there are so many different credit cards that can help you maximize your rewards across dozens of spending categories but what if a single card could not only simplify your wallet but also maximize your earnings today I'm diving into the best single cashback cards that go Way Beyond earning just 2% there's so many new options including cards that earn up to 4% back on all your spending so I'll break down the top contenders their pros and cons and how to choose the right one for you and then I'll throw a little bit of a wrench in it all and tell you about an even better way to be earning 133% or more back on all your spending I'm Chris Hutchins if you enjoy this episode please share it with a friend or leave a comment or review and if you want to keep upgrading your life money and travel click follow or subscribe okay first I want to talk about the best cashback cards because a lot of things have changed in episode 170 I had an episode called cashback versus points and I made a case for cash back then but this felt like it needed an update since there's been a lot of changes most specifically the US bank smartly card which has really forced a lot of people myself included to decide how much we really value our points today I want to talk about the best single cashback card we can have in our wallets and by that I don't mean the US bank card if there is just going to be one card we can have to handle the everything category anything you want to spend money on what that card would be and there's a few options and then what that means for the points game that said I'm not going to cover everything I did in that episode so if you want to go deeper and listen to the best cashback cards for every spending category and how I think about points versus cash back go back to episode 170 okay so you know how we're going to handle this we are not going to look at anything 2% or below because there are so many cash back cards out there for 2% that I think now because of the cards that earn more than that a 2% card is actually leaving money on the table so today I'm really only going to focus on the cards that earn more than 2% on all of your spending and fortunately there's nine different cards that I found that do that but just to do a quick recap I am not sharing all of this because I don't think points are valuable and I think we should all just switch everything to cashback I just want to share this because if you're using a one and a half or even a 2X points card for all your spending or just your everyday spending that doesn't fit into a bonus when you could be earning 4% cash back that means you're valuing your points at 2 to 2.6 cents per point and while I've gotten that much value and even more sometimes from my points if you look at the points SK valuations or frequent MERS reasonable Redemption values you'll notice that there isn't a single airliner Hotel point that gets valued above 2 cents on either one of those lists now the Points Guy does say that some transferable credit card points are worth more than 2 cents but it caps at 2.05 and that's not because those points are necessarily transferable to places worth way more it's just that they get a premium because they have so many different ways you can redeem them so given that I want to start talking about the best cash back cards for everything and so I'm going to start with the new kit on the street the US Bank smartly Visa signature card because it earns up to 4% cash back on every single purchase so I'm looking at the website it's stated as a unlimited 2% cashback card because in order to get to 4% you need to have some money stored at US bank now that money doesn't have to be in a checking account it could also be in a brokerage account and so you could transfer over an IRA or some stocks and if you transfer $5,000 or more dollars over or you hold $5,000 or more in your accounts you get 2.5% on everything if you go over 50,000 you get 3% back on your card and if you go over $100,000 you get 4% back on everything now that is incredible I don't honestly even understand how this is possible because as someone who now runs an e-commerce website I'm not paying 4% to run credit card transactions so how they can afford to give you 4% I have no idea how long this will last I don't know but I have multiple friends with this card and they have gotten their 4% back they have not had transactions getting declined and they've been very happy with their experience with US Bank so a couple of the basics here $0 annual fee which is amazing no sign up bonus so if you think a lot of credit cards are giving away a lot of value in a sign up bonus that's not happening here so that's some of the way that they're able to justify giving 4% back at least that's my assumption a couple other things about this card one it's missing a lot of the common things you find from premium travel credit cards and I guess at a $ Z annual fee that's because it's not a premium card but when you look at the return it is so there are no waved foreign transaction fees so if you use this card overseas you're going to be paying 3% for All Foreign transaction purchases there's also no Rental Car Coverage travel insurance TSA or pre-check so a lot of those things are missing a couple little small Nuance things that I've read when I'm doing my research here there's no support for Google Voice phone numbers so if you are someone who doesn't like using your regular phone number that's a problem on the flip side a good friend of mine has this card