Yeah, I just can't spend my time on that stuff. I got a card that just gives me 2% on everything and I'm calling it a day. no fee.

Airport lounges sound cool, my friends sometimes get a deal on travel/hotel. But they also can't use points in some situations for weird reasons. Another uses a spreadsheet to optimize his poins. I just can't devote that kind of time to that stuff.

The points can really be worth it though. In 2 years, over 3 cards (between my wife and I), I've racked up nearly 400,000 Aeroplan miles, which is valued somewhere around $8,400 (2.1c per mile). And this is regular spending, and pretty basic cards (AMEX Cobalt and TD Infinite). These aren't the $700+/year cards, all are $1xx/year.

You are gambling that the airlines let you spend those points or miles on something that you would have bought anyway at a conversation rate of $0.021 per point or mile, but there is no guarantee. They hold all the cards and they can devalue those anytime they like.

To me, if I have to spend any extra time figuring out how to spend those miles and points, or if I have to make even a single extra stop or adjust my itinerary to make use of them, then it is not worth it compared to a simple 2% cash back scheme.

You’re 100% right. I had 800k points I was sitting on for years because it took weeks or months of advanced (in both senses of temporal and complexity) planning to try to spend them optimally. No one is getting optimal rewards under constraints. Sure, it is possible to get round trip business class SFO to SIN for like 60k points in some edge cases. But the more typical scenario is that only on certain flights at certain times that are scooped up immediately by people who are in the know and religiously checking for exactly these deals.

What really happens is you hope you can do that but then get frustrated and either sit on your points for years or spend 2-3x the “optimal value” amount for something basic. Don’t get me wrong I like points, and it feels good cashing in on international business class tickets, but spending them in any way close to optimal is a stressful mess of transferring between airlines, calling service reps to get hidden seats and deals, gambling on upgrade availability, etc.

Finding great deals is not something accessible to someone who is only willing to spend 1-2 hours looking for a flight. You really do need to make it a hobby. I asked on r/awardtravel a few months back where all the deals were for an international flight I was trying to book 5 months in advance and got downvoted to oblivion because “everyone knows those deals are gone by now, you need to look at least 9 months in advance”.

I'm about to book business class tickets over to Lisbon -> Amsterdam -> Vienna, for 140k points and $300 in fees. All it cost me was a few hours spread over a year as I signed up and churned through 3 different credit cards.

Easily worth it IMHO. If I'm spending that money anyways, putting a bit of effort in to maximize the rewards seems logical.

$8,400 over three years is about $230/month. And aside from the opportunity cost of your labor to optimize that, you should also theoretically account for any purchases that you wouldn't have made if you weren't trying to optimize your points (if any; I'm sure it's hard to attribute).

With current interest rates of around 5%, one could get the same stream of income ($2.8k/y) by just plonking $50k or so into a high-yield savings account or money market fund.

I have likely spent 1 hour applying for cards, loading them into Apple Wallet over 3 years. If you are doing the math on opportunity cost for something you spent 1 hour over 3 years, you are already wasting your time.

To be honest, the $50k argument isn't comparable. It's like saying "Oh you have a side gig making $10k/year, why don't you just invest $200k in a money market fund instead?" First, someone could do both. And second, it's not even a logical comparison.

Mind you, the theoretical advantage here is that it's money you're making that doesn't require you to have $50k sitting around all at once time.

Yes, but how much did you spend to get those miles? What is your effective % cash back?

Best consumer cash back card is 2%. I'd have to spend over $400,000 to get $8400 in cash back. I definitely haven't spent close to that. So if I value the $8400 at cash value, it's better than any cash back credit card available.

Aeroplan stole 300,000 points from me. Never again. I'll stick to cash back cards that give me my rewards every month in a form I can use.

It's been like 10 years since I looked into the options but at the time I was getting my first cards I was doing the math on various points cards to compare to cash back and what I found was, unless you were really gaming the system, the best you could hope for is roughly 1-2% returns. And the system, whether you're gaming it or not, also requires you to then play in the system so any given card might work out to like 5% if you spend those points on air travel... with a whole host of restrictions including but not limited to a specific airline. I don't have the time in my life to game the system so I can fly marginally cheaper with a specific airline and therefore restricted set of airports and scheduling options.

