Hannibal Barca wrote: ↑Sat Apr 23, 2022 10:59 am
One strategy I've been considering is a blend of 1) my existing ~5% category cards / 2% everything backup cards and 2) churning new cards for early spend bonuses. Since the latter can be 15-25% of spend, I might be able to get the weighted average cash back across all my spend closer to 10%. The obvious issue is the credit score impact from opening and cancelling so many cards (maybe 3-5 cards per year). But I'm not sure how much a credit score impact this would have; the inquiries will be there for ~2 years, but with an already long credit history and very low utiziliation rate I'm not sure churning cards will impact those factors much at all.
Have any Bogleheads tried a variation of this strategy?
Also keep in mind that there can be restrictions about how many new cards one can open, at least within a particular card type.
I haven't kept current, but last I heard it was something like 4 Chase cards in 5 year? I don't know if other card vendors "notice" any such limitations other than for their own, or what the limitations might be for other card types.
To answer you question, yes, you'll read here that many of us try to make use of those bonus points. Getiing 50k or 100k points for opening a new card and spending $X within Y months can really add to the points pot.
And with two people, well... multiply
We've done this with cards that we don't otherwise want, and find those with minimum annual fees, something like $95/year. We tend to wait until the second year to close them (or try to change them to a non-fee flavor so there is no closing of the account) to minimize the risk of a claw-back of points.
We also focus on cards that have points that work with the networks that we already use, so we don't end up with, say, 60k points in a card with points that we can't use.
When you are considering this, also keep in mind whether the points can be transferred to an airline network partner of another card program. We use AAdvantage CitiCard awards for the American Airlines network (we don't fly on American itself, but on it's international partners). And we use Amex, transferring points to their network airlines. Those two don't overlap too much, so we have almost (not all, but almost) all the airlines we'd want to use.
So when we decided to get a Chase card, we first check whether those points could be transferred to either AAdvantage points OR to an airline that we'd want to use with AAdvantage of Amex points.
We've traveled on some very, very comfortable international airlines, in J (business) or F (that's more difficult to get) on some very long flights 10-15+ hours, and sometimes 2 of those long flights connecting to where we wanted to go.
There is no way we could possible sit up for two of those flights, and arrive in even vaguely good shape, not at our ages anyway. I'm not sure that
those lengths of flights would have worked well even when we were younger...
RM
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