(upbeat music) - Hello, and welcome to another episode of "All The Hacks," a show about upgrading your life and travel. I'm your host, Chris Hutchins, and today I wanna do a little 2024 planning. I titled this episode, "What's in My Wallet," 'cause I wanted to take a hard look at all the credit cards I have, the ones I use, don't use anymore, and whether there are opportunities for new cards to fit in.

And I wanted to do that publicly 'cause I thought it would be really valuable for you all to hear how I'm thinking about this, because I'm sure many of you are dealing with the same questions. The funny thing about the title is that I don't really carry what traditionally would be a wallet with all these cards I have in it.

I actually just use the Apple MagSafe wallet, and I only carry two credit cards, usually my Amex Gold and my Capital One Venture X, unless I'm traveling, and I use Apple Pay for everything else, or I store those cards in one password and use them online. I'm gonna talk about a lot of cards in this episode.

If you wanna support me or the show, please go to allthehacks.com/cards to check any of them out. It really, really helps, and I really appreciate it. Before we jump in, I wanna kick it off with a story from a listener named Jake. He hadn't really played the card game that much, but after listening, he'd been able to open up a handful of cards.

He wrote to me from a perfect day at the Hyatt Zalara in Montego Bay, Jamaica, where he was able to use points for flights and hotels, and because the property was all-inclusive, all the food and drinks, as well as lounge access on the way down in Atlanta, which he said was not the greatest lounge in Jamaica, which was awesome, and got some free bags thanks to card benefits.

He's got trips planned to Portugal and Argentina in the future. He said he couldn't thank us enough for everything we've shared. So Jake, I'm so glad the trip was awesome, and I'm so glad you're doing what you love. Jake actually is a sommelier, and his wife pointed out that he was constantly helping people plan trips related to wine, and finally kicked off his own business called Terroir Tours, where he leads food and wine tours through remote parts of Italy and beyond.

I hope this new business goes well, and even more, I hope it brings you ample opportunities to earn more points on business cards. So let's jump in right after this. Sometimes the smallest changes make the biggest impact, and Trade Coffee is a great addition to your new year routine, and I am so excited to be partnering with them today.

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First is how you spend. So lots of cards earn bonus points on different categories. So if you are spending a lot in a category, I think it can make sense to have a card that matches with that category. So that's spending. Second is perks. There are some cards that the benefits of having that card far outweigh the cost, and whether you spend anything on that card at all doesn't matter because the perks are so great.

For us, that's the Hilton Aspire card. Between the free night and all the credits you get with a card, it's totally worth the annual fee. And if you wanna check that one out, it's not on our cards page, but you can use my wife Amy's referral link at allthehacks.com/hilton.

And then the third reason to have a card is the bonuses. There are plenty of welcome bonuses that you can get for cards that may or may not make sense for you in the longterm, but that if the bonus is compelling enough, I do think makes sense to get.

My threshold is usually somewhere in the 75 to 100,000 point range. Though, if it's a hotel card, I try to look for something even greater because those points are usually a little less valuable, except Hyatt, where if Hyatt had a 100,000 point offer, I would be jumping on it as soon as I saw it.

Also, and I'm recording this little part right after I recorded the episode, I just noticed that the Amex Platinum referral offers are up to 150,000 point signup bonus. So if you wanna take advantage of that, I'll put my referral link up at allthehacks.com/platinum to all the hacks members that might have platinum cards with 150,000 point bonus there.

So in general, I want cards because they're gonna help me earn more when I spend, they have big bonuses, or they have a lot of perks. Today, I'm gonna focus probably mostly on the spending side, but I will touch a little bit on the perk side as well. Also, when I went through this process for me, there were a couple of goals I had.

One was I wanted to make sure I always was keeping my transferable points. So that means that even though I might not need a particular card with a bank like Amex or Chase, I might wanna keep that card open just so I keep those points alive or find another card that will keep those points alive.

Few other things that are important to me, may or may not be for you, is to have at least one card with good rental car coverage, to maintain some lounge access. There are a lot of promotions I've seen recently where you get bonus for mastercard. So I wanna have at least one mastercard because I have a lot of Visa and Amex cards.

I need a card with no foreign transaction fees, which is pretty easy. And this year, I really wanna try to have more built points and status, but I will come back to that one. Okay, so the first thing I wanna do is talk about how I review the cards I have and my spending and try to pick cards that align.

So for me, fortunately, I use an app called Copilot, which makes it really easy to track all of my spending from last year. So as I'm recording this, I've gone through 2023 and I've looked at how much I spend in a lot of different categories and tried to figure out which ones I spend the most on so I can think about that.