Travel cards haven’t been that restrictive in the time I’ve been using them (since around 2016). Chase Sapphire Preferred/Reserve and Amex Gold/Platinum don’t have any restrictions on what earns points, it just needs to code as travel (flights, rides, or hotels) or restaurants and while there’s some benefits from using the Chase/Amex portals to book even that’s not required. Similarly points can used towards anything that codes as travel.

Of course there are airline/hotel specific cards and those may be more restrictive but I’ve never seen the point in those.

I used to have a sapphire preferred, which promised 1.25x point value or something when spent on travel. When I went to book via the chase portal, everything was magically .25x more expensive when compared to the airlines page.

I can’t say I’ve observed that. Checking just now the prices I’m seeing in the Chase portal are identical to those listed on Expedia (which the Chase portal is built on). Some flights are slightly cheaper on airliner sites though.

hmm, maybe it was just jetblue specific, or something about the time I was booking. But it left a bad taste in my mouth, I decided to cancel the card at that point.

> but I’ve never seen the point in those

The one points card I have actually is a Marriott card which obviously only works with Marriott, but Marriott is everywhere and doesn't restrict scheduling options so it was an easy choice at the time. I used to travel weekly for work and the hotel was on me for reimbursement whereas the airline was on company card, and Marriott was the preferred booking option by my company so it made a lot of sense to get the card. The math at the time for that was like 5-7% when spending the points at Marriott plus a free night for what was an $85/year card. Useful for personal travel.

I can buy any flight from the airline directly and just apply points to my bill. Easy to do.

I’ve derived quite a lot of benefit from a Sapphire Reserve and Amex Plat over the years, though a lot less recently with the pandemic. They pay for themselves very quickly if you do any amount of travel at all, like recently I used the points earned from a trans-pacific flight to cut the cost of a hotel stay later during that trip in half (and booking that stay also netted me a nice chunk of points).

Might drop one of the two at some point though since they both cover the same niche.

I definitely believe it can be worth it monetarily. But to me it seems like such a maze of which cards to get, what point transfers to do. When it comes down to it, I don't even travel that much. Churning cards. One of my friends has a bunch a points that are going to expire, or there's point inflation or something?

I may waste my time on other things (like on hn, lol) but I don't think I want to spend it on that.

There are sites that basically walk you through optimal strategies depending on your situation. It's super easy nowadays.

Between Amex vs Chase Sapphire, I feel like the Sapphire points go a longer way than the Amex

And what would you have gotten from 2% flat cash back? Probably similar, I’m guessing.

To get $8400 on 2% cash back, you'd have to spend $420,000.

Exactly, there are 0 cards that would give cash back equivalent to what I've spent. I suspect it's like $100,000-$150,000. So being conservative, it's a 5% 'cash' back card.

I mostly fall into the 'set it and forget it' group. But, if you travel it can pay to add another card. Also, there's a middle ground between do nothing and track on a spreadsheet. It's pretty easy to have an Apple Card for 3% Apple things, Amazon card for 5% at Amazon, and then something like Venture X (or other travel friendly card) for everything else. One of nice things about the Venture cards is you simply book travel however you want then apply points to the purchase after the fact - no blackouts.

And since you mention lounges - if you travel 3+/year, lounges and TSA Pre/Global Entry really lower the frustration of travel.

I was reading reviews of the Amazon card and it sounded like there was a huge catch with fees and interest making that 5% not worth it. That's the only card I think would be worth adding for me. I don't do enough travel or shopping at Apple to make other cards worth using if I have a regular cash back card.

The amazon card has absurdly bad interest rates if you're carrying a balance, but that's not unusual with points cards, most of them are >= 25% APY.

There is also a weird gotcha if you use the cash advance balance transfer offers. It's 4% transfer fee, 2% APY for a year, but the cash advance pays off first, so, any purchases will continue to accrue at the 25% APY if you make them - but if you want to do a balance transfer just lock the card afterwards.

Other than that it's fine, actually great. I make a shitload of rewards on those amazon purchases, pay the balance monthly, and cash it out every month and don't pay any fees/interest.

You should never carry a balance on any card anyways so I think the high interest rate is moot. I don’t even know the interest rate of any of my cards. The 5% back on Amazon is worth it if you buy a lot on Amazon.

You do have to maintain a Prime membership, but there are no other regular fees. It's trivial to use the earned money on other Amazon purchases. No CC points/cash back are worth carrying a balance on any card.

2% on apple pay, 1% otherwise. So many other cards offer more cash back.

