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ETB posted:On the flip side, I think Chase has the best over-the-phone service I've experienced from any company, and this is over three cards I've had with them (and sadly all closed). I agree. They really step up their game though if you have the Sapphire Preferred card - the number on the back of that card is a VIP line, where a person will pick up pretty drat fast. So I typically call that number even if I'm calling about a Freedom card or any other card. Even if they have to transfer you to someone else, they'll transfer you, skip the line, and explain what you're looking for in Bank Terms to the new customer service rep. It's pretty impressive; night and day vs. any other company I've ever had to call up for customer service.
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Nov 9, 2014 19:06
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Blinkman987 posted:A cash back card is almost always going to be better unless you're also flying and supplementing your cc spend with flight miles/booking your own flights. Cash is king. The only reason I personally do hotel/flight credit cards is because I open them, spend to the minimum to get the bonus, open another card, and close the cards at the 11 month mark. Some cards have even paid me straight cash to keep the account open when I go to retentions. That's bad general advice. If you're using points and miles you're not usually paying 1 mile: 1 cent rate. Airline mile pricing is based on region to region, hotel points are based on hotel category. A $1500 round trip economy flight to Europe may be had with 60,000 airline miles and minor taxes in cash. So your opportunity cost is $600 in cash back (or I guess $1200 if you've got a .02/dollar spent card, which you should), but you're saving a ton more money than if you just collected cash back. Obviously it doesn't work out like that every time, but every time I've booked flights with miles I've made out better than if I'd collected cash back to pay for it. What I typically do is get all my miles/points balances topped off to the point where I could fly/stay wherever with what I've got, THEN everything is cash back after that point.
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Nov 16, 2014 20:35
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What a huge win for lenders that myth has been over the years. Ridiculous that so many people believe it. PAY YOUR CREDIT CARD OFF IN-FULL EVERY MONTH OR YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE A REWARD CREDIT CARD.
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Nov 25, 2014 00:15
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xie posted:My girlfriend and I are taking an International flight in 2015, and I've been looking at how to best take advantage of offers to help offset. Has anyone done anything like this, or know if it can be done? That's the general strategy yes, but there are a few things take into account: Card earned miles (including your bonus mileage) don't count toward elite status, so you won't get any platinum status from that. The bonus miles sometimes have a lag between when you earn them and when they're deposited in your account. This might end up being negligible, but you're not going to have them right away. This becomes a problem because the airlines only open up a certain amount of award seats, and depending on when and where you're going, they might be sold out with no intent of opening any more. And I'm not sure where you're getting that 50K miles is enough for a round trip first class ticket to Europe. I'm assuming you're in the US? It's 50,000 miles for a ONE WAY business/first class trip from the US to Europe at the lowest level of award on AA (and finding awards at the lowest level is rare/difficult, mostly depending on what time of year you're going (peak vs. off peak)). I'm guessing you're reading the award charts wrong - the AA chart shows one way costs, the US Airways chart shows round trip costs. So what I'm saying is you can still use those miles to book a (economy, with no elite benefits except what come with the card) ticket to Europe, but you may not find awards available depending on when you're going. Your best best would to have been to get the card sometime in the past year and been spying for awards tickets, miles in-hand, as soon as you possibly could have (they open them a little less than a year before the travel date). Brian Fellows fucked around with this message at 19:18 on Dec 20, 2014 |
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Dec 20, 2014 19:15
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xie posted:How is 100k miles not enough for a R/T ticket to Europe? I think you misread my post. US is offering 50k that convert to American at the end of the year. American is also offering 50k. Oh OK yeah that makes more sense, 100K total. Your post was reading to me like you were talking about getting one card or the other. So my other points still stand - no guarantee you'll find award availability at the 100K level for where/when you want to go, and I don't think US Airways and AA miles are going to be merged until the second quarter of 2015, so you're not going to have much time to book that award. So fundamentally you've got everything right, the timing just might not work out for you. This IS your best bet, however, to get your trip using miles. I would go forward with your plan but assume you're going to have to book tickets with cash.