So that was step one. And I'll go through each individual category that I found and talk about the cards that make sense there, many of which I already have, and we'll go a little bit further. And to figure out the value of a card, there are a few things.

So first off, I have this card value tool. If you go to allthehacks.com/cardvalue, I built this spreadsheet. You can download it for as little as $1 if you're interested, where I break down all the cards and how many points you earn on each and make it really easy to type in how much you spend in different categories and see how much adding a certain card would benefit to your points accumulation.

There's a whole video on that page so you can check it out before you have to make the decision but honestly, it's $1. It was part of an experiment to make sure that these products are valuable. So go through each card. Dining was the first category. It was a big spend for me.

I'm already using the Amex Gold card which earns four points per dollar, which was great. But I figure as I go through these categories for people listening, it's also helpful to mention what my backups would be if I wasn't using that card. So for Dining, while I think the Amex Gold at 4X is great, the Capital One Saver also earns 4X points on Dining, which is fantastic.

And the Citi Custom Cash earns 4X points but only up to $500 a month. And then in the 3X Camp, there are so many cards. You've got the Chase Reserve, the Chase Preferred, the Freedom Flex, the Freedom Unlimited, all four Chase cards and then the Built Rewards card which also gets three points on Dining.

So Dining, I feel like I have it covered. I have a couple backup cards as well for anyone that doesn't take Amex. So then I looked at Groceries and I don't spend more than $25,000 a year on Groceries so I'm in the clear with Amex Gold because you get 4X points on Groceries up to that $25,000 limit.

Additional to that, if you're looking for a card and that one's not a fit, the Saver card from Cap One gets 3X and the Citi Premier card also gets 3X. I'm gonna focus on points earning cards but I'll talk a little bit about Cash Back later. Next big category for me was Travel.

Right now I'm using the Chase Reserve to get 3X on Travel. Some other 3X cards include the Amex Green, the Citi Premier, which is 3X on Flights and Hotels but not all Travel. And then there are a lot of cards that earn huge bonuses on Travel with the caveat that you need to spend them in the Travel Portal.

So for example, the Capital One Venture X and the Chase Reserve get 10X on Hotels and 5X on Flights when booked in their Travel Portals. The Chase Preferred is also 5X on Hotels and Flights booked in the Travel Portal. The Platinum card earns 5X on Hotels in the Portal.

And what's interesting about the Travel Portal is there are some downsides. Doing a little bit of research for this episode, there are actually some upsides. So I take that with a word of caution when I think about how much I can earn with Travel. The obvious downside is that when you book through a Travel Portal, you're usually booking through an agency, which means you have to deal with that agency to make changes.

We were taking a trip with a bunch of friends to Cabo and our flight was so delayed that everyone wanted to go take another flight and everyone that had booked through the airline, and this was canceling a United flight to take an Alaska flight, everyone was able to very quickly and simply call United and cancel the flight because it was so late, except the people who booked it through a Travel Portal who needed to get Amex Travel to help out.

And it was a little tricky 'cause they'd already checked in. And so I'm not actually sure to this day whether those people all got their refunds, but I know they were trying. So that's a big downside to booking the Travel Portal. I've definitely used the Portal to book flights and it's gone fine, but I just caution that if things go wrong, having booked in the Portal can create a few problems.

And also if you're booking hotels, there are some Travel Portal hotel rates that don't always accrue points. So that's another thing to keep in mind. However, I was very surprised when I was looking at an article that the Points Guy wrote, which I'll link to in the show notes, where they compared the pricing for flights, booking direct and at the Portal.

And while sometimes Travel Portals were expensive, there were almost as many times where the Travel Portal was cheaper. And that was something I was really shocked by. So I can definitely tell you that when I'm going forward, looking at expensive flights, I'm certainly gonna look in the Portal because there were times where flights were five, 10, 15, 20% cheaper booking in a Chase or Citi or Amex Portal than it was actually booking directly with the airline.

Though, if I remember correctly, I don't actually think there was a single time where booking in the Chase Portal was cheaper, but Citi, CapOne and Amex all sometimes were a little cheaper. All right, I'll also link to an article from the Points Guy about reasons to avoid booking for a Travel Portal if you wanna go deeper, but I just wanna caution that when I'm talking about earning points on travel, I'm talking about earning points on any type of travel booked anywhere, not the Travel Portals.

Separate from travel, I'll just highlight flights because I have a Platinum card on Amex that earns 5X points on flights. So I'm using that for flights. I'm using the Chase Reserve on everything else. Another big category for us was Amazon. We have the Amazon Prime Visa. It earns 5% cash back.

You guys know I love points, but it's hard to turn down 5% cash back compared with earning two points, which is the best I could do with any of the other cards I have. The next is cell phone services. Since switching to T-Mobile and Mint Mobile, we've actually brought our household phone bills down significantly.