It really is quite nice. If it weren’t for my SoFi credit card giving a flat 2% back on everything (which can be routed into a 4.5% savings account), my Apple Card would be my primary card. As it is it primarily gets used for Apple Pay since the cash back is the same in that circumstance as well as for Apple stuff for the 3% back.

Wouldn’t be surprised if between the two Apple will be the one to keep the perks going longest though… my hunch is that SoFi will dial theirs down once they’re done trying to aggressively grow.

Apple still beats SoFi in the UI department though. More bank/card apps should be modeled after the Apple Card page in Wallet.

Amazon card is a good option. 5% cashback on Amazon purchases (and often with "no interest if paid within 12 months" type terms on stuff like TVs. 2% on gas and 1% on everything else. Cashback accrues in practically real time and is useable on 99% of products on Amazon, so it's very normal-person friendly as it doesn't require optimization of habits if you already buy a lot of stuff on the 'zon. Super simple since it just rewards flat dollars, no points or annual thresholds or loyalty programs or...

Also doesn't require the insanely good credit of the Apple card.

Yikes. I know it's just an example, but how often do "normal" people buy TVs?

I gave up videogames because I didn't want to spend so much time in my head like that (I'll still gladly play tabletop games with other people, and even couch-coop videogames if I'm invited too, but I gave away my gaming PC), and I sure don't want to spend time fiddling with credit-card points games. It helps that we're mostly unhooked from "retail therapy" or whatever the term is these days.

What are the costs of cc points games? Who pays in the long run?

A TV specifically? Maybe once a decade. But, what if it's a new computer, or a new couch, or whatever? Substantially more often. Their minimum threshold is only $250, although items are specifically elibile, not automatic. They'll happily do the 12 month deal on a $399 iPad mini, for instance, just to name one thing I spot checked).

> Who pays in the long run?

People who only use cash for in-person transactions for privacy reasons. :(

Does Amazon see your activity outside of what you spend at their store?

I don't believe so. The actual card is managed by Chase, payments go through the Chase website, etc. Amazon just links to it and updates your reward balance nightly.

Note that it's better if you don't apply rewards points at checkout - instead, get a payout to your bank account via the Chase reward redemption portal in the app. If you have $100 in rewards points, and use them in checkout, that $100 doesn't hit your card and you don't get the 5% cashback on that $100.

Technically you don't even need to loop through the bank account, you can also do statement credit. It doesn't count against your minimum payment, but it does count as a credit/payment towards the statement balance.

But yes, always charge the full amount and then handle rewards at a lower layer, never "pay with points".

Isn't this optimizing for 5% of 5%? e.g. 1/400?

Sure, to get $100 in rewards you'd need to have spent $2,000. It's not life-changing but $5 is still something, and I imagine Chase/Amazon save >1 million a year from people not doing this.

It sounds like you're guessing here...

Anyone without access to the entire source code of Amazon is.

I hate points. There's always a catch, a term and condition that excludes your desired flight, or a time limit, or a horrible website, or something stupid.

The best points are called dollars and are accepted everywhere, all the time, for any purchase.

I agree.

While I don't use cash for everything, I do actively avoid credit cards that offer any of those "perks".

> The software is solid and Apple prevents them from reselling your data to third parties.

We will see. The Apple Card is using the Mastercard network. Recent article came out which shows MC does their own internal processing of transaction data for their personal gain.

I have requested my data through the GDPR portal — “My Data”. In theory, there should only be data for my other MC card.

https://www.mastercard.us/public/my-data/dgr-public/personal...

I do agree. It’s a nice card for those that don’t care about the “point warfare” (most programs offer 1-3 cents per dollar spent). Side note, GS is very generous with their credit limits. My limit is reaching almost $60K at this point and I maybe use 10% of it.

The one thing I do dislike about the AC is the support. It’s so bad

> most regular people

I'd bet that this is pretty close to 'everyone' at this point. Haven't we been reading stories on HN recently about how airline points are basically worthless these days? I wouldn't be at all surprised if that were essentially true for all travel-related points.

> Apple prevents them from reselling your data to third parties

Do you have a source on this? The Apple Card uses Mastercard which is known to sell data.

The privacy policy claims that MasterCard and Goldman do not sell or share transaction data from Apple Card. I’d like clarity on how this differs from any other MasterCard but that is what it says.

Source: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-card/

> do not share or sell your transaction information to third parties for marketing or advertising.