and he's really enjoyed the experience of using US Bank as a bank and the card together one example was he had hit his limit on the card and he was able to log into the app immediately pay off part of the card from his checking account and immediately be able to use that credit card for a purchase right away now one of the things that I will point out is that he also had a pretty low limit so this is someone that I know who regularly has high limits on other cards and the highest limit he was able to get on this card was only $155,000 and so one of the drawbacks on this card is I have not heard a lot of stories of people getting really really high limits and from my experience doing a ton of research US Bank isn't too keen on you getting a $115,000 limit spending $155,000 paying it down spending another 15 paying it down which is called credit cycling they don't love that now does that mean that if you do it one time it's going to be a problem probably not but I think if you're consistently doing that and spending 50 $60,000 a month by paying your card down frequently obviously I don't know any of the underwriting criteria here but there's a decent chance you could get your card cancelled shut down your limit lowered Etc so those are some of the drawbacks that said if you have $100,000 that you can park somewhere at US Bank and because you can do that with brokerage assets it doesn't cost you anything it's not like you have to put it in a checking account that earns 0% % when you could be earning 4% so in my mind this card seems like a no-brainer awesome card to be in your back pocket for that everything else category with the exception of a few things I'll bring up a little bit later so that is the US bank smartly card now there is another US bank card and funny enough the day the smartly card came out they stopped taking applications for it however I have seen that you can product change into it and that's the US Bank altitude Reserve card now because you can product change into it I'm still going to touch on it but I'm only going to do that briefly because it's kind of interesting it is not an everything card in that there are plenty of purchases that will only earn 1X or one and a half X points which is not that exciting but the categories where it does earn are so broad that I feel like it's worth including here and that's because it earns 3x points on travel and all mobile wallet spending so that's anywhere that you can pay with Apple pay and whether that's Apple pay on your phone using tap to pay pay or if you've noticed there are a lot of websites now when you're using mobile or if you have a Mac using Safari you can use Apple pay on the web and that's not just Apple pay it's Google wallet and Samsung pay as well that makes it effectively a 3X points card however there's this thing that US Bank has for these cards and I'll put a link in the show notes for more detail called real-time rewards and anytime you make a purchase in the travel category they give you a text that says hey if you want you can use your points to pay off this purchase and you can get 1 and. half cents per point now if you just go to redeem your points for statement credits and that kind of stuff they're worth 1 cent so if you're earning 3x points and you're able to redeem them at one and a. half cents then that makes it an effective 4.5% cash back card on all mobile wallet and travel purchases now I don't know about you guys and how you spend your money but the vast majority of things I spend my money on that are not in bonus categories elsewhere I can pay with mobile wallet I can pay with Apple pay online and that kind of stuff so I felt like it was worth mentioning this card I know you can't sign up for it now but if you do have another US bank card I have been told that some people are able to product change over to it one of the examples was the altitude go card so I just want to mention it it's also a much more kind of Premium like travel card so it does have a $400 annual fee but it comes with $325 of travel and dining credits that are so easy to use that I didn't even try to to use them and they just showed up on the card and it has all the standard benefits that a high-end travel card has you get airport lounge access travel coverage primary Rental Car Coverage some statuses on different rental car companies credit for Global Entry no foreign transaction fees and all that kind of stuff so I've been really happy having the US Bank altitude Reserve card will I product change it to a smartly card or get a smartly card for right now no because most of where I'm spending money that is not earning more than an effective 4% is where I can use Apple pay so this card is effectively a four and a half% on almost everything card for me Costco is a great example of a place where we spend money and I can pay with Apple pay this episode is brought to you by viori which is amazing because they are one of only the few Brands I wear almost every single day got a shirt on I've got the core shorts on I love vori and I love that they bring a new perspective on performance apparel it's so versatile it can be used for just about any activity whether it's running training swimming yoga or even lounging or running errands or going out to dinner seriously I wear my meta pants out for dinner all the time but today I want to talk about their Dream niit Collection because it's 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check out co-pilot it's one of my favorite apps and I check it