So this didn't really make sense to call out except that we bought our cell phones through our carrier. So I bought a iPhone 15 Pro through T-Mobile. So I actually put that entire charge there, which was fantastic because there are cards mostly on the business category, the Ink Cash and the Ink Preferred, where you can earn three to five points on cell phone services.

Unfortunately, this category is mostly focused on business cards. So there aren't a lot of cards that prioritize this category to get bonuses. So for most people with consumer cards, I would actually just focus on whichever card gives you the best cell phone insurance. Next, we actually spent a lot of money last year at Costco.

And unfortunately, there isn't a card that earns more than 2% or 2X points at Costco, though I will get to one later that is surprising way to get a little bit more than 2X at Costco. So we just used our Venture X at Costco to earn 2X points. It seems like with every business, you get to a certain size and the cracks start to emerge.

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Like a lot of cards, the Double Cash is marketed as cashback, but if you have a points-earning card with that issuer, you can transfer that cashback to points. So in this case, you would need the Citi Premier to have the Citi Double Cash earn points that you can transfer instead of just cashback.

The other big card in this category is the Chase Freedom Unlimited. Now, normally, it only earns 1.5 points per dollar, which is, in my opinion, not as great as earning two, but up until last week, there was the ability to sign up for an offer which would double your points on the Chase Freedom Unlimited.

So it was gonna earn six X on dining and three X on everything else for the next 12 months. Downside was those extra double-matched points weren't gonna come until the end of that 12-month period, but the ability to earn three X points on everything was unbelievable, six X on dining, also unbelievable.

For anyone who missed out on that deal, you definitely should get subscribed to the newsletter because I sent a reminder out before it expired. That's allthehacks.com/email if you're not already subscribed. One more category that I don't use but really comes up a lot with listeners is the Gas category.

The Citi Premier at three X or the Custom Cash at five X is really your best option. There are a few other cards like the Wyndham Earner card that earns a lot of points on gas, but the Citi Premier is one of the best at three X points. And that Custom Cash at five X is great, but it is capped at $500 a month.

So depending on how many points you are or how many dollars you're gonna spend on gas, it kind of affects that. And also like the Double Cash card, the Custom Cash card is a cashback card that can be converted to points if you also have that Citi Premier card.

So that's a little bit how I thought about all the main categories. For anyone listening with a business, I'll run through this really fast. I basically went through that same list of categories for business and I just tried to figure out whether I had a card I could use.

So for travel, it was three X with the Inc Business Preferred. For flights, there wasn't a great option. So that's where the fact that Amy and I both have a platinum card comes in handy. I use one for business stuff and one for personal. And then dining, I ended up just saying that my Chase Freedom Unlimited, which only earns three X on dining because I didn't take advantage of that offer because I already had the Freedom Unlimited, has kind of become my dining card for business to kind of separate things.

For Amazon and everything else for business, we just use the Spark Cash Plus, which is earning two X on everything. Though I would love to get the Venture X Business, I am not eligible because I have the Spark Cash Plus and I'm a little scared to cancel it and be not 100% certain that I could open up the Venture X Business.

So that's business. Now I've gone through all these categories. Then I thought, let's go through all the cards I have and decide if they make sense to use. And I think about this in two ways. So one, depending on how much you spend on a category, earning more points in it might not make sense.

So for example, the Capital One Saver earns four X points on streaming. And I don't have a card that earns more than two points on streaming, but I don't spend enough on streaming to make those extra two points per dollar make sense. And so the way I would do the math there is if I spend $1,000 on streaming, I'm gonna get an extra 2,000 points.

So 2,000 points, but the cost of that card is $95. So what am I gonna pay for those points? Well, if I'm paying $95 for 2,000 points, I'm paying 4.75 cents per point, which is really, really high. So it doesn't actually make sense for me to get that card solely for the streaming category.

So as I'm looking at where I'm spending money, I'm definitely trying to see, oh, maybe I could get a few more points per dollar on a category, but is it worth the annual fee? Is it even worth the hassle? There are categories where I might spend $500 a year.

And even if I could get more points on that category with a no annual fee card, it might not even be worth the hassle for a few hundred points. So that's one value. And then the other is when it comes to premium cards that have a lot of perks, trying to figure out whether a card's worth it is often about a lot more than the points.

Take the Amex Platinum, for example. Yes, you can earn 5X points on flights, but you also get a bunch of perks. So saying, can I spend enough money on flights that earning 5X points versus maybe 3X for whatever other card you have is worth it? And it doesn't make sense to say, is it worth it for a $695 annual fee?

