning in addition to the person you refer getting the welcome bonus. So for instance, if my wife was interested in getting the, I don't know, ink cash card, and let's say there's a 75,000 point welcome bonus on it. I don't know what there's going to be when you hear this.

You need to go to our website and see whatever's current. I'm just making up a number here. But let's say it's a 75,000 point bonus on the card. And I refer my wife from one of my cards. I'll get the 20,000 points for referring her and she'll get the 75,000 welcome bonus still. So it's just a way of juicing up the number of points you earn. But Greg's point about it not being quite as nice is that you do get taxed on the referral bonuses. So you're going to get a 1099 as though those were awarded to you in cash. And so you're going to owe tax on them. So they're not free points exactly. Whereas the welcome bonus on a new credit card has traditionally not been considered income.

It's been considered a rebate instead for tax purposes. So you don't pay income tax on the, you know, keep in mind, this isn't tax advice. We're not tax people, but, but anyway, the way things stand, the precedent is that you won't owe tax on a welcome bonus on a card, but you will on a referral bonus. So yeah, keep in mind, it's going to cost you something. Right. Right. All right. And so keeping in mind the welcome bonuses and referral bonuses as good ways of earning points, now you need to think about multiplayer mode. That means earning points with someone else. If you and a significant, work together with your finances and everything, then you should be thinking about doing all this in what we call two-player mode.

Both of you can apply for all the cards we talked about. There's no reason for just one of you to do that. And you don't have to say, well, you know, my spouse already got the freedom unlimited, so I can't get the bonus on that. That's not true. You can both get it. Even if you're an authorized user on your, on your spouse's card, that doesn't matter. So you can each get them all. You can refer each other. So you can earn those referral points by referring each other. So, you know, once you each have one card, you can refer each other to another and so

on. So that's pretty cool. Now, referrals are within sort of families. So in order to refer someone to any of the three ink cards, you need to have at least one ink card in order to do that. Same thing with the Freedom cards and the Sapphire cards. You need to have one in each of those families to do that. Yeah, and then for sort of long-term, one of the nice things about playing in two-player mode is you don't need to keep the cards that make your points more valuable. You don't need to keep two of them.

So within your household, when you've earned points, you can combine them all to one person's account. And only one person in the household technically needs to be able to transfer points to transfer partners. So you're always going to want to have in your household, but not for both of you necessarily, either a Sapphire Preferred card or a Sapphire Reserve card or an Inc. Business Preferred card. You don't have to have two card, you, you don't have to have to, you know, you don't both have to have one of those. Yes. So, so the rationale there is that those are the three cards that allow transfers to chase transfer partners like Hyatt and United and all those airlines that we mentioned a few minutes ago. So in order to transfer to those,

you need to have one of those cards. However, because within a household, you can combine your points. If my wife has a Sapphire Reserve card and I only have Freedom cards, I can move the points from my Freedom cards to my wife's Sapphire Reserve, and then she can transfer them on to transfer partners. So that's what Greg means when he says, I don't need to have a Sapphire Reserve or a Sapphire Preferred. If she's got one, we can just combine points and she can transfer on to partners potentially. So you don't both need a card with an annual fee. That's not to say you might not want them or have them, but you don't need to have two cards with an annual fee if you're working together in a household and sharing everything. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that becomes a big deal, especially with a Sapphire reserve

card, which has very high annual fee. And so if you're interested in being able to book travel and get 1.5 cents per point value from your points, you're going to want one of you to have the Sapphire reserve card, but you don't have to pay two annual fees in order to do that within your household. Great point. Okay. So you can earn a lot of points from welcome bonuses. You can earn points from referral bonuses, including playing in two player mode and referring your spouse, partner, whatever additional player in order to get those new cards and then combining your points. So those are three things so far, but then what about spend? What are the best ways to earn points by spending? Yeah, so there are a couple ways

to earn five points per dollar from your spend. First of all, the Freedom Flex card has rotating categories. So they change up the categories every three months, so every quarter, and offer five points per dollar within those categories. And they're usually like broad categories like gas stations and supermarkets, restaurants, drugstores, you know, things like that, that you're likely to be able to use some of those categories. There is a limit of fifteen1,500 spend per quarter. But over time, Chase doesn't prevent you from having multiples of these cards. So let's say you've already signed up