almost every day because it makes it so seamless and easy to manage your money and track your spending which for us has resulted in a huge boost to our savings and I've tried dozens of apps that do this I've even made a whole episode about it but co-pilot is the only one I've kept using and I have no plans to stop you can link Accounts at over 10,000 institutions and their AI powered expense categorization is the best I've used with custom Amazon and venmo Integrations to make it even better you can completely design your spending categories and subcategories and easily set up rules to assign transactions to them in the future thanks to co-pilot I have never had a better grasp on our spending and cash flow which I'm pretty sure has resulted in thousands of dollars of savings every year so for the best app to track your spending subscriptions and Investments go to Chris hutch.com copilot or click the link in the description to download co-pilot and enter code hacks during onboarding for a two-month free trial again that's Chris hutch.com copilot and the code hacks to for a free two-month trial of my favorite personal finance app next card is the Robin Hood gold card now when this first got announced it was unheard of 3% on everything that's wild and that was obviously shortlived with the US bank smartly card but here get a 3% on everything card with no foreign transaction fees it technically doesn't have an annual fee but you can only get it if you have Robin Hood gold which is $60 a year and there are a lot of other benefits of Robin Hood gold that I won't talk about but it's up to you to determine whether that is a annual fee or not depending on whether you already have Robin Hood gold or the other benefits make up for it so pretty great option if you for whatever reason don't want a US bank card or if you don't have the $100,000 you need to meet their minimum the US bank card isn't a 4% card and so Robin Hood gold card is interesting the only hesitation I have and one of the reasons I didn't get it out the gate was that there were some mixed messages online about what kinds of purchases were qualifying and there were people who had bought gold at Costco and gotten that declined or made really large tax purchases and gotten that declined and having gone deep in Reddit and reading about this I don't think that those claims were as widely experienced as they felt in the beginning I think it was a few people were complaining but if you do go read the terms of the card on rewards they do say that purchases of precious metals including gold are not eligible for rewards same goes for purchasing reloads of balances on gift cards or prepaid cards or cash equivalents business type transactions including reselling so if you wanted to buy a bunch of stuff at Best Buy to be able to resell that was something that the term explicitly say would not be eligible for rewards there might be something like this in other card terms of services I went and looked and didn't find it but they say Robin Hood in its sole discretion determines whether a transaction constitutes an eligible purchase and has the right to deny points or remove points if they were already granted on a transaction that is ultimately deemed ineligible so if you're using this for regular spending I don't think you're going to have a problem but if you're using this to try to do lots of things at scale I think you might find out that their uncapped unlimited rewards could come into issues especially if you're doing a lot of business spending or reselling spending or things like that so I think it's a good option especially if you don't have the capital to be able to earn the higher rates with a smartly card now another card that I think is one that people probably weren't expecting to hear about is the Discover It Card and discover is so interesting because I'm looking at their website right now and they just say travel credit card so I'm like which card is is this but when I click on it it says it's the Discover It miles card and what's interesting here is technically this card only earns one and a half miles for every dollar spent so it's a one and a half X card but for the first year you get 2x miles which makes it a 3% back card no annual fee also no signup bonus but surprisingly no foreign transaction fees in fact I didn't know this but discover has no foreign transaction fees on all credit cards so that's kind of interesting another cool thing this card seems to be very easy to get multiple times I saw a lot of people on Reddit post that someone had it four or five times and so getting it once maybe your partner getting it the next year maybe you getting it again the next year seems to be very possible I do know that discover is not known for really really high credit limits so that may be a challenge if you need to spend lots of money but a no annual fee no need to get Robin Hood gold like kind of straightforward easy way to get 3x for the first year is the Discover It miles card and potentially to be able to do it over and over again added bonus the card right now on their website says that it has 0% APR for the first 15 months and so in addition to getting this card you also could potentially benefit from not having to completely pay it off right away and be able to invest the money and earn a return there which is an interesting thing that were the limit of the card to be high enough that'd be interesting if you have this card and you can earn 3% back on everything for a year carrying a balance