I imagine for almost everyone listening, it's not going to be worth it. However, the Amex Platinum also has a ton of perks. I think in the points and miles world it's often been called a coupon book because of how many different ways that you can earn value from the card, whether it's sax credit or airline credit, clear, global entry credits.

So I really like this premium card spreadsheet that the Frequent Miler team put together where for every single card with a big annual fee, they itemize out every single one of those perks and they give their estimate of the value. And then they let you put in your estimate of the value and then summarize it all on a tab.

So you're able to kind of go through and say, well, how much is a $50 credit at Saks twice a year worth? Push you to say, just because you spent $100 at Saks doesn't mean you saved $100. Maybe you used it to buy some fancy Aesop soap, which is often what we do, which otherwise we would have just bought regular soap and it probably saved us $30 instead of the full 100.

So I love how you can go through that spreadsheet and see are these cards actually worth it? How much do you value the bonus points you get in this category? So you can put that in as well. I'll link to that spreadsheet in the show notes. So for us, I'll run through all the cards we have and just say what our takeaway was.

Chase Sapphire Reserve, gonna keep that for 3X travel. Chase Freedom Unlimited, we never use it. It has no annual fee, but I decided this year to make it kind of my segregated card for earning points at dining and restaurants for business. The Chase Freedom Flex, we actually have, it's kind of a wild card because it earns 5X points on categories that rotate every quarter.

So I can't tell you that this card will be valuable for you in the future because I don't know what it will earn points on. In Q1, you can earn 5X points on groceries, I think gym memberships and some personal care spa services, but I don't know what it'll be for Q2.

So we're definitely keeping that, no annual fee, and those 5X points while marketed as cash back because we have the Chase Reserve end up being points. On the business side, actually noticed we had the Inc Unlimited card, which earns one and a half points per dollar on everything. Well, we don't really use it for anything and the Inc Cash card earns 5X points on phone and internet services.

So I'm gonna product change that card, which is something you can do for any card. You can product change it within its group. So I can go and say, "Hey, can we change the Inc Unlimited to the Inc Cash?" At least as I'm recording this, there is also a $900 or 90,000 points signup bonus on the Inc Cash and Inc Unlimited, which I'll link to in the show notes.

And as I said, also at allthehacks.com/cards are all the links to all the cards except for a few that I will call out. I gotta decide, do I wanna just product change it or do I wanna open up another Inc Cash for that 90,000 point bonus? I'm gonna keep my Inc Business Preferred 'cause I use that for travel for the business.

And then I'm gonna keep the Amazon Prime card, which I use for 5% on Amazon. And then we have a United card that is my wife Amy's longest held card. And we're just gonna keep that one going because it helps boost her credit by keeping a really long credit history.

And I should say, I'm talking about all of these cards as if I have them all. Because Amy and I play this game together, we often have some of these cards are hers, some of them are mine, so we're not all carrying all of them. Moving on to Amex, the gold card, Workhorse card.

It's my primary card I keep in my wallet. Probably not necessarily because I put the most on it, but because dining and groceries are the purchases that I most often need a physical card for. Next is the Amex Platinum. This is an interesting one. We have two of them because there was a great signup bonus for them.

And we've held onto both of them because it's kind of made sense and we got some good retention offers, which I'll talk about in a minute. Going forward, I'm not sure if it makes sense. Now that Amex has removed the free guests into the Centurion Lounge, at least if Amy doesn't have her own card, she won't be able to go in.

So that could make it make sense to keep. And like I said earlier, I think we might end up using one for business flights and one for personal flights to separate that. I also have the Business Platinum card, which we opened up this year for a massive 190,000-point signup bonus, which I don't think, based on using that frequent miler premium card spreadsheet, I'm gonna get the value out of.

So that's not a card that I think I'm gonna carry past the 12-month mark. We have two Bonvoy cards, a Bonvoy and a Bonvoy Business card. The annual fee is worth about as much as the free night certificate we get, though they're a little tricky to use. The primary reason we keep these cards is because they earn 15 Elite Nights on Marriott each year, and that means between the two of them, we're 30 of the 50 nights you need to get to Platinum status, and three more years of earning Platinum, and we'll have Platinum for life, which would be a great thing to hit for us because then we never pay for breakfast.

So we'll probably keep both of those open. Next, on the hotel front, we have the Hilton Aspire card. Amy has it, and it's such a great value. I might even get it myself just because the free night certificate at any Hilton worldwide plus the resort credit plus the airline fee credit, I think it pays for itself.

And then last, I have an Amex Blue Cash card from so long ago that I think maybe earns 1% cash back and nothing special. I got it in college, but because it has no annual fee and it helps boost my credit score, I will keep it open. In the Capital One camp, we both have a Venture X card because of the big sign-up bonus when it launched.