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Dec 21, 2014 19:18
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Pompous Rhombus posted:Ugh. I applied for the Chase British Airways card a week ago. It was approved by Chase within a few hours, BA still has yet to generate me a rewards account so they will actually issue me the card, and Chase apparently can't do anything to contact them or hurry it along. If I want to hit the $30k spend for the Companion Pass I need to get this first tuition payment on it, which I also need to get my student visa issued (electronically, thank god), and I leave in 15 days. Might give it until Wednesday morning (they said 48-72 hours a week ago), then call up Chase and cancel the application if nothing's happened yet. Make sure anyone that reads this learns the lesson - ALWAYS set up the third party rewards program membership before signing up for the associated credit card. It took a few weeks to get a Starwood rewards card when I applied for it without a preexisting Starwood account. It's always worth it to spend the five minutes setting up an account. I did this with the BA Chase card you're talking about in January and I had the card about a week later. Your case might have been a bit different because I was approved instantly (sounds like yours went through some kind of review?), but I have heard that BA can get a little finicky and they're more involved with the credit issuing process than most loyalty programs are.
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Jan 21, 2015 00:26
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That is a new thing. I can't remember exactly what they did or when (it was within the last year or two though), but they made it HARDER to get multiple credit cards for the same airline and I believe that's their catch all reason. In the past people would open up a few of those at one time and shamelessly get the bonus. Since there's absolutely no way that's good for business, Barclays made it tougher. I had always heard that Barclays is a company that'll shut you down if you don't use their cards regularly too. Just close your account with no warning. I've actually found the opposite true - I've got two cards with them, and I NEVER use the US Airways card. When I called to cancel this year to avoid the fee, they waived the fee and still gave me the yearly miles bonus for keeping the card open. I do use the poo poo out of the other Barclays card, so that might be part of the reasoning (it's the discontinued Priceline 2 cents per dollar spent cart, and it rules).
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Jan 22, 2015 23:52
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Don't outright cancel cards. Cancel the card and ask them to move the credit to another existing credit card. These are the steps you should follow: 1. Have two Chase credit cards, $5K limit each. 2. Call to close one of the cards, ask them to move the credit to the other card. You now have one card with a $10K limit. 3. Keep opening and closing cards to your heart's content with the above strategy. 4. When Chase gets bitchy about auto-approving you next time and they try to tell you you can't have the new card, ask them if they can transfer some credit from one of your other cards to a new account in order to let you open the new one. Boom. Usually when credit card companies don't approve you in your type of situation (and your credit is otherwise good) it's because they feel you've got too much credit with them, NOT necessarily that you've been abusing their sign up bonuses or have too many CARDS with them. What I do is always have a Sapphire card (so yeah, I pay that fee every year), and typically when the yearly fee on another card comes up (United this last year), I call to cancel that one but move the credit over to the Sapphire. Then next month I opened a British Airways card. In this case they just let me open a new card, but before I've had to play the old "well, I've got $23,000 on my Sapphire card, could I just move $10,000 to this new account?" card. You still get the signup bonus, and Chase doesn't extend any additional credit to you. Win/win. Weirdly Chase is the only company that's never made me any kind of offer to keep a card open. They always close it out with no questions. Amex is 50/50, and Citi I have never closed a card because they always offer me hilarious bonuses when I try (and I have more than enough miles/points on Citi related cards so I don't feel the need to chase signup bonuses anytime soon).
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Jan 30, 2015 06:07
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Blinkman987 posted:Thanks. I'll do that next time. Should I call sometime to ask to reduce my Southwest card to 10K in preparation for this? Nah, there's no reason to do shift things around if you don't have to. General rule of thumb is don't give up credit (aka outright close cards or lower limits), just move it around to new cards when you have to. Otherwise just try to open cards and use the flexibility to move credit if they otherwise want to reject you.
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Jan 30, 2015 23:13
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Cacafuego posted:I see differing suggestions between closing cards to avoid fees and transferring balances between cards by the same bank (ie Chase). Wouldn't you have to cancel cards to take advantage of the bonuses offered after the 18mo or 2yr waiting period that cards seem to have? Open a fee-free card with the company that doesn't have a signup bonus that you plan on churning (Chase Freedom, whatever Citi Hilton fee free card I have, etc), and use that as your card to throw credit at. Open a United Chase card, close it a year later, put the credit on the Freedom, open a new United Chase card in 18 months. I used the Chase Sapphire Preferred in my example above because that's a card I happily pay the fee on every year, but you can do the exact same thing with a Freedom card that's not costing you $95 a year to keep open.
