Should You Apply Now for Chase INK Unlimited 90,000 Points Offer?

The 90,000 points offer on the Chase INK Unlimited card just went live online by following the steps outlines in this post. The quandary for many of us is that we’d like to also get a 40,000 points referral bonus for a friend who refers us to the card. That referral offer is ending on September 2, 2024, and it seems unlikely we’ll see referral links with the 90,000 offer before that date. And so we’re stuck either signing up for a 75k bonus with 40k referral or waiting

Those who are mainly signing up for the bonus might do better going for the 120,000 offer on INK Preferred. However, it’s worth noting that it’s not guaranteed that you’ll end up getting the match on that card either since your approval might not come until after September 5th when that bonus ends. Once there’s no public landing page, it’s by no means certain you’ll get a match from Chase.

Another option is to signup for the 75,000 INK Unlimited offer via a 40,000 referral link and then hope to get the bonus matched. If we’ll assume the 90,000 INK Unlimited offer goes public soon and also that they match it, there is a chance to get a match will get backdated before the public offer date. With the recent INK Preferred bonus increase we saw them backdate it a full month, and it’s likely they’ll match this one at least from August 25th/26th when it went live in Chase branches.

Ultimately there’s no perfect solution here, and we’ve left with a number of options:

1. Signup directly for the 120,000 INK Preferred without any referral bonus
2. Signup for the 100,000 INK Preferred offer via 40,000 referral link. Even if you get approved after September 2nd, you’ll still get the 40k referral bonus. And hopefully you’ll get approved quickly and/or will somehow be able to get the match on the 100k bonus to 120k.
3. Signup directly for the 90,000 INK Unlimited without any referral bonus (we discussed in the original post why this offer might be superior to the 120,000 INK Preferred offer)
4. Signup for the 75,000 INK Unlimited offer via 40,000 referral link. Even if you get approved after September 2nd, you’ll still get the 40k referral bonus. And we can hope that it will be possible to get a match and increase the signup bonus from 75k to 90k.
5. Wait and hope that the referral offer on the INK Unlimited card gets update to 90,000, and then signup for the 90k card bonus + 20k referral bonus.