for the Freedom Flex card. And now a year later, you're like, oh, I want to spend more than $1,500 at supermarkets this quarter, if that's the 5X category. Well, you could look at one of your other cards. Maybe you've had your Sapphire Preferred card for a year. Call up Chase and ask them, can I product change this Sapphire Preferred to a Freedom Flex? And assuming they let you do that, the points are preserved and you now have, now you can spend up to $1,500 on both of your Freedom Flex cards. Yeah. So that's a way of expanding your capacity there to earn 5X. And keep in mind, whatever merchants that they include, whatever purchases you're

making at those merchants are going to qualify for the 5x, whatever you're buying. So you get a wide range of things, especially oftentimes, like Greg said, there are broadly useful categories like grocery stores and gas stations that sell lots of different things. So anything you grab on the rack is going to earn you the 5x. So that's that. Then we've also got the Inc. Business Cash Card. And that card also offers some intriguing 5x categories. So there's office supplies, cellular, landline, cable. Those are all 5x on up to $25,000 per year on the Inc. Business Cash Card. So another great card to have because, of course, office supply stores, for instance, sell, again, a wide range of different products that might be useful for you that you might need. And whatever it is you grab off the rack in the office supply store and

bring up to the checkout counter, you're going to earn your five X on it when you're paying for it with your ink business cash card. So that's a great deal. And we often on the blog will publish a quick deal when there's a particularly good deal happening in an office supply store in order to alert people to those types of opportunities. Yeah, exactly. And then beyond that, things like the cell phone and landline cable, if anyone has landlines anymore, being able to get 5X on all of those, it may not add up to huge numbers of points. But if you have one of these cards and you just set it up to auto pay, if your if your utility allows that, then, you know, that's a really easy way to be getting five points per dollar on that on that spend without without thinking about it.

Yeah, yeah. Super easy. I mean, I could easily imagine someone with cellular and cable TV spending $200 a month and you're looking at 1,000 points every month as kind of like just a no-brainer. Set it and forget it. 12,000 points a year, that adds up. So keep in mind, again, that those 5X categories are limited to a combined $25,000 in purchases per calendar year, although – or no, per card member year, not calendar year. Per card member year, not calendar year, per card member year. Although, like Greg said before, it is possible if you have an ink business cash and you also have an ink business unlimited and you decide, oh, the ink business unlimited isn't really

working for me anymore, but I could use some more capacity to spend off the supply stores or on cable because I'm buying cable for lots of people or whatever it might be, then, uh, then you can product change your ink business unlimited potentially to a second ink cash and increase your capacity for spend there. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, definitely. In fact, that's, that's what, uh, I think makes a lot of sense with the, you can't product change from business card to a personal card or vice versa, but within the ink cards, like you might have signed up for the ink business unlimited or the ink business preferred either one mainly for the welcome bonus. And so a year later, you might look at it and say, well, I don't really need this card in its current form. Let's product change to the ink business cash, like Nick said.

And then you have more of that 5x capacity. If you're, you If, if you're, you know, if you're needing more capacity, that's something you can do. And the ink business cash, um, has no annual fees. So there's no, uh, that's a better option, I think, than, than, uh, canceling the card like thing, but ink business preferred, which does have an annual fee. Um, you might not want to pay that annual fee anymore. I prefer product changing that over canceling the card. Yeah. And that's a great point of question that came in just this week from a reader that was very specifically on that topic, said they had an ink business preferred,

but didn't want to keep it. When's the right time to cancel it is what they were asking. And that was the first thing that came to my mind was, well, no time, don't cancel it. Just product change it because you can product change to an ink cash or an ink unlimited. And if you're like, oh, but I already have an ink cash. That's fine. You can have two of them. You can have two of the ink business unlimited. You can't apply for one that you already have. No, I take that back. And the business side, you can't. So that's not even a limitation there on the consumer side. You can't apply for one that you already have, but you can product change to one that you already have. So anyway, so that's that. So that's five X categories, but that's not it. There are other categories. Yeah. There's plenty of opportunities to earn