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Jan 31, 2015 20:10
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nickutz posted:You're right, looks like the cut off to apply for the US Airways MC is March 20. Barclaycard used to be incredibly easy to get cards from, but there were definitely people it just plain didn't like, AND it's supposedly gotten a lot harder to get cards from. They're also pretty well known for shutting down cards that get no usage without any warning whatsoever.
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Mar 14, 2015 15:21
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Yeah if you think 50,000 miles is useless, you're doing it wrong. Also the reason to get the US Barclaycard before it goes away is because that'll be combined with American Airlines miles soon. AA is partnered with Citi, so you can get a second card through them for AA miles. So basically you've got the opportunity to get 100,000 miles in one go, instead of getting 50,000 and then waiting a period of time (I think 18 months with Citi, if that's still timeline) to re-apply for the card to get another bonus. I managed to get in on the US Airways card a year or so ago where the first year fee was waived, so I actually pocketed 50,000 after one purchase, then never used the card again. They actually gave me a retention bonus when I called to cancel a couple of months ago for some reason(I think just a fee waiver and some bonus points if I spent $XXXX in a month, which I didn't do).
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Mar 21, 2015 03:34
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Figured I'd qualify my first statement real quick: OK, you're saying 50,000 for an $89 signup fee is mostly worthless for domestic travel because it ties you to an airline and it doesn't get you much. My local airport is Detroit, which is more or less a Delta hub. Let's say I want to fly to Atlanta (THE Detla hub) for some sweet sweet Cinco De Mayo action on May 2nd and come back May 9th. I'm just using an arbitrary date, but a near one (since people always bitch that FF miles are useless unless you book them way ahead of time). I'm SPECIFICALLY using a competitor's hub so I can show you how tying yourself to one airline is rarely a thing. Priceline tells me that the cheapest paid ticket I'll get for that (on an airline I'd fly, IE NOT Spirit) is $228, from Delta. Trying to book that same flight with AA miles, its... 25K miles for a round trip. So this is how you'd think about whether you book with miles or points there: Paid is $228. If I pay in miles, that's a redemption value of .912 cents/mile. That's not a great mile redemption rate, so if I had some Barclay Arrival points (1 whole cent per point), it would be smarter to pay with cash and erase that with 22,800 points. If you have several different kinds of points, you can always do this math to figure out which one is the smarter option. Or you can do what some people discussed above and save your miles for international travel, the best value, and use cash for the cheaper domestic flights. But to the "what's the point of 50K miles for $89????" crowd: You can take this round trip, twice, for $89 dollars, even if you're "hub captive" to a competitive airline. It's obviously not always going to work out like that, but who in the world said you HAD to sign up for any of these cards before you did a cursory search for what and where you'd want to use the miles/points?
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Mar 21, 2015 03:54
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Amex's website actually will hide signup bonuses for other cards if you're logged in and have an existing card. Seriously. It's bullshit. Log off, clear your cookies and temporary internet files, THEN go to their site to get around it.
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Mar 22, 2015 20:44
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Barclay's is pretty bad, and honestly is 100% the reason I didn't use Baby's First Barclay's card very often. It's OK once you get used to it, but every other one I dealt with before that was better. As the poster above said, though, on the phone they're fantastic and will be quick to take care of whatever crazy issue you may be able to come up with. I told them their website was unintuitive and they acknowledged it and apologized, haha.
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Mar 28, 2015 04:26
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I haven't posted in here for a long time, and this isn't quite within the scope of the thread, but I was hoping someone here maybe had some experience that could help me. I went to turn on my PS4 today and it seemed fine and the TV seemed fine, but the TV insisted there was no signal. I tried changing HDMI ports, same thing. I brought out my monitor and the PS4 works fine. The TV actually works fine too as long as I'm using the components. Apparently my HDMI ports are somehow fried. I bought the TV a year and a month ago, and the manufacturer's warranty lasted only 1 year. I did however specifically buy the TV with an Amex card due to its extended warranty feature. Has anyone here made a warranty claim with a credit card company, especially Amex? And does this sound like a situation Amex's warranty would cover? It's been storming a lot here lately so I could see them saying it was damaged through that, but everything is surge protected and all of my other appliances/electronics are just fine.