I don't see any reason for us to both have it, so I think this year will be the year that one of us cuts our Venture X card. The $300 travel credit plus the 10,000 points a year make it a break-even on the annual fee, but we don't really need it.

You can transfer all of one person's Capital One points to another person, and unlike some cards, you can actually do that to anyone. It doesn't have to be in your household. So we might probably just transfer all of our Venture X points to one of us and cancel the other card.

And then last, I have the Spark Cash Plus, which is a 2X on everything card, but for business. And I like to pair that with the Venture X so that I'm separating all of the everything else spend. If I can figure out a way to get that Venture X business, especially right now when it has a massive sign-up bonus, I think it's still 150,000 points, I would love to.

I got denied when I applied because you can't have both. And like I said earlier, I'm a little nervous to cancel the Spark Cash Plus and then find out I couldn't get the Venture X and then be out of luck with a 2X card for business. Though, as I'm saying this out loud, maybe the strategy here, cancel the Spark Cash Plus, use the second Venture X we already have for business if I don't get approved for the Venture X after I cancel that card.

So somehow just talking about this aloud made me come up with a strategy that makes sense. And then the only other card we have, which isn't technically a credit card, is the Target debit card, which we're gonna keep for 5% off at Target. There's no annual fee, it's not even a credit card, so we'll keep that going.

And if you don't have that, oftentimes throughout the year, they do bonuses where you get 40 or 50 or 100, I can't remember the exact amount of kind of free credit for signing up. There's no impact on your credit score 'cause it's a debit card. So definitely one, if you shop at Target a lot, that makes sense, just wait till they're doing the promo, which I will probably put in the next newsletter the next time it happens for the Target card, that would be the time to get it.

So if you go through a similar process yourself, what should you do when you find out that you have cards you don't need? There's three things that you should consider. The first one is find out if you're eligible for a retention offer. And I guess maybe the first one is just do nothing, right?

If it's a no annual fee card that you've had forever, even if you're not using it, I would consider just keeping it because it helps your credit score to increase the average length of credit history when it averages all the cards on your credit profile. So you could just keep it if it has no annual fee, even if you're not using it.

If it does have an annual fee and you don't wanna have to carry that fee every year because it's not worth it, step one, see if you can get a retention offer from the bank to make it worth keeping. I've had the Amex Platinum retention offer once of a comped annual fee.

I think one time I had a card where it was 30 or 40,000 points if we could spend a few thousand dollars on it. So always check if you can get a retention offer that might offset that annual fee and make it worth it. If not, many cards have the ability to downgrade within a product class.

So the Amex Platinum can go down to the gold or the green. All of the cards in the Hilton portfolio can be downgraded. And similarly, in a lot of other categories, the Chase Sapphire Preferred and Reserve can downgrade to the Freedom Flex and Freedom Unlimited, which is actually, we had Chase Sapphire Preferreds, downgraded to the Freedom Flex and Freedom Unlimited, and then opened up Chase Sapphire Reserve when that came out.

So downgrade path is great. Keep in mind with Amex and a few other cards that once you have a card, you're often not eligible for the bonus on that card. So for some cards where the bonus is small enough or non-existent, it might make sense to downgrade. But if there's a card you really wanna try to get a big bonus for, you might want to not downgrade to it because you might make yourself ineligible for getting that bonus.

Also, sometimes there are cards that aren't obviously marketed that exist that you can downgrade to. So I didn't think there was a no annual fee United card back when I downgraded our United card, but there was, so it never hurts to ask. A lot of times also you can do all of this through live chat or through secure messaging.

Sometimes the retention offers don't work well through kind of that secure messaging portal, but on Amex, I've had a lot of luck with them just live chatting, but you can also always call or look up the numbers for the retention departments, just Google Amex retention number or Chase, et cetera.

And then the last option is to cancel the card. If you can't get a retention offer, you can't have a downgrade path and the card doesn't make sense, it could make sense to cancel it. Only thing I'll share here is before you cancel it, if there is a lot of credit on that card and you don't wanna lose that credit, at some issuers you can transfer credit between cards.

So I know Chase is pretty good about this. So if you had two cards with a $20,000 limit and you wanted to cancel one, but you needed that limit, you could actually transfer all but 1000 to the other card, bringing that one up to 39,000 and then cancel the card when it has a $1,000 limit.

As for when to cancel and go through this process, usually within 30 days of the annual fee posting to your account, you can still negotiate it. Also, a lot of the ways that cards market and check for people taking advantage of offers is that you close the card within the first year.