three X as well, which is, which is really nice. So Sapphire preferred, you could get three points per dollar for dining, streaming services, and online grocery. And we talked in a previous show about how you can earn that with things like the Kroger app. So even if you're in-store using the app, it treats that like an online grocery purchase. The Sapphire Reserve card, three points per dollar for travel and dining. And travel is very broadly defined. So that's really nice. I love using that card for whenever I'm paying for travel, especially because it also has really good travel protections, more so than almost any other card on the market. The Freedom Unlimited and the Freedom Flex card both also have 3X for dining. So in general, all the personal cards we've talked about offer three points per dollar for dining. So

that's a nice abbreviated way of thinking about that. But these also add 3X for drugstores. So the Freedom Unlimited and the Freedom Flex. And the Freedom Flex, right. Yep. Yep. That's right. That's not for all personal cards, but for the Freedom cards, 3X at drugstores, you know, like we were talking about with office supply stores before and grocery stores, at drugstores, you'll get three points per dollar no matter what you're buying in store, as long as it

codes as coming from CVS or Walgreens or whatever. And they just have all kinds of things on their shelves and on those racks by the counter. Plenty of things to buy there. And also keep in mind the Built Rewards app, then you'll additionally earn Built points on your spend at Walgreens anyway. So if you're going to be using, like I just today went to Walgreens and I was like, oh shoot, I meant to, I got to make sure I link up my Freedom Unlimited to my Built Rewards because then I think it's what, one point per dollar on, well, I should say two points per dollar on Walgreens branded merchandise and one point per dollar on everything else. So that's

an addition to the three X that you're earning through chase. You can earn built points too. And one of the reasons we like build points is because they transfer to Hyatt. So, uh, you know, similar sort of a thing. They're very useful points. You could just amp up your earnings a little bit more. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And then the last set of three X's is from the Inc business preferred card where you're getting three X for travel, just like the Sapphire reserve, but without as good of travel protections, still good, but not as good. But also three X for shipping three X for internet cable phone and advertising with social media sites. all that 3x stuff is up to

$150,000 spend per year. That advertising one I could see as being especially valuable for someone with a business that does advertising. I mean, earning 3x could be really valuable there. Yeah. And a card with a very reasonable annual fee at that, $95 a year, that's pretty reasonable. I mean, there's another card that comes to mind, an Amex card that earns four points per dollar on advertising, but has a $375 annual fee. So the $95 annual fee here for a 3X, I mean, that's a pretty good deal. So certainly, like you said, if you've got a business where you're advertising on social media, that could be a really good use. And again, the $150K is in combined purchases across using either the Freedom Unlimited card or the Inc. Business Unlimited card to earn one and a half points per dollar everywhere else rather than earning just one point per dollar with most of the other cards. So that's the way to go.

But both of those cards do have foreign transaction fees. So leave them at home when you're traveling internationally, but you can use them for your miscellaneous spend that wouldn't otherwise use a category bonus within the United States. There you go. There you go. All right. So there you have it in terms of earning from all of those various things. So again, welcome bonuses, referral bonuses, two player mode, referring each other and spend, you got a bunch of different good opportunities for earning chase ultimate rewards points through all of those, but that's not it yet. There are other ways to earn ultimate rewards points as well. So one of those would be through shopping through the chase portal, because chase has a shopping portal, much like other shopping portals we talk about.

We often talk about like Rakuten or top cashback or things like that. But Chase has their own shopping portal. And so you can click through from their shopping portal and and go to Macy's or go to, you know, wherever it is that you're spending your money and earn additional ultimate rewards points per dollar spent. No matter what credit card you use when you check out, by the way, you don't have to use a Chase card when you're making your purchase. As long as you click through the Chase portal and make your purchase in sort of one fell swoop, then you should earn the ultimate rewards points advertised by the Chase shopping portal. Yeah. Yeah. So that's great. There's also, Chase will offer extra points when booking travel through their portal with their various cards. The best one is if you have the Sapphire

Reserve card, you get 10 points per dollar for things like car rentals and hotels booked through Chase. They also offer for Sapphire Reserve card holders 10 points per dollar for dining purchases made through their Chase Dining. Now, I personally haven't used that, even though I dine out a lot, because it's only select places that are available to kind of prepay and earn that 10x. So I think if you're in a major market like New York City, you could probably do really well with that. And here in Ann Arbor, where I am, not so much.