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Sep 8, 2015 01:36
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I just read through the last ten pages and didn't see anyone with the same question as me, so here I am. I'd call up Chase but I'm guessing my chances are better of someone here knowing the answer. I have had a Sapphire Preferred for years. I have opened less than five cards over the last 24 months (I think I opened maybe one). I get more vacation this year than I have for years, so I'll be travelling more and want a Sapphire Reserve. The internet seems to be split on whether i can get a CSR and it's signup bonus if I already have a CSP. Ideally I'd sign up for the CSR and get that signup bonus, and have both cards for at least a year. Sounds like that won't work- has anyone tried to do this? Barring that, maybe I cancel my CSP, wait a few days (???), and apply for. CSR with bonus? I really don't want to lose the benefits of the CSP for too long (tons of Chase points right now), so if I have to cancel the CSP and wait two years, I'd rather just change my CSP to a CSR, which would mean I forefit the sign up bonus. Anyone know the way to optimize my situation? Guess it's not that big a deal to try to ge t auto approved - my credit is ~800, so a failed application can't really hurt me.
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Dec 26, 2017 18:35
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THF13 posted:From this it seems that you can't open a CSR while the CSP is still open. https://www.doctorofcredit.com/chase-memo-customers-can-get-one-sapphire-card-e-g-csp-cardholders-cant-get-csr/ Looks like people have had luck downgrading Sapphire Preferred to Freedom Unlimited, waiting awhile, then applying for the Sapphire Reserve. I'm going to go for this - I'll let the thread know how it works. I already got an OK to product change to Freedom Unlimited from Sapphire Reserve via direct message on their site- sounds like it's not an automatic thing IF your card is less than a year old, but mine is several so no problem. I'll wait 1 month after my card changes over to Freedom Unlimited to apply for Sapphire Reserve, just so it's for sure flushed out of their system.
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Dec 27, 2017 15:17
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I mean, if you've burned through most of your points and aren't actively churning, You're gonna have trouble finding round trip tickets that are less than the $300 yearly reimbursement amount. That's basically where I'm at - one or two vacations a year, either pay cash for one or buy $300 worth of gift cards to use the next year. Not everyone fulltime churns forever.
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Jan 14, 2018 00:04
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Brian Fellows posted:Looks like people have had luck downgrading Sapphire Preferred to Freedom Unlimited, waiting awhile, then applying for the Sapphire Reserve. I'm going to go for this - I'll let the thread know how it works. For anyone following this harrowing tale, this worked. Product change from Sapphire Preferred to Freedom Unlimited, wait ~ 2 weeks (I've had and have been using the card for about a week and a half), applied for the Sapphire Reserve and got auto-approved.
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Jan 15, 2018 23:41
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Untagged posted:If you convert a CSP in to a Freedom (Unlimited), you can reapply for the CSP after two years from the original bonus and obtain the bonus again? I remember reading somewhere that Chase looks at the conversion as the same line, even if not the same product and may decline the new application. That must have been incorrect. See my post above - I literally just changed from a CSP to a Freedom Unlimited, waited two weeks, and got approved for a CSR (different card, same family). I would make sure you wait at least until you have the Freedom/Freedom Unlimited in-hand befiee reapplying; I've seen stories of people switching, waiting a day, and getting declined because Chase's system hasn't totally caught up to the change. Just clear all cookies in your browser and don't be logged into your Chase account when you reapply and you should be good, assuming you meet 5/24 and 24 months since your last Sapphire signup bonus.
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Jan 20, 2018 00:00
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Go to Staples or Office Depot, buy a stapler or something and Amazon gift cards, just so the total dollar amount isn't a perfectly round number and there's no reason for the cashier to question it. Works like a charm.
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Feb 11, 2018 07:46
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