So my advice is always let that annual fee post after one year and then figure out what you wanna do. So instead of trying to cancel it before the fee posts, let the fee post and then decide whether you wanna cancel it. And you can usually get that annual fee refunded if it's within 30 days.

Every issuer has their own set of rules. You can search online and say, "Annual fee refund capital one policy," and find an article that explains what each individual issuer's policy is. But within that 30 day window of it posting, not of the statement close, but the fee posting, you should be good on all the major card issuers.

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Okay, so that covered all of the process I go through when I review cards and what I'm thinking about my cards. But what I wanna do that I think is really interesting is talk about where to go from here. So what am I thinking about for the future? So I've gone through this process.

This is what to do with my cards, but where were the gaps? What's next? Next, I wanna talk about where the holes are. What are the new cards that I'm looking at? What are the new things that I wanna add to my roster this year? So first off, anytime there's a massive new exciting welcome bonus or a new card, obviously I couldn't have anticipated that.

So you can assume that that's gonna be exciting to me even though I don't mention it. But as for cards that I know exist that I'm really excited about, the first one is one that as of January 1st this year, I strongly regretted not having the card sooner. And that is the Built MasterCard.

Built Rewards is notably one of the highest value point currencies by the PointSky bank rate in my personal opinion, because Built Rewards allows you to transfer points to a lot of different airlines and hotel groups, but the big ones that I'm most excited about are American Airlines, which is not a partner of anyone else.

They have United, Air Canada, Air France, British Airways, Avianca Life Miles, Turkish Air, Hyatt. They've recently added Marriott and IHG. And so there's just so many options for what you can do with Built Rewards. But that's a reason to love Built Rewards, the points, but there's so many other reasons to actually love the card and some really cool things Built's doing.

First off, if you are a renter, the Built card, in my personal opinion, is a must-have. You earn one point per dollar you spend on rent payments. And the best part is that even if your landlord requires a check or a specific payment portal, Built can handle it as well.

So if you're spending money on rent, you have to check out the Built card. And like I mentioned earlier, Built earns 3x points on dining, 2x points on travel, and 1x points on everything else. But the really exciting thing is what Built does on rent day. And that is what gives me so much regret for not having gotten the Built card earlier.

And what Built does on rent day is that all points are doubled. So you get 6x points on dining, 4x points on travel, and 2x on everything else. I have a couple of people who've emailed me as all the Hacks members and said, "Hey, can you reset my payment date to hit on the first so I get 2x points with Built?" Lots of people, time booking travel, time going out to dinner to hit rent day, but even better is the promotions Built has been doing on rent day.

Each month, they've done an awesome promotion, but January 1st this past year, they did the best one yet, where they took three different partners, Air France, Virgin Atlantic, and IHG, and gave you huge transfer bonuses based on your Built status. So any Built member could get a 75% bonus, all the way up to Platinum Built Rewards members got a 150% bonus.

That means that if you were gonna transfer 50,000 points to Air France, and you had Built Platinum status, you would earn 125,000 points. That is crazy. I have not seen transfer bonuses coming from Chase, Amex, Citi, CapOne, for anything more than like 30%, and sometimes it's 15, 20, 25, 30, but to get 75 to 150% is crazy.

Now, I didn't have Built status at the time, and all I could think about was, I don't have three days to earn this status, 'cause I believe they announced this promo three or four days before the first of the month. And it made it my goal that in 2024, I'm not only going to make sure I have the Built card, I'm going to be spending enough on the Built card to earn status so that the next time they have one of these monster bonuses, I am participating.

So I opened a Built card, and my new plan, because I don't pay rent, is to focus on spending, travel, and dining, especially on rent days, when I can do 6x dining, 4x travel, and 2x everything else. So that means date nights are getting shifted to the first of the month.

That means I'll be booking travel on the first of the month, and it means that any bill that I can pay at a certain day of the month, I'm gonna try to earn 2x points. I don't know what kind of transfer bonuses are in store for 2024. They're even half as good as the ones they've done last year, especially the one they did on the first.

I'm really excited, and if you're interested in the Built card and you haven't yet signed up, I would greatly appreciate it if you do that at allthehacks.com/built, B-I-L-T. The next card on my docket this year is the Delta Platinum card. I got a mailer for a big bonus for the Delta card, and you get free check bags, a companion certificate, and 15% off award bookings.

So it's something I'm thinking about. Delta points are not the most valuable. In fact, they might be some of the least valuable points. So the welcome bonus definitely isn't enough on its own, but we do have a few Delta flights planned for this year, and so the free check bags will help.

To the extent we book any of our flights using the few hundred thousand Delta points we already have, getting 15% off awards would be a pretty meaningful addition to the sign-up bonus. In fact, if you get 100,000 points from the sign-up bonus, getting 15% off award bookings just makes those points go further.