It's not that they don't sell them. It's that they don't sell them for marketing and advertising. I wonder if Mastercard selling pseudo-anonymous data is covered by this.

I believe the Apple card uses a different card number for each purchase, so they can't aggregate your purchasing history.

That's for the merchant. Merchants only have access to the tokenised card number. MasterCard and Goldman will surely have access to the actual card number. How would you recon they generate monthly statement otherwise?

Goldman surely has access to the real card number and the statement, but not sure if the Mastercard network has access to that as you would think that information just gets routed back to Goldman.

Doesn't Google Pay do this with normal cards?

Google and Apple Pay negotiate a card number of them to use. But, Mastercard and the bank both link those to your account and can tell how you spend. They can even tell the difference between using the physical card and the app.

Same with Apple Pay. You don't need to use the Apple credit card for that.

It is really nice once you give up trying to min/max rewards.

And some of the issues are kind of self inflicted - the "always monthly on the nose" isn't a feature I really need, and I would actually prefer to offset that by a few days, so if they offered that as a feature I'd take advantage of it.

So why did you stop using it?

I still use it, I just started traveling way more so lounge access was nice.

Then once I had the travel cards I started using them to see if I could optimize their perks.

I am very content with my alliant signature visa, as it gives 2.5% on everything, still has an extended-warranty benefit, and has no international transaction fees.

There are a few downsides, specifically (a) no contactless chip in the credit card yet, (b) need to keep $1k on deposit and have at least one monthly deposit of any kind/amount (scheduled ACH for $10) to get the 2.5% rate, otherwise it's 1.5%, (c) minimum redemption $50, and (d) ACH processing is a little slow/awkward, so you probably want to pay a bit ahead of time. And generally the UX is a little rough etc, they are a small credit union and it's not super polished, but it's functional.

But yeah I'm tired of category gimmicks/etc, they are not usually worth it anymore. BOA Signature Visa has 3% on category of choice (online purchases or home improvement being the good ones) but it's only up to $2500 in spend per quarter, and they count the non-choice categories against your total bonus, so using it for gas/groceries costs you from the theoretical maximum of $75 total bonus per quarter. And they charge international transaction fees which completely negate the online purchase bonus for anything denominated in non-USD (at least it's not charging for international transactions in USD anymore). And they really screwed up on a fraud case that took CFPB intervention to fix - it turns out, the price of my dignity is apparently $75 a quarter.

The costco card has 4% on gas, which is good (especially when I had a nearby speedway I could buy beer at), but it doesn't cash out until the next calendar year (so you can wait up to 14 months for points) so I generally don't use that except for the end of the year (I'll wait 3-4 months, I won't wait 14). But I think this is emblematic of the problem - the costco card (and many other store cards) only gives 2% even in the store, so it's worse than the alliant, on top of the onerous cashout process! Even if you have a more typical 2%-on-everything card, the costco card is pretty much strictly worse because of the cashout. I mostly got it for the 2-year extended warranty, that was the value to me, but they dropped that benefit at the start of 2022, so, it's almost useless to me now.

Notionally I could use amex or something and try to make it my primary card I guess, but I'm not a business traveler, and the alliant is just mentally easier. 2.5% on everything if you keep the $1k in the account and set up a recurring monthly $10 ach transfer, done. No international transaction fees, what you see is what you pay (plus or minus actual currency conversion, which is unavoidable). Use it as your primary card and spend $2000 and you'll cross the $50 redemption threshold every month. Is fine.

The Amazon Prime card is also very good, 5% on all amazon purchases is good enough I'll make a special point of it. If you do most of your bigbox purchases there, it adds up quick. They also have very good cash-advance offers, right now it's 4% transfer fee and 2% APY for a year - but the cash advance pays off first, and new purchases continue to accrue interest at the full rate (25% or whatever), so, you want to lock the card while you're doing a cash advance, so you are also foregoing that 5% (really, 2.5% above the alliant) from amazon purchases, but, if you're mature with it, it's great for consolidating other debt or financing things that need to be done in cash.

I'm also an overall satisfied Alliant customer. Definitely the lack of contactless chip is annoying, and I will echo that their UX could use refinement, but otherwise it's a pretty reliable card and the points are simple and easy. Fraud detection is a little hair-trigger I've found, but I have a few backup travel cards so when something unusual gets declined I can use an alternative.