actually limits how much you can spend over the year and so it might not actually be worth it from that perspective but interesting card I've actually never had a Discover card there are a few cards that I've never had I've never had a city thank you point card or a Discover Card they're things that a part of me wants solely just to have the experience but then another part of me doesn't think it's worth a new slot given all the other options next on the list is Bank of America and I actually have a lot of recent experience because we've opened a handful of Bank of America cards recently and Bank of America's lineup is pretty interesting and it was incredibly interesting before the launch of the US bank smartly card and the Robin Hood card and I'll say for a couple reasons it's maybe still interesting and if you look at any Bank of America card on face value it's probably not going to be that exciting and it becomes exciting with their preferred Rewards program and I'm pulling up right now they have a gold tier a platinum tier a platinum honors tier and a diamond tier and the reason that gets interesting is because whatever you earn on your credit card gets multiplied based on the tier you have and so if you have $220,000 of combined balance across your accounts at Bank of America which includes any accounts you have at Merill their partner brokerage firm you get a increase of 25% of the points if you have over $50,000 then you qualify for the Platinum tier and you get a 50% boost and then at Platinum honors you get a 75% boost and then at the D tier you actually get no extra benefits on your credit card I'm not actually sure what other extra benefits you do get so I don't know why that tier would be interesting to anyone I've never heard of anyone in the points World talk about it now as for which cards make this interesting there are actually a quite a large number of them the main ones are the unlimited cash travel rewards premium rewards and premium rewards Elite and the unlimited cash and the travel rewards also come in a business version and so one of the reasons that I think this is interesting is it is really tough to get really great cash back on business cards there aren't a lot of business cards offering more than 2% cash back but the unlimited cash and the travel rewards business cards do assuming you qualify for those higher tiers and so how this works is the unlimited cash and the travel rewards both earn 1.5x or 1.5% and if you multiply that 1.5% times 1.75 because you get that boost if you're in the Platinum honors Camp you go to two 2.625% now on the consumer side you might say 2.625% is nothing compared to 4% on the US bank smartly card and you would be right and so it's actually potentially pretty interesting to consider this only if you need a business card for some reason you can't qualify for the US bank card or if you spend so much money that the limits you can get on your US bank card just aren't enough and that's because I've had a lot of people I know at Bank of America be successful in getting incredibly large limits with Bank of America that I have not seen with US Bank and so I mentioned the unlimited cash and the travel rewards one other bonus they do offer signup bonuses on both those cards $200 or 20,000 points and they both actually offer 0% APR for 15 months the only real difference between the two that I could find is the travel rewards has no foreign transaction fees the unlimited cash has a 3% foreign transaction fee and the travel Rewards Card seems to earn miles but it seems very easy to turn those miles into statement credits worth a penny so it's effectively seems like the same thing so I'm not really sure the difference between those two cards practically but they are separate and it has not been hard for me on the business side to be able to get the card limit to be up north of $50,000 which has been super helpful on the business side the one thing I will say on the personal and business side obviously you have to open up an account one cool thing is that once you open that account you can fund it and you qualify for their status for a full year once you have that balance so if you put $100,000 in your account you can quickly qualify they have a kind of accelerated way to earn your preferred reward status and it lasts for a year whereas so you don't need to have that $100,000 all the time I believe it's on a rolling three-month average to qualify again for a year so probably months 10 11 12 you might need to have that $100,000 balance but because you can open up a brokerage account and and transfer over Securities or IAS it makes it pretty easy to not worry about the fact that their checking account or their savings account isn't going to earn a lot of interest I will say opening up the Merill brokerage account for the business is not the easiest thing to do and so for us we were able to move some business assets into the checking account and qualify for a year and now we have like six more months to figure out how to open up this business brokerage account I know how to do it but it requires a physical paper form that I believe needs to be faxed or brought into a branch and so I just haven't gotten around to it the other two cards that they have that are not the travel and unlimited cash are the premium rewards cards and the base one the premium Rewards Card practically has the same spending return except that you also get 2x points on travel so instead of 1 and a2x on everything you get 1 and a2x on everything