I did a great deal of shopping over Thanksgiving weekend and took advantage of the increased payouts from shopping portals to maximize my purchases.
I checked Cashback Monitor to find which portals paid the best for each website. I found that depending on the website, I could earn more points by using Ratuken, TopCashback, CapitalOne Shopping and the Chase Ultimate Rewards portal.
While cashback is great, I love when I earn a great portal bonus with Chase. Ultimate Rewards are valuable because I can transfer them to World of Hyatt for some great travel redemptions.
I noticed a trend in 2020, where Chase would offer better portal bonuses to their less expensive cards, which seems to still be the case. For all my purchases, I got more points with my Freedom Unlimited card than from either our Ink Business cards or our Sapphire cards (Preferred or Reserve).
In fact, I was able to earn 5 Ultimate Rewards per dollar at Best Buy with the Freedom card while the other Chase cards were earning 2-3 points per dollar. When you’re spending over $1,000, that extra 1-2 points per dollar adds up quickly.
This is still the case. Here are screenshots from Nike, Under Armour and Pandora Jewelry.
For each merchant, the Chase Freedom card pays a better return than the other Chase cards. I’m not sure if this is because the Freedom cards earn points worth cashback while the other cards earn Ultimate Rewards points that can be transferred to travel partners.
Of course, if you have both cards you can transfer the points from your Freedom card to your Sapphire Preferred or Ink Preferred and then send them to Singapore Airlines, United Airlines, Aeroplan or World of Hyatt.
While some people write off the no-annual-fee Chase Freedom cards, I think having one in your portfolio makes sense, if only to take advantage of opportunities like this.
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