Can other setups really beat USBAR? It has a $75 effective annual fee so your profit with the card approaches 4.5% as you spend more.
I think the C1 duo gives 3x on dining, groceries, entertainment, and 2x elsewhere with an effective annual fee of $5. If you can redeem consistently at 2 cents per point, that’s 6% plus 4% for everything else, which I feel could be similar in expected profits to USBAR’s 4.5% overall. But is that cents per point realistic for C1?
Chase Trifecta offers 3x in several categories but only 1x for (in-person) groceries and gas. Even at Hyatt with 2 cents per point, I think 2% for groceries and gas will lower it too much to match around 4.5%.
The only other option I can think of is Amex Gold, if you use the credits well for a negative effective annual fee. But even then, it lacks important categories like gas and travel (outside of their portal), plus the groceries and dining limits.
The only thing that comes to mind is unlimited Citi Custom Chases or unlimited Kroger cards.
What setup do you think can yield a higher average profit than the USBAR plus support card?
Consistently redeeming at 2 cents per point isn’t that easy. The issue I have with award travel is that I don’t value business class at more than 2x economy.
If a flight costs 25k miles for economy, 50k miles for business, $400 for economy, and $1000 for business, while on paper the business redemption is 2 cents per point, I don’t think it’s actually worth the $1000 sticker price. Thus, a 50k miles redemption wouldn’t be worth it to me.
Obviously, this is very personal, but I think there are a lot of overpriced business class tickets that lead to high cents per point.
@Cale
I agree. Travel points are definitely also affected by devaluations, limited award availability, and inflexibility with who and where to book with. Plus, you have to book with points fully, so you often end up with leftover points collecting dust.
It seems really unclear if you can beat a straightforward 4.5% in cash saved.
@Cale
Agreed. I value points at 1 cent per point in my comparisons for this exact reason. Only those who regularly pay for business class tickets without points and will save should be doing their cost-benefit analysis using business flight redemption rates.
Yeah, I’d go further and say that because you can buy a lot of international airline currencies on sale for about 1.5 cents per point, you could just do that with your cash back from USBAR. You’d need to average 3x to beat USBAR redeemed at 4.5% for travel purchases (travel purchases you were already planning to make).
With an optimized setup, using a decent travel portal like Capital One for 10x on travel, taking advantage of transfer bonuses, and if effective annual fees are kept low, that might just barely be possible, but with a lot of effort.
Groceries 4x Amex Gold
Dining. 4x Amex Gold
Travel. 10x via portal
Overall. 2x. Various cards
Gas. 3x. Multiple options
5x Chase Freedom rotating categories.
Other categories would include utilities, Amazon, online shopping, and a few others.
Last point, you actually earn points on your USBAR real-time rewards purchases. You don’t get points when you redeem or transfer points from other systems. So if you add the 4.5% from USBAR redemption that you don’t get with other travel card points, you actually get about a 4.7% return.
@Ansel
Very interesting point about focusing on exclusive portal use for travel booking. However, if you use the other card as the USBAR support card, you can process all travel payments through the portal as well.
@Cherlie
Yeah, the other card offers 10x for rental cars and hotels, so it could outdo USBAR (at up to 7.5%) for the right spender. I love both of these cards. I haven’t used the USBAR portal yet though.
Still, that’s probably a small part of overall spending for most people, so it may not significantly increase the overall return for the alternative travel card setup.
Getting consistent high cents per point relies on either paying cash for low cents per point travel or shaping your travel to maximize cents per point. I lean toward the first option. I can achieve 2 cents per point or better almost all the time because I’m willing to pay out of pocket when using points gives lower value.
I think it’s easy to exceed USBAR’s 4.5% if you are careful with point redemptions and are okay with paying cash at times. The unique benefits of USBAR are its simplicity (you can buy the exact flight you want in cash instead of searching for award space) and avoiding the point shortfall issue (i.e., you don’t need to fully cover the charge with points or save a specific number of points for a large redemption). It’s a solid system for almost anyone who books through credit card portals or for those who don’t want to deal with award searches.
I don’t think real-time rewards are a good way to purchase points because most of them are processed by points.com and don’t count as travel. There are some exceptions to this general rule.
@Reign
If you’re paying out of pocket every time you get less than 2 cents per point, don’t you have a lot of points just sitting inactive in your account for long stretches? So even if each of your points, when used, is individually valuable, aren’t you still losing out overall if you have many points unused in your account?
And also, what do you mean by ‘buying points’? Real-time rewards are the redemption method for automatic USBAR redemptions.
I’m not a fan of USBAR like many in this forum are, at least not for me and my partner.
I want my overall rewards to really be a catch-all, not just where mobile wallets are accepted (like tax payments, contractors, insurance, medical bills, utilities, etc.).
If I only use USBAR for mobile wallet and then use a different card for everything else, I’m stuck with rewards currencies that can’t be combined through common transfer partners.
We travel pretty frequently, both domestically and internationally (family abroad) and we consistently get:
1.5-1.7 cents per point on domestic redemptions through the Amex portal thanks to the Business Platinum 35% MR rebate on our selected airline.
2-3 cents per point on international redemptions by transferring to Air France/KLM (we do this 2-3 times each year and it’s quite reliable).
Since Air France/KLM is a transfer partner for all transferable currencies, we can optimize every major category to at least 3x, often 4x-5x. At even the baseline of 1.5 cents per point, that’s 4.5x minimum on all major categories.
As a note, this gives us a reward value range of 4.5% to 15% on major categories, with an average above 5%.
I agree that USBAR is great in its simplicity and is probably better than a complicated setup like ours for most people. But, just not for us.
@Alston
You seem to be the ideal candidate for someone from the travel team. What’s your setup? And do your miscellaneous non-category expenses like healthcare significantly impact your expected average return?