and 2x on travel and dining so I did briefly mention the premium rewards and the premium rewards Elite card and they also get 1 and a2x on everything with your platinum honor status would go to 2.625% however the bonus is that they get 2x on travel and dining and with your platinum honor status that brings it up to 3 and 1 12x on travel and dining and so depending on how you spend and what the Blended average of your travel dining versus non-travel dining this could pretty easily find its way to be close to or even north of a 3% on everything card and and these cards both have pretty good sign up bonuses at least relative to the US bank card which doesn't have one at all and the premium rewards Elite card has a 75,000 Point sign up bonus points are ending up being worth 1 cent so a $600 and a $750 signup bonus now interesting if you assume that maybe you can average 3% on everything so I was trying to compare this to the US bank card so 3% on everything here because you're getting 3 and A2 on travel and dining and 2.625 on everything else and you want to compare that to the US bank smartly card well you're earning 1% there but you're getting a 75,000 Point signup bonus which is $750 so effectively because you're getting that $750 signup bonus on the premium rewards Elite card it's kind of like getting a 4% return on the first $75,000 you spend on the card in a way so you could view it like that in a way it's actually better because you get it all upfront so I would say given the fact that this has a signup bonus it could be a better card for however long it takes you to spend $75,000 and if you had a heavier waiting towards travel and dining spend then it would actually go up and take you even further because you you'd be only earning an incremental half a percent getting 4% versus 3.5 then you would getting 4% versus three or 2.625 if you were to use one of the other Bank of America cards so both those cards do have an annual fee 995 for the regular 550 for the elite but to make up for that they have a bunch of credits and so the $95 version gives you a Global Entry Credit every four years it gives you a $100 Airline incidental credit which we've found to be really easy to use without even trying and with the Elite card you get four priority pass memberships now that's not four authorized user cards with One Premium rewards Elite card you get four individual priority pass memberships that include restaurant access which is something that almost every other issuer has lost and then on the cards you get rental status travel coverage purchase protection that kind of stuff there's also no foreign transaction fees and then finally on the Elite card yes it has a much higher annual fee at 550 but you're getting a $300 Airline credit and $150 lifestyle credit which total $450 so effectively you're paying $100 for that card but depending on how you value for priority pass membership and the signup bonus you know it could break even that that's a card we went with and so far it's been great there also is one perk of the premium rewards Elite card that actually might make it very competitive with the US bank smartly card and that is that if you want to book travel using Bank of America's travel portal on domestic or international airfare in any class you get a 20% discount using your points so what that means is if you had 100,000 points that would normally be redeemable for $1,000 statement credit or $1,000 of travel you actually could go use those points and get a discount so that $1,000 of travel that you want to book would actually be 80,000 points or that 100,000 points would actually get you 1,250 worth of travel because you take 20% off 1250 so if you add 25% to earning 2.625% on everything you get 3.28% on everything or if you add that 25% boost to earning 3.5x on travel and dining you end up with 4.375% back so obviously the requirement here is you book your travel in the Bank of America portal I have not gone through that experience yet I don't know how hard or easy it is I don't know how frustrating it is I've talked in the past about how I prefer not to book in the travel portal but if I'm able to get an extra 25% of value from all my points I don't know it might be worth it especially for certain trips but given how easy it is is to have a simple straight 4% on everything card with the US Bank smartly is this even worth it I would say probably not unless maybe you're already a Bank of America customer and you love it or if you really value having a much higher limit right if you're spending 3040 $50,000 a month then that US bank smartly card can't keep up and so that card might feel like a 4% card but if it can only cover half your spending then what's the backup card and what is your effective rate and so I would say that for someone who spends more than $15 $20,000 which seems to be about the limit people have been getting for the smartly card if you're spending more than that looking at Bank of America especially the premium rewards Elite might be a good option this episode is brought to you by element now I love element and I use it all the time because it helps anyone stay hydrated without the sugar and other dodgy ingredients in popular electrolyte and sports drinks and that's important because electrolyte deficiency or imbalance can cause headaches cramps fatigue brain fog and weakness in fact element is a zero sugar electrolyte drink mix and sparkling electrolyte water born from the growing body of research revealing that Optimal Health outcomes