Yeah. So some additional opportunities anyway to earn ultimate rewards points. So all of that combined can add up to quite a few points. So you get a lot of different ways to amass ultimate rewards points and they can be really valuable to use. And again, as Greg said, we'll probably talk in a future episode again about some of our favorite uses of the points, but there's how you can kind of amass your war chest of ultimate rewards points to be able to go to town and redeem them for great value. Exactly.

I think that brings us to this week's question of the week. So for this week's question of the week, we have a question that comes in from a reader named Jason. Jason says, Hi, FM, when does it make sense to credit paid flights to a different airline's frequent flyer program in the same alliance? For example, if I'm flying Alaska, should I use my American Airlines number or my Alaska number? Do any programs have sweet spots for crediting miles back to another airline's frequent flyer program? Thanks. I love the show, Jason. So, Greg, how do you figure out which frequent flyer number? Many airlines belong

to alliances or have partnerships, even if they're not in the same alliance with other airlines. So when you, you know, you're in your reservation online, you could change the frequent flyer number, use either the airline you're flying or any of their other partners for your frequent flyer number. What are some situations where it might make sense to use a different airline's frequent flyer number and how do you figure out what your best option is? Yeah, it's hard. If you're going after elite status and that's what's most important to you, then I think it should be obvious that it can make sense to put, if you're going for American Airlines elite status, for example, and you're flying one of their partners, it can make sense to put your American Airlines number on there. You'll earn some loyalty points that way.

And that's great. And that, of course, applies across, you know, in many situations. Maybe you're going for Delta elite status and you're flying Air France or Virgin Atlantic. You could put your Delta number on those. Or maybe you have elite status with American or with Delta and you want your elite benefits while you're flying with their partner. That might be another instance where you would use that because maybe you'll get a free check bag or lounge access or whatever it might be. So I've done that plenty of times before. You probably have too, where I've used a different airline's frequent flyer number so that I

could get those benefits. Now, you don't always have to do that. Uh, it gets complex because there's lots of different, like if you're flying star Alliance and you have gold status with a different star Alliance airline, you don't necessarily need to credit your flight to the program where you have status in order to, uh, it gets complicated, but, but that's the situation where you might. Yeah. Uh, and, and, and it helps to get, uh, to make sure that it's on your ticket, that you have that level of status, which is great. That's funny that I was so focused on the earning side of things that I wasn't thinking about. The benefits, yeah. To me, that's the more important part. If you have class, because they had Turkish Airlines gold status through a status match.

They were able to skip past a huge line at the airport and use the fast track security. That's a benefit that sometimes you can get with airline elite status. So that's a time, if you have elite status with an airline or you're going for elite status with an airline, then you may consider using whichever airline it is you have or want elite status with on your reservation. That's one of the factors that'll come into play. All right. So that aside, let me just say one more thing. When we did the 40K to far away challenge a number of years ago, I knew I was going to be flying Star Alliance flights a lot. And so I did a status match ahead of time to United with no plans on trying to meet the terms of it, but it gave me 90 days of Star Alliance gold status, which meant when I was flying other airlines I had my United number on there and was able to yeah to do faster lines at the airport sometimes are really big lines I was able to walk by and get into lounges thanks to Star Alliance gold and so that was really really big okay yeah so so we talked

about elite status now the The other thing is sometimes you can just earn more valuable points. So you're talking about booking a paid flight on one airline, but maybe you're not going to earn that many points, uh, by crediting to that airline. Uh, sometimes you can earn a lot more points or more valuable points by crediting to a different airline knowing which is, which is which is tough though. And why don't you talk about that, Nick, how to do that? Yeah. So the easiest way is first to figure out what the fare code is on your ticket, which I say the easiest way, because that first part of it can sometimes be challenging. When you're

booking the ticket, oftentimes there'll be a letter code that tells you what the fare class is. And hopefully you paid attention and you know what that is. If you didn't pay attention, then maybe if you pull up the reservation on the operating airlines website, it'll show what fare class it is. Maybe you're going to have to call somebody or figure out how you figure that out. But once you figure out the fare class, the like the letter code for the fare that you're paying, then go to wheretocredit.com and out of the dropdown, again, that's wheretocredit.com, the word to, wheretocredit.com. Out of the dropdown, pick the airline that you're flying. And then second dropdown, pick the fare code, whatever it is, A, B, C, Q, P, whatever the letter is. And it'll show you how

much you're going to earn with each of the various programs that you can credit to. And that's a really handy tool because it's a quick, simple, easy visual comparison. So you can see what your earnings will be across different airlines because they can vary quite a bit. And so for instance, if you're flying a paid British Airways business or first class ticket, you can earn a boatload of Alaska miles by crediting that to Alaska. You're earning way more Alaska miles than you would British Airways Avios in most cases by crediting that to Alaska instead of to British Airways or to American Airlines or whatever else. You can earn way more with Alaska in that specific situation. That's one that I know of because

it's so much higher in general, but there are lots of other situations where you may consider that too. I just flew a paid ticket on Hawaiian and I had used membership rewards points and the business platinum pay with points rebate to use my membership rewards points to buy the ticket, but it was a paid ticket, a revenue fair. So I had the choices to where I wanted to credit. And initially when I booked the ticket, I looked at where I could credit and I figured I never use Hawaiian Airlines miles. Hawaiian miles aren't particularly valuable. They don't have a lot of great uses. So where else can I credit it? And when I looked at where to credit, it showed me that in international flight, I could credit to American Airlines. So I was flying Tokyo to Honolulu to New York. The Tokyo to Honolulu, I could credit to American Airlines and earn 150% of mileage flown.

But the domestic flight, the flight from Honolulu to New York, I couldn't earn American Airlines and earn 150% of mileage flown. But the domestic flight, the flight from Honolulu to New York, I couldn't earn American Airlines miles on at all. And so that wasn't a particularly appealing option. But oh, Virgin Atlantic was another option that would have offered 150% of mileage flown. So I figured, okay, well, I'll put in my Virgin Atlantic flying club number. But then we found out about the merger with Alaska looking like it's going through and the fact that Hawaiian miles are eventually going to become Alaska miles. Well, now suddenly, I said, oh, well, I better switch back and get my Hawaiian Airlines number on that reservation because now I want to earn the American Airlines or rather the Hawaiian Airlines miles. But

where the credit is going to help you compare that because oftentimes it'll be a case where you'll earn 150% of mileage flown with one program, 100% with another, maybe only 75% with another 25%. It varies from airline to airline and memorizing all of that or individually going to all the partner websites to figure that out. It would really be a pain. And I've never found where to credit to be wrong. I've always found it to be accurate. So I think they must keep it up to date. So with so many different alliances out there, that's the tool I use. Yeah. No, that's great to know. Now, as far as the URL goes, I thought I heard you say the two and where to credit was the number two, but it in fact is just T-O. That's okay.

Thank you. Yeah. Where to credit.com, but we'll put the link in the, in the show notes. There you go. Thank you. Yeah. Wow the link in the, in the show notes. There you go. Thank you. Yeah. Wow. If I said that wrong, I apologize. So anyway, there you go. There you have it. Hopefully that helps you figure out which program you should be crediting to, because that's going to vary depending on your own personal circumstances and which miles you value the most and which miles are going to have the best expiration policy. There's a lot of different ins and outs to consider when you're figuring out where you want to credit. Like maybe you could credit to Turkish, but do you want to credit to Turkish? Because

they're going to expire after a few years and you have to consider those types of things. Anyway, all that out of the way, that brings us to the end of this week's episode. We hope you enjoyed this episode. And if you did, hopefully you'll come check us out a little bit more often. We'll be here every week with the episodes dropping on Fridays, but you can go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list and then get our posts in your email inbox each day or each week. And please follow us on all the various social media. We're on Instagram, Facebook.

You can join our frequent miler insiders, Facebook group, where you can ask questions just like this one and get answers from lots of other knowledgeable group members all the time. And if you have a question that you'd like to be considered for a future question of the week or a piece of feedback for a giant mailbag, you can send that to. Send it to mailbag at frequent miler.com. Bye everybody.