Travel: Inconsistent, but typically $200-300 every other month
Other: $600
Open to Business Cards: No
What’s the purpose of your next card? I would like to start earning points to redeem for future travel. I travel to visit my long distance fiancé typically once every other month so I’d like to get points on that, and redeem some points for my honeymoon, if possible. (in about a year and a half)
Do you have any cards you’ve been looking at? AMEX Gold, Venture X, Chase Sapphire Preferred.
Are you OK with category spending or do you want a general spending card? I’d rather a general spending, but can do category spending card.
3% grocery (note that Walmart, Target, and club warehouses don’t code as grocery)
3% dining
3% entertainment
3% popular streaming
5% hotels and rental cars booked through Capital One Travel
8% Capital One Entertainment
1% otherwise
Mastercard
No FTF
Savor cashback can be converted to miles for Venture X.
Capital One Venture X ($395 AF)
10x hotels and rental cars booked through Capital One Travel
5x flights and vacation rentals booked through Capital One Travel
2x catch-all
$300 annual Capital One Travel credit
10K anniversary miles
Visa Infinite
No FTF
You can do better than 1 cpp by transferring your miles to transfer partners, but 1 cpp is a good floor for discussion purposes, so the effective AF is -$5 if you’re sure you can use the travel credit each year.
In exchange for your trouble, you get:
Priority Pass for each cardholder (including authorized users)
Capital One lounge access (currently at DCA, DEN, DFW, and IAD)
No cost for authorized user cards
Global Entry credit every 4 years
Primary auto rental coverage
President’s Circle status with Hertz (you can use it to status match with other rental car companies)
Trip delay, cancellation, and interruption coverage
Purchase security, extended warranty, and return protection coverage
Cell phone protection
One quirk is that Capital One’s transfer partners skew international, however you can often book domestically through them. But the travel eraser is a guaranteed 1 cpp valuation if you want to keep it simple. Capital One Travel is run on Hopper and price matches exact outside offerings.
Check the flights to your destination before applying for any cards. This is super important because sometimes points for flights don’t always work. Availability can be super restricted.
You can find some flights that work first on Google Flights (use just any dates to check out how this works)
Search the same flights on the airline’s website using “book with miles” to see the price in points
then you can see if it will likely work and what the price would be in points
compare the price in points to the price paying cash
Often times, it’s actually better to stick with cash back for your credit card instead of points (outside of signup bonuses)
If you’d like to switch to having a metal card, the $95 Capital One Venture is a nice value without the downside of the Venture X. The major downside of the Venture X is that you have to pay a rather large annual fee and the only way to get it back is booking travel through Capital One’s in-house travel agency. This isn’t ideal because they don’t necessarily offer all airlines and they don’t match hotel member-only prices.
Beware a lot of blogs and YouTubers push the credit cards you mentioned pretty hard because they’re looking for referrals. It’s a serious conflict of interest.
Can consider one of the sapphire cards or Venture X since you already in their ecosystem. You can think about which transfer partners from them you prefer more, and other criteria like if you value lounge access or not, if you like to book through portal or directly or not.
Here’s the problem: Chase duo/trifecta, Capital One duo, and AmEx Gold all leave out something important for your spend categories. Chase only gives you extra points on groceries if they’re online grocery, or if you have the Flex you can get 5x for one quarter out of the year. Cap 1 duo won’t help with gas, and you only get big travel multipliers if you are booking through their portal (for what it’s worth, I think it’s a great portal and it’s treated me well. BUT I have only used it for flights).
I think in the end I’d recommend the Capital One duo, but ONLY if you think you’d make good use of the portal. The benefit of the duo is that it includes the Savor giving you 3x on groceries and dining, your biggest spend categories. For everything else, the Venture X gives you 2x as opposed to the Chase Unlimited 1.5x. And when you book through the portal, you get a whopping 10x on hotel bookings and rental cars, and 5x on flights. So overall I think you’d be earning more points. While the AmEx Gold does both gas and groceries (and direct-booked flights at 3x) as just one card and for a smaller fee than the X, the Gold’s annual fee is harder to justify unless you always use Grubhub, Dunkin’ etc. Meanwhile, the Venture X’s fee is justified as long as you use the anniversary points and travel using the portal at least once a year. Also, Capital One’s cards do not come with a foreign transaction fee. Neither does AmEx Gold but it’s an AmEx, so womp womp. And the Sapphire works abroad but the Unlimited has a foreign transaction fee of 3%. So aboard you’d be getting on anything non-category with Sapphire.
As a final point, I’d look at Wells Fargo’s small list of transfer partners and see if any of them work for you and your fiancé. If they do, the Autograph and Active Cash make for a really nice $0-fee duo. Like Chase, these cards don’t help with groceries. But the Autograph has a very large set of 3x multipliers, including a more generous “travel” categorization, and the Active Cash has a better catch-all floor of 2x. Put your dining, gas, cell plan, any qualified streaming, and travel on the Autograph, then put your groceries and “Other” spend on the Active Cash. Both have smaller sign up bonuses than the other cards mentioned above, though. So you won’t immediately have as many points to work with. This might be better than the Cap 1 duo if a) you’re not convinced by using a portal for your travel needs and b) WF’s list of transfer partners works okay for you. But if you’re okay with utilizing a price-matching portal for at least a lot if not all of your travel, the Capital One duo is far and away your best bet imho. With all of this said, if you’re going to get the Chase Sapphire, just grab the Freedom Flex as soon as you can!