occur at sodium levels two to three times government recommendations element is formulated for anyone on a mission to restore their health through hydration and is perfectly suited for everyone from athletes to regular people like me and works if you're fasting on a keto low carb or paleo diet and if you're not sure if it's for you don't worry because element offers a no questions asked refund policy so you can try it totally risk-free get your free sample pack with any element purchase at Chris hutch.com lmnt this deal is only available through that link so support the show and go to Chris hutch.com element or click the link in the description and get hydrated this episode is brought to you by gelt now when it comes to Building Wealth taxes are such a big part of the strategy and as tax time gets closer getting prepared now is so important and now that I'm working with G I finally feel like I have a partner I can trust to handle everything for my personal and business taxes you can think of GT as the ultimate modern CPA of course they have an in-house team of expert CPAs to work with who can help you determine the most effective Tax Strategies to minimize risk and grow your wealth but they also have an amazing Tech platform that gives you personalized guidance to maximize deductions tax credits and savings beyond that the tax Library you get access to as a client has dozens of in-depth guides on things like choosing retirement plans taxes for parents qualified business income or qbi and much more so if you're ready for a more premium proactive tax strategy to optimize and file your taxes definitely check out gelt and as a viewer you can skip the wait list just head to Chris hutch.com gelt GT again that's Chris hutch.com gelt or find the link in the description to stop overpaying p on taxes the last card I'm going to mention is the Alliant Credit Union Visa signature card and I don't know anyone that has this card I've never had this card I've never had an accountant Alliant but the one interesting thing is it is a 2.5% cash back on everything card it does have a few Hoops that you have to jump through but no annual fee no foreign transaction fees does have some travel protections it does not have a signup bonus and so if for whatever reason none of the other options make sense for you I said at the outset I'm going to talk about cards that earn more than 2% on everything I think this qualifies cuz it's 2 and a half% the only catch is it's only on up to $10,000 per billing cycle so $120,000 of spend I know that's plenty for most people so I thought it was worth including after that it rolls over to 1 and a half% the requirements you need to jump through to make this work is you do need to enroll in E statements I imagine everyone listening here prefers getting electronic statements to paper ones and then you do need to open up their High rate checking account which is not very high rate it's 0.25% and you need to have one deposit a month and that could be a direct deposit an ATM deposit a mobile check deposit or even a transfer from another bank and you need to maintain a balance of $1,000 or more now if you compare that ,000 what you would earn earning 4% somewhere else relative to a quarter of a percent here it's going to cost you $37.50 a year so not too high but I would effectively assume that okay this is kind of a $37.50 annual fee card if I have to open up that account that said I think all of the other options are pretty great but if I go through how this looks in my head and I compare them really quickly if you have $100,000 that you can move in brokerage or dollars US Bank smartly seems like the easiest unless you need a really high limit and Bank of America seems to make that a little bit easier or if you need a business card that seems to be easier if a lot of your spending is mobile wallet and travel and you can open up a US bank card and you're able or eligible to product change over the altitude Reserve could be interesting if you're willing to use Robin Hood I know there are a lot of people that have strong feelings about it 3% seems to make sense and and be the best option if you don't have $100,000 to transfer over the Discover Card seems to be a good backup to that though it's only effective for a year so you'd have to keep reapplying for it or opening it with your partner but if all of those don't makes sense the Alliant as a backup earning 22% is interesting but at the point we're talking about 2 and 1 12% back on everything you spend money on I start to think about whether I would actually rather just have 2X points with something like the Capital One Venture X or the Venture Card so that's the summary here now I said that was the single best card but I couldn't help myself from doing a really quick look at the card Optimizer tool I built and looking for the best cards that might complement that let's say you decide you know what this is the year for cash back let's forget about points what do I do are there any other cards that you could pair with a card earning 3 4% cash back that even Mak sense if we start first assuming you have the smartly card it's a really easy filter you're looking for any card where you can earn more than 4% and there aren't a lot of cards even on categories that earn that much more the most common cards that I would say can beat 4% are there's a handful of cards that do these rotating categories or categories that you pick like the Bank of America customized cash the city custom cash US Bank Cash Plus