Our Favorite Card
One question that we get often is “What card do I start with??” Surprisingly, it’s pretty straightforward. We always recommend starting with the Chase Sapphire Preferred (CSP) card. It has an annual fee of $95, but the benefits far outweigh that. Here’s why we love it so much and encourage everyone to start with it:
The CSP earns Chase Ultimate Rewards (URs) - our favorite kind of points! The standard offer for the CSP is 60,000 points after you spend $4,000 in 3 months. URs are flexible points, so they can be used in a variety of ways:
60,000 points would give you $600 if you opt to cash out your points use them to purchase gift cards. (We definitely don’t recommend this, but it’s an option!)
60,000 points would give you $750 if you book anything through the Chase Travel Portal. (Still not the best redemption for your points in terms of value, but it’s another option.)
60,000 points would give you way more value if you transfer them out of Chase to partner brands. (This is by far our favorite way to use them!)
Our family most often transfers our URs to partner brands like Hyatt and Southwest to get supersized value for hotel accommodations and airfare. Chase is the only bank that transfers to Hyatt and Southwest, which is one of the reasons we value URs so much.
URs also transfer to many other airlines and hotel brands, so if you aren’t quite sure what trip you want to plan or how you want to redeem your points, accumulating URs is the perfect strategy. The Chase transfer partners include:
Airlines: Aer Lingus, Air France/KLM, Air Canada, British Airways, Emirates, Iberia, JetBlue, Singapore Airlines, Southwest, United and Virgin Atlantic
Hotels: Hyatt, IHG and Marriott
The CSP provides an annual $50 credit for booking travel through the Chase Travel Portal. We don’t book through the portal often, but we do at least once per year to utilize this credit. It essentially brings the annual fee from $95 down to $45.
It offers awesome travel protection benefits if you use your card to book airfare, hotels or rental cars:
Trip Protection: If your trip is interrupted by severe weather, sickness or other covered situations, you can be reimbursed up to $10,000 per person and $20,000 per trip. Or, if your trip is delayed by more than 12 hours, or if you need to stay overnight because of the delay, you’re covered up to $500 per ticket for expenses like meals and a hotel stay.
Baggage Delay Insurance: If your luggage is delayed more than six hours, you can get reimbursed up to $100 a day for up to five days. This would be so beneficial if you need to purchase things like clothing, swimwear or new toiletries.
In terms of regular spending, it offers 3x points on dining, online grocery orders, and certain streaming services, 2x on travel expenses, and 1x on everything else.
Last but not least, it’s important to understand the Chase 5/24 rule. This unwritten rule states that if you’ve opened 5 or more personal credit cards from any bank in the last 24 months, Chase will not approve you for another card. Since we value URs so much and always want to accumulate more of them, we want to open Chase cards first before moving on to cards from other banks. This is another reason why opening the CSP first is a great plan!
If you’re ready to get started racking up Chase Ultimate Rewards, we’d appreciate it so much if you use our Chase Sapphire Preferred referral link to apply. It won’t cost you anything, but it gives us a few referral points to add to our stash.
We’re here if you have any questions!