And then finally, the companion certificate is great. You don't get it until your first year is up, so it's not something you can use right away until the card renews, but it is something that keeps the annual fee effective value down. Next is a card that I, it's so interesting.

It's the Capital One Saver card, and I just, every time I read about this card, I look at this card, I just think it's such a great card. It's marketed as a cashback card, but if you have the Venture or the Venture X, it's points, and you're getting 4X on dining, entertainment and streaming, 3X on groceries, and for most of the rest of this year, 10X on Uber and Uber Eats, and you get a free Uber One membership, and it's only a $95 card.

I feel like it's such a good card that I should have it, and I just love talking about it, but it just doesn't fit with all the other cards I have. The welcome bonus isn't that big. It's $300 or 30,000 points, and all of the categories that it earns points on are categories I'm already earning as many or more points on, except for entertainment and streaming, which I just don't spend enough to really make this a huge value, but if you have the Venture X card, and you don't wanna spread your points across lots of programs, I think this is a great companion to that card.

Next is the Bonvoy Brilliant. Like I mentioned, I'm three years of platinum status away from having lifetime platinum. You have to have platinum for 10 years plus a number of nights, so if I can't stay at a Marriott enough this year to earn the nights I need to stack with the elite nights I get from my card to hit platinum, I may just shell out for this card.

It's a massive annual fee, but for three years to lock in platinum status and get free breakfast at Marriott Properties for life, it might make sense. If I get to that point, I'll definitely be waiting until we actually have a trip planned where the breakfast that we'd get would actually offset that cost.

So that's one. A couple other ones that aren't on here that I was just thinking about, and I thought it would be worth sharing my thoughts. So one is city cards. When I look at this strategy, I'm like, I have no city cards. I talk about them a lot, but I don't have any, and there are a few reasons.

One is that there's not a lot of ROI for what I have, right? The Premier card is crazy. 3X flights, hotels, dining, gas, and groceries, but I already have those categories covered. The custom cash is 5X on whatever category you spend the most on, but it's up to $500 a month.

So, you know, meaningful number of points you could earn in a year on those categories. And then the city double cash is 2X on everything, which is comparable to the VentureX, but I already have the VentureX. And so, look, if you wanna build that trifecta of the Premier custom cash and double cash in city, I think it's a really powerful group of three cards.

However, I have them all covered. And the other reason could be I don't have city points, but right now city points transfer to all the same transfer partners as all of the other credit card programs I already have points in, with one exception, which is Tye Air, which doesn't really matter to me.

So again, if you wanna go to allthehacks.com/T, the letter T as in transfer, P as in partners, allthehacks.com/TP, that's where you can get a free copy of the transfer partner spreadsheet I have, and you can see where all the different programs transfer to. But because city doesn't have any unique transfer partners, having city points aren't really that valuable to me.

And if I'm not gonna earn more points, it doesn't make sense. Honestly, I want one just 'cause I'm curious. I wanna be able to see the card-linked offers they have to be able to share those with you, but not enough until something more interesting comes out. So if something happens in 2024 from city, I'll be excited, but I'm not holding my breath.

What I am holding my breath for is Wells Fargo. And I know that sounds strange 'cause Wells Fargo hasn't been talked about much on this show as a interesting card. But for one of their cards, the autograph card, they've announced that they will be adding transfer partners. I have no idea whether those transfer partners are interesting.

I have no idea if those points will transfer one-to-one, but I'm just saying I'm interested. And that's 'cause right now the autograph is a decent cash back card. It's no annual fee, and you get 3% on dining, travel, gas, transit, streaming, and cell phone services. Not a bad card, but today it's just cash back.

And that's not a priority for me right now. But depending on what happens with these transfer partners, it could be super interesting. And if somehow this card adopts built rewards as its transfer partner program, it'd be even more compelling. They've also announced that they're gonna launch a premium and better card.

It's rumored to be called the autograph journey card with a higher annual fee. And honestly, when they've said it's going to be better, I assume that means it has to earn more than 3X on dining, travel, gas, transit, streaming, and cell phones, which is now sounding pretty interesting. So I don't know what the autograph journey card will include.

I don't know how much it'll cost. I don't know what the transfer partners will be and whether that'll transfer one-to-one, but if all those things line up, it could be a really interesting entrance to the point space, especially if like the Chase Reserve did and like the Venture X did, they kick this card off with a massive welcome bonus.

So stay tuned there. One more card that's interesting that I don't think I've ever talked about on the show is the US Bank Altitude Reserve card. Now I won't go into a lot of detail and I'll explain why, but what's interesting about it is that it earns 3X points on mobile wallet, like Apple Pay.

