This is always a hot topic and really depends on the person.
I’m going to give you my stack based on me running a company that purchases lots of inventory with credit cards and spends a lot on logistics, but the cards here can still work great for you.
So your core personal card should be a premium travel card.
What I have:
Other great options:
My additional personal cards:
Marriott Bonvoy Card : Get 15 nights every year added to your nights stayed, making getting to platinum way easier.
Business Cards:
These change often but my core cards are the Chase Ink Preferred, Chase Ink Unlimited, Chase Ink Premier, and I do have 2 capital one sparks that I will be eventually fazing out because of the premier card. (I got about $4000 in bonuses from meeting the spending numbers from the capital one cards, so it was worth it, but now I can close them out.)
Chase Ink Premier: A new card, it's metal and fancy. You get unlimited 2% back on transactions, but you get a whopping 2.5% on transactions over $5000. For that reason, I am making this my new primary for inventory.
The thing is though, you can’t transfer points over to your personal. It is the only card I’ve seen where its locked in, and it doesn’t look like there is a multiplier for spending on travel with the points in the Premier.
So technically, the 1.5% back on the preferred and then transferred to your reservation will give you a higher cashback amount as long as pay yourself back is active because 1.5 x 1.5 = 2.25% back.
How does the Chase point hack work? Well, the big thing is about transfer points.
You can take your Chase points from your Ink cards and send them to your personal card. Then you can use a relatively new redemption function called Pay Yourself Back to get 1.5x your points on that card.
I made a video explaining more about how this works here
But the idea is, you for example get 3x points on shipping and logistics with the preferred card. But if you have a chase sapphire reserve, you can transfer the points over to it and then redeem them personally at 1.5x, making it a 4.5% back on shipping and logistics. This is a huge rebate.
The fun thing to remember about rebates is that they are tax-free. Rebates are not taxable, so all these points redeemed to cash can be just that, cash. Learn more about that here
So, if are you a casual traveler, but don’t have the right kind of business spend, then Venture X is technically a better card for the yearly fee. But the Reserve is better for the transfer benefits.
Want to spend your points effectively? Check out point.me
