My Uber credit card finally transferred over to the new (inferior) rewards system, so I haven’t touched it at all lately (I wrote more about that stuff here). As a result, I was charging basically everything except groceries to my Citi Double Cash card. While the marginal extra rewards I would have earned weren’t worth all that much, I did apply for the Wells Fargo Propel card [1]; after a week of waiting, a call to Wells Fargo, discovering that my application was in a weird limbo state, and another day of waiting, I was finally denied, on the grounds that I had opened up too many accounts in the past year.
Seeing as that situation wouldn’t change for the next 5 months or so, I decided to look around for something that perhaps might make money moves. I had recently been added as an authorized user on my parent’s Schwab Amex Platinum [2], so I started looking into the Amex Gold card to see if that’d make sense for me. As it turns out, the answer to that was a resounding no for me - I don’t spend nearly enough on eating out or Doordash to negate the $250 annual fee [3]. No to Amex it was.
And so I discovered the Chase Sapphire Reserve, which I assert is the biggest arb in the credit card world, under a few circumstances. It recently got revamped with a more favorable (for college students, at least) rewards structure:
$550 annual fee
$300 annual airline credit, which will work for plane tickets [4]
3 points per dollar on “travel and dining”, which apparently is quite generously interpreted
1 point per dollar on everything else
1 point = 1.5 cents when redeemed on flights through Chase’s portal. I don’t like the idea of booking indirectly, but if it’s the same price then who cares?
Some random perks like free Global Entry and a network of airport lounges
DoorDash: $60 in credit per year until 2021, plus DashPass for a year
Lyft: Lyft Pink for a year (15% off on rides). 10x points until March 2022.
It’s that last line that really moves the needle. Saving 15%, and then earning 15% back on top of that is basically ~28% off on Lyft. My thoughts are that if you can use the full $300 of airline credit, you’re functionally bringing down the annual fee to $250, and so if you happen to spend more than about a $1000 a year on rideshares, the credit card starts to look incredibly attractive. Most people don’t spend that much getting around town - but if you start calling rides for your friend group going downtown, the math changes very quickly in your favor. Given my current baseline, the additional cash from eating out and Lyft rides should more than make up for things.
Now, I’m biased, since I’ll be spending the summer at a consulting firm, which means I’ll be eating and riding around more than most. I also think the fact that Lyft and Doordash perks expire after a year or two is a bit strange, but (1) I don’t care about Doordash, (2) March 2022 is a hair over two years away, and (3) I’ll probably still get value out of the card after the ludicrous 15% back category reverts to 4.5%.
In short, if you’re going into consulting, you should almost certainly be looking at this card. If you’ll end up flying around and eating out a ton, you should take a glance. If you use Lyft frequently, this thing is pure arb.
[1] Highlights: 3% on eating out, gas, rideshares, flights, hotels, car rentals. No annual fee, and the card is metallic, which is cool. Link is here if you’re interested.
[2] The Schwab version of the Amex Platinum is basically the normal version, but with the ability to cash out points at 1.25 cents/point (in addition to the normal options), and an annual bonus depending on the value of your assets with Schwab. If you have a Schwab account, it’s an objective upgrade over the normal version. In any scenario, it’s not worth it from a strict cash perspective unless you spend literally thousands of dollars a year on flights - but since you can transfer points from one Amex card to another, it can increase the value of other cards (which is why I considered the Amex Gold in the first place). Link is here.
[3] If you already use Doordash, or eat out at Shake Shack / The Cheesecake Factory every month, the Amex Gold card becomes far more valuable with the monthly credits. I, however, was concerned about whether I’d just start eating out more.
[4] This is an important distinction, since while Chase’s airline credit is good for fees and tickets, Amex’s credit is only good for fees. As a result, the Amex credit is basically worthless to me, since I prefer to fly Southwest.