It also earns 3X points on travel. Now, right now, those points are just cash back and there's no plans to change that. So I don't really think of it as a points card, but those points can be worth one and a half cents either used to book travel or using this real-time rewards feature they launched, which I'll put a link to in the show notes of someone reviewing it, but it's pretty cool.

Essentially, you take a Uber or something in the travel category and after the fact, they let you kind of use your points to pay it off at that same 1.5 cent rate, which means you don't actually have to go and book everything in the portal to be able to get that bonus.

That means that all mobile wallet payments are four and a half percent cash back, which is a lot. And I started thinking, would I rather have four and a half cents cash back or 2X points? And then I started thinking, okay, well, what are points worth? I say one and a half to two cents is a great value, which means 2X points is only worth three to 4% cash back.

So if I'm getting four and a half percent cash back, that's better. And then I started thinking, okay, well, am I actually gonna use my cash back to buy these kind of really premium, aspirational business class trips, or am I gonna get caught up in spending that money? And then I started thinking, okay, well, a lot of times American, Avianca, United, and a lot of airlines sell their points.

And I started wondering if I switched to cash back and use that cash back to buy miles and points when they were on sale and then book trips, would I actually come out ahead? And so that led me down a path that I'm not gonna cover today, but I'm going to be doing an entire episode where I really try to make the case for cash back.

Not necessarily saying I'm gonna switch, but I want to do a steel man argument for what it would mean to switch to accumulating cash back and kind of put a case out there for team cash back and what it could mean, taking into account everything I just said, the fact that points depreciate over time.

So stay tuned on that episode. I will also cover a bunch of the cash back cards I don't cover normally. And then one other thing that I'll probably include in that episode, or I'll bring up in a future episode, was something that Ben wrote in to me asking about a strategy he used with his Apple card to buy a MacBook Pro.

And on that card, he got 0% financing for a year. And it made me think about a way to potentially earn more with 0% APR cards because we have a high interest rate environment. So I haven't done the math to kind of process this out, but the argument would be, let's say you're gonna go spend $5,000, right?

You could put it on a card that earns two points per dollar and get 10,000 points. And let's say those points are worth 2 cents. So now you've got $200 worth of value. But what if you take that $5,000 and you go put it in a high yield savings account that earns 5% and don't pay that card off other than the minimum payments for the 15 or whatever number of months you have, well, you might actually end up earning more than $200 in interest.

Now that interest is taxed. So I haven't quite figured out whether the math would play out here, but it's definitely something I'm thinking about. And as I dig into this and think about it more, I will definitely share that because with high interest rates, if you can avoid spending money, it might be worth more than the points.

And there are also some cards that earn points and have 0% APR. So if you could find something that does that, then I think this could be really, really compelling. So definitely something I'm thinking about in 2024. All the things I just mentioned, obviously, are ideas. I haven't committed to any of them other than the built card, which I've already gotten.

That's one that I am so excited to earn status and find the next transfer bonus. I think that's it. I think that is everything that's in my wallet, what I'm doing with it, how I'm thinking about it, all the categories I spend money on and everything I'm excited about going forward.

I hope this episode was helpful. If I missed anything, or if there's something you want me to cover in a future episode, send an email to podcast@allthehacks.com. I will read all those emails. I may or may not be able to reply to all of them, but they will definitely inform the future direction of the show.

Also, allthehacks.com/cards are links to sign up for any of the cards we mentioned or any card you're signing up for. Obviously, please make sure that you find the best deals there. If you don't find the best deal, go somewhere else. I want you all to earn the most points possible, but if you do find the best deal, would greatly appreciate you using the links at allthehacks.com/cards to support the show.

Thank you so much for listening. 2024 is gonna be an awesome year for all the hacks. I'm so excited for what we can share, and I will see you next week. (upbeat music) I wanna tell you about another podcast I love that goes deep on all things money. That means everything from money hacks to wealth building to early retirement.

It's called the Personal Finance Podcast, and it's much more about building generational wealth and spending your money on the things you value than it is about clipping coupons to save a dollar. It's hosted by my good friend, Andrew, who truly believes that everyone in this world can build wealth, and his passion and excitement are what make this show so entertaining.

I know because I was a guest on the show in December, 2022, but recently I listened to an episode where Andrew shared 16 money stats that will blow your mind, and it was so crazy to learn things like 35% of millennials are not participating in their employer's retirement plan.

And that's just one of the many fascinating stats he shared. The Personal Finance Podcast has something for everyone. It's filled with so many tips and tactics and hacks to help you get better with your money and grow your wealth. So I highly recommend you check it out. Just search for the Personal Finance Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and enjoy.