A number of months ago, the annual fee posted on my Chase Sapphire Reserve card and I downgraded the card to become a Freedom Flex card instead. (Of course I first used up the $300 travel credit before downgrading. 🙂 ) My biggest motivation to have the card was the 1.5 cents value from Pay Yourself Back, but I don’t need to have it all the time and pay the hefty $550 annual fee.
Flush with some new Ultimate Rewards points, I decided to upgrade again to the Sapphire Reserve. The card I chose to upgrade – a different Freedom card – had a very low credit line, and the Chase rep was easily able to transfer over some credit from another card to bring my credit line up to $10,000, the minimum needed for upgrading to the Reserve.
The timing of this Reserve upgrade isn’t great since Pay Yourself Back benefit on the card has been degraded to the current redemption rate of just 1.25 cents per point.
Hopefully I’ll be be able to cash out some points throughout the year using the Chase Ultimate Rewards travel which offers a value of 1.5 cents per point. The new PYB categories of Grocery and Gas are easy to use, though, and I’m considering cashing out some at the 1.25 rate.
I’ll also be sure to find $300 of Travel over the course of the year to get the $300 Travel credit. The Sapphire Reserve credit works on all a wide variety of travel charges so that should be easy enough. I’ve even had success with tolls in the past.
I’ll use the card on all Travel and Dining purchases throughout the year for the 3x rewards on those categories. The card also offers primary car rental insurance and some other benefits will will be useful. I’m not aware of any easy way of using up the Instacart $15 monthly benefit, and I’ll probably let that one go to simplify my life. I might use the $5 monthly ($15 quarterly) DoorDash credit, though I’m not honestly sure if they have stopped giving that to me since my prior card was cancelled some months ago.
The Chase rep told me that the annual fee would post on the 1st of the month, but I haven’t seen any charge yet. Interestingly, a reader tells me that with Sapphire Reserve upgrades it even takes a few months until they charge the annual fee, so upgrading actually gives us a bit more than one year for the $550 annual fee. Nice.
In this article, you linked to the Payments Workshop about what counts as a travel credit for the CSR. I went there and the vast majority of the DP are very old. The same can be said for the 2 articles below. Would you consider posting a fresh article for people to provide DP of what currently works for the travel credit on the CSR that can easily be converted to cash?
https://www.doctorofcredit.com/maximizing-chase-sapphire-reserve-300-travel-credit-cash/
https://www.doctorofcredit.com/300-chase-sapphire-reserve-travel-credit-work-triggers/
The instacart benefit shouldn’t be hard to use, especially if you do pickup. Instacart+ gives you free pickup so just find something useful.
I’m surprised though you wouldn’t use a different combo of cards to maximize earnings at lower fees. AMEX Gold for grocery/restaurants and Citi Premier for other travel. And if you have the AMEX plat, use that for flights (though I wouldn’t have that card just for flights).
Is 1.25c or 1.5c the best redemption value for Chase points ? Putting aside the claims/goals of 5c and above by redeeming for some long haul business class seats, what are some of the other best options ?
I am thinking that transferring to Hyatt gives a decent 1.7 to 2c value. Thoughts and other options ?
On a side note, Venture-x is a good alternative with most of the same benefits as CSR and lower annual fee.
Like you, CSR has been my travel and restaurant card. If there is another restaurant card giving me 3%… I may switch to that.
Citi Premier gives 3% on restaurants, supermarkets, gas stations, air travel, hotels. Also has a high SUB at the moment: $800. $95 AF.
I know these Chase cards give 3% back for restaurants and all have no annual fee:
Chase Sapphire Preferred
Chase Freedom Flex
Chase Freedom Unlimited
Sapphire Preferred has $95 af
U.S. BANK ALTITUDE® GO VISA SIGNATURE® CARD
Gives you 4% back with $0 AF.
I kust became eligible for sapphire bonus again after 48mo but seemed like an easy call to wait on CSR until my VentureX comes closer to renewal again.. VX covered all the perks I care about on CSR except the 1.5x redemption.
But, just found out from this thread that I had missed the announcement on Venture X dropping the PP restaurants.. which is a big one to me. That change really gives CSR a leg up as my travel perks ‘keeper’ card.. Unless Chase decides to follow suit.. I recall Amex already did it years ago.
Will be cancelling mine when the next fee hits — $550 for a mediocre card that’s outclassed by the handful of churn cards available at any given time. Overall a dark period for normal point earners with fees skyrocketing and value dropping. Go to recommendation is now Citi 2%
There is no point in having a CSR unless the plan is to BUY a lot of travel. For those with deep pockets of points you redeem rather than buy travel. CSP has better bonuses for online food delivery and the annual bonus points.
