With the announcement of Chase extending their infamous “5/24 rule” to extend to all co-branded and business cards, there has been a lot of discussion about what to do in the interim before the rule takes effect and what to do after the hammer falls. For those who are unfamiliar, the 5/24 rule is that Chase will not approve you for a card if your credit report shows more than five new accounts in the last two years. This was designed to weed out applicants who ‘churn’ their cards for the signup bonuses without adding meaningful value to Chase as customers.
Tag: Barclays
(Targeted) Barclays AAdvantage Aviator Red/Silver: 1000 AAdvantage miles for adding an authorized user
Via Reddit, some people are getting targeted offers for the Barclays Aviator Red offering 1000 AAdvantage miles for adding an authorized user by December 31, 2015. There seems to be no spending requirement attached to this offer.
I personally also received an email title Earn More Miles this holiday for my Barclays AAdvantage Aviator Silver with the following:
There doesn’t seem to be any date restriction on my offer, but there’s no reason not to take advantage right away. So check your email! It’s an easy 1000 miles.
Targeted Spending Offer for Barclaycard Sallie Mae Mastercard Holders
Received this in my email today! I’m a huge fan of my Barclaycard Sallie Mae Mastercard thanks to the 5% cashback on grocery stores (up to $250 per month), 5% cashback on gas (up to $250 per month), and 5% cashback on bookstores, including Amazon.com (up to $750 per month). And of course the standard 1% cashback on everything else. I always recommend this card to my friends and family who aren’t really looking to play the travel hacking game but just want to earn the maximum cashback on the most common everyday spending categories.
Should you downgrade to the no-annual fee version of a card?
There is a lot of benefit to signing up for cards that have annual fees. For example, the US Airways Mastercard (RIP) offered 40k miles on first purchase and payment of an $89 annual fee. Plenty of other cards waive the annual fee (Chase Sapphire Preferred, Amex Starwood Preferred Guest, etc) AND provide you a gigantic sign-up bonus. But when it comes time for you to renew the card (and pay the annual fee) what should you do? Should you keep the card?
The break-even point
Where credit card issuers trick us is in getting us to count the sign-up bonus as part of the card’s value proposition beyond the first year. For example, consider the case of the CapitalOne Venture card. It comes with a 40k point sign-up bonus worth $400 with an annual fee of $59. Should we keep the Venture card for a second year, or downgrade to it’s little sibling, the VentureOne card? Here’s the math:
$59 annual fee / 0.75% extra cash back per dollar spend = $7,867
What that means is if you plan on putting more than $7867 spend on your card, it’s worth it to pay the annual fee to keep the Venture card over the VentureOne.
Wait. What about your $400? Remember that the money is already in your pocket, whether you keep the card another year or not. It therefore should play no role in your decision of whether or not to keep the card.
What if instead you considered replacing it with a 2% cash back card with no annual fee like the Fidelity Amex or Citi Double Cash rather than the VentureOne? Intuitively, your break-even point will be higher, but here’s how the numbers work out:
$59 annual fee / 0% = infinity
So yeah. You’ll never make up the annual fee.
And the Barclaycard Arrival (which bloggers tout as one of the best fixed-value cards out there)? It offers not 2%, but 2.105% cash back when redeeming for travel, and it’s sign-up bonus of 40k points is worth $421 to the Venture card’s $400. Comparing it to the Double Cash or Fidelity Amex:
$89 annual fee / 0.105% extra cash back per dollar spent = $84,761 spend to break even.
To put that into perspective, $84,761 is more money than many households make in a year, forgetting even the fact that people split their spend across multiple cards. Add that to the fact that you can only redeem Arrival points for purchases of $100 or more, and you have a clear winner.
The general case
In general, when deciding between an no-annual fee card and a card with an annual fee (or any two cards, for that matter), you want to consider the following:
Difference in annual fee : Fee for card A - Fee for card B
Difference in earnings : Earnings rate of card A - Earnings rate of card B
Break-even spending: Difference in annual fee / Difference in earnings * 100
A few notes
You might value points for the different cards differently. In that case, the earnings rate is just the value per point (more on that later) * points earned per dollar.
For cards with category bonuses, just take the average earnings rate for a given set of spend, e.g. for a card like the Chase Freedom, maybe you have 75% category bonus spend and 25% general spend, so your earnings rate would be 0.75 * 5% + .25 * 1% = 4%. Typically I only ever use cards with category spend for purchases in the category (with all my non-category spend on a 2% cash back card), so I don’t ever have to do this math.
Reprise
So, should you get the Amex Everyday Preferred card ($95 AF) over it’s little sibling? To keep things simple, let’s only focus on the highest earning category, groceries, and let’s value Membership Rewards points at 1.5 cents / point. Assume also that we hit the transaction bonuses in each case. The Preferred card earns 4.5 points per dollar spent whereas the normal Everyday card earns 2.4 points. Where do we break even?
[$95 annual fee / (1.5 * (4.5 - 2.4))] * 100 = $3015