Earlier today Chase announce ‘Pay Yourself Back‘, this will let Chase Sapphire Preferred & Chase Sapphire Reserve use points to offset some charges for 1.25¢/1.5¢ per point. This promotion will run from May 31st – September 30th, 2020. It’s largely been speculated that this feature is in response to COVID-19, but based on a tip I received this has been in development since before COVID-19. I can’t see Chase keeping these specific categories long term, but it’s possible they might have rotating categories. For example the Chase Sapphire Reserve page states (emphasis mine):
with the Pay Yourself BackSM tool, your Ultimate Rewards® points are worth 50% more when you redeem them for statement credits against purchases in our current categories:
I obviously wouldn’t rely on this feature being extended and obviously Chase will use this period for some cost benefit analysis as well but it is interesting to hear that this feature was in development before COVID-19. For more information on the new Pay Yourself Back feature click here.
The feature went live and it’s pretty straightforward. I don’t see a mention of whether the UR for the original purchase will be taken away, my assumption right now is that they will not, but time will tell.
You can get gift cards at grocery stores and some home improvement stores so this becomes pretty interesting. Some restaurants offer gift card deals as well.
sounds like next year will be a good time to stop using my Amex Gold for grocery MS and start using my (upgraded from Freedom) CSR
Sounds like they wanna move away from a travel portal and do what some other banks do – allow you to “erase” charges in specific categories. Hope they don’t couple it with negative changes… 🙄
September 31st?
Fixed
It comes before September 32nd.
Hopefully Amex follows
Sep 31? LOL
If it’s able to be used in the travel category longterm then count me in, ever since their change to the Expedia travel portal I find it a lot harder to use UR points. (for my particular airport, transferring directly to miles is almost never better than the 1.5x redemption on the portal). That would let you effectively use points for any travel, and would make the CSR a no-questions longterm keeper for me even with the higher AF.
Do we know if PYB purchases will still earn points? Getting 1.5cpp is terrific but not at the cost of losing 5X.
We don’t know yet
You get a statement credit for past purchases. I would assume if you make purchases, wait for the billing cycle to end, get your points and THEN pay yourself back for those purchases, you are getting both the points and the statement credit for 1.5x.
I just redeemed my points for the past 90 days of purchases, meaning that I already had my points accumulated for those purchases and also got the 1.5x statement credit!
What’s PYB?
pay yourself back I would assume.
To me it makes no sense that Chase would set it up where PYB on purchases that you can earn 3x or 5x on would be worth it. That would only make sense on 1x purchases to use PYB if that was the case.
I would expect that you still earn 3x or 5x on your purchases and that you are using your UR points to pay for your credit card bill. It will be interesting to see if it is more of a instance where you may have to let your monthly statement closes to then use PYB and then keep the 3x or 5x points or can you use PYB before the statement closes and still keep the 3x or 5x points for those purchases that got the statement credit.
Really hoping they expand this offer to Chase You Invest accounts. Would definitely make me sign up for their investment product and would cement Chase at the top of my wallet.