Even if you redeem, CSR is the best for travel protection. Of course, it’s not worth paying for it but with a bit of creativity you can have CSR at no cost,
The annual fee won’t post for about 90 days, but you will get your $300 travel credit immediately, and another $300 travel credit in one year. This will allow you to get two $300 travel credits for one annual fee. I upgraded to a CSR a few years ago in August. I immediately received a $300 travel credit and my annual fee posted on December 1. I received my second $300 travel credit when my statement closed on August 26. I could have used the second $300 travel credit and downgraded the card before the second annual fee posted on December 1.
Yes, with proper upgrade/downgrade cycle one should be able to net $50 after travel credits and annual fee. To me it’s not worth the trouble though. CSR still shines as a card packed with useful features but if one does not mind these features spread out across several cards, it will work better. 4x Amex Gold for restaurants, 3x travel on Citi Premier, travel protections on Ritz and you don’t need CSR at all. Not sure about PYB, I don’t want to sell points back to Chase even at 1.5.
I’ve had the CSR for 6 years but will be downgrading soon. Unless you’re making very heavy use of the travel portal or PP restaurants, the CSR can’t be justified anymore.
We used to cash out via travel using CSR or CSP. I actually realized if I just cashed out for straight cash I can use that cash to fund our Albert accounts. Then I buy Airbnb gift cards with 20% back at Kroger, 10% back at Target and 10% back at Walmart. Effectively netting 15-25% discount on our Airbnb bookings.
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Can you use multiple Airbnb gift cards for a single reservation? I also have Albert and I Amazon buy gift cards each week at Best Buy, basically everything I buy at Amazon is 15% off now. I’ve been reluctant to buy Airbnb gift cards because I didn’t know how easy or difficult they would be to use.
yes, you can use multiple airbnb gift cards for a single reservation. when you load the gift cards to your accound they show up as a credit, and you can apply multiple credits to your reservation.
You load Airbnb gift cards into your account and use your account balance to book a reservation. Similar to loading up your Amazon account
Hi, sorry as I do not quite understand. 1. What is an Albert Acccout, and 2. How do you regular get 20% off on ABB GCs? I am always watching for deals on those.
Albert is an online-only bank. If you set up direct deposit with Albert (I send 10% of my paycheck), and subscribe to their Genius service ($8/month) you get access to regular ‘deals’ in the form of cash back. For example, my current available deals at the moment are:
10% off at Shell ($5 max)
10% off at Starbucks ($5 max)
15% off at McDonalds ($5 max)
15% off at Etsy ($7.50 max)
10% off at Lyft ($5 max)
15% off at Chick-fil-A ($5 max)
10% off at Uber ($5 max)
10% off at Doordash ($5 max)
20% off at Whole Foods ($5 max)
15% off at Sephora ($7.50 max)
In the past 1 week I have used:
10% off at Target ($5)
10% off at Walmart ($5)
15% off at Best Buy ($5)
Different people see somewhat different deals; I think it depends on your location. For example, my friend (who lives an hour away) gets deals for Chevron but not so much for Shell. There are Chevrons near him but there are more Shell stations near me.
Cash back posts in a day or two after purchase. When you use a deal, it will become available again in about 1 week.
The Best Buy/Walmart/Targets offers are especially nice because you can use them to buy gift cards for other places at 10% or 15% off. I use it to buy gift cards for Netflix and Amazon (then I load the gift cards to my accounts), but Best Buy has many other gift card options. Now I have learned I can do the same for Airbnb so this is great news to me.
I generally save about $15-$20 per week from these cash back deals, or $780-$1040 annually which for me is well worth the $96 annual cost of the Genius service. Albert allows me to save 10%-15% on almost every place I shop regularly: Shell, Walmart, Target, Netflix, Amazon, Starbucks. It is more valuable than any credit card I have.
Albert has a referral program, the person referring and the person being referred each get $100. LMK if you are interested or have more questions.
Pretty much everything
chicken_po_boy said. We get 20% back at Kroger every week and do this in 2 player mode ($5 back max). So basically we can get $200/mo in Airbnb gift cards for $160. I just load them to our Airbnb account as we buy the gift cards. Same way with Target and Walmart, but the cash back is only 10%.
We used to book Airbnb’s using Chase pts for 6.5%. Now I just cash out the Chase points and load those funds to our Albert accounts inevitably giving is an extra 5% back.
We got in on the Albert annual subscription service early on (August 2022) when they were running a deal. The subscription cost was lower overall and they gave us $10 back for signing up. We will re-evaluate when our annual subscription service expires to see if it makes financial sense to keep the service.
Hi, will you briefly explain why you didn’t do an application for a new CSR card but instead upgraded your freedom card? Reason why I ask is because my CSP card renewal is soon and I’ve had mine for a few years already, I think enough time to get another sapphire bonus. IIRC there’s a no annual fee sapphire card that I can downgrade to so I can keep the UR points, then I was going to outright apply for the CSR.
One reason could be that you are only allowed one Sapphire (Reserve / Preferred) bonus every 48 months
Plus if the credit card number doesn’t change (and it generally won’t) it won’t use up a 5/24 slot or require you to be under 5/24.