where you earn five sometimes 6% on some amount of money that when you annualize it ends up being around six to $10,000 a year but if you go all the way to the top and say okay let's look at a 5% card that's going to earn that on $110,000 a year relative to getting 4% you're really just getting an extra % on $10,000 which is just $100 now if I saw $100 on the side of the road I'm definitely going to pick it up but I'm not sure that I would open up a new credit card add it to my wallet think about which card I'm using think about when I've spent too much so that I don't use it anymore to earn an extra $100 so if you've got the smartly card and you're earning 4% I can't really make a case for any other card unless you're focused on a welcome bonus or you want to earn points and on that welcome bonus point we're going to get to that now if for some reason you don't have the smartly card and and you're really only at 3% then there are a few more options those category cards now are going to earn you an extra 2 to 3% which could be worth $200 a year maybe $300 a year still probably not worth it relative to what you could get from another card in Your Arsenal but where I think it could be worth it is not the rotating cards that have a limit but there are some cash back cards out there where you can earn four points or 4% back on a hand full of categories and when those cards come into play I think if you're sitting with the Robin Hood card earning 3% it could be worth putting some of your spend on them and the first one I'm going to mention might really surprise you because I don't think I've ever really considered it but that is the Verizon Visa card now the obvious challenge here is you can only get this card if you're a Verizon Customer which means you're probably already spending way more money on your phone bill than you would need to somewhere else at least based on my experience as a former Verizon customer but if you are eligible for this card as a Verizon customer not only do you get $10 per line discount on your Verizon bill but you get unlimited uncapped Forex on dining Grocery and gas so it's effectively just 4% cash back you're earning these Verizon rewards but the one caveat I'd say is those Verizon rewards seem to only be able to be used to offset your bill and I couldn't find anyone that could explain what would happen if you earned more Verizon reward in a year than your bill like what do you do with that money how do you get it out can you pay a negative balance in your bill and get reimbursed that was a little bit unclear but if you're looking for a supplement card for the Robin Hood gold card and you spend a ton of money on dining groceries and gas and you have Verizon that could be a pretty rewarding experience there's also a gold card out there from a very popular bank that has 4X on dining and groceries and and that is capped at I believe 25 and $50,000 and so if you're spending a lot a year in those categories that could be worth it because it's not just capped at 6,000 or 10,000 so if you have a 3X card that could make sense if you spend a ton of money on hotels or flights there's the autograph Journey there's a platinum card those could make sense but otherwise that's kind of it like if you have a three or 4% cashback card I don't know if you really need a compliment unless maybe you have the 3% and you spend a ridiculous amount of money in a couple categories that you could earn a little bit more but you know we're talking probably for most people hundreds of dollars not thousands or more but to go back to all those point valuations there are plenty of options where points are worth more than one cent right you can look at almost every Airline point and Hiatt points mostly not the other Hotel points points are worth more than one cent so doing this analysis that I did comparing one: one might not always make sense right if you're looking at a card that earns four X points on groceries is it fair to compare that equally to 4% cash back really depends on you but probably not if you have a 3% cash back card and you're comparing it to earning three transferable points on dining I don't know I'd probably take the points over three cents almost every day so earning points might change some of this calculus but when you go back to looking at your everyday spend if you're buying something online from a random retailer and the best points card you have is going to earn 2x points I really think for all those transactions you should consider whether cash back is a better option and in that episode that I talked about earlier number 170 I talked a lot about how buying points kind of changes this because it doesn't mean you can't benefit from the value of points you can use that cash back to go buy points sure it doesn't feel as free because you have these points and you can't really convert them to cash and you get to take these vacations but practically I think it might be a better Roi for a lot of those purchases if you're only earning one one and a half or 2x points but I mentioned welcome bonuses earlier and I really need to come back there because I think it makes a case for throwing out everything we just talked about and and I've brought this up before even in episode 170 but I went a lot deeper this time and I think it's worth diving into so I went to our site all the hacks.com cards and I looked at some of the top bonuses so for example the capital 1 spark Cash Plus it's a $2,000 signup bonus on $30,000 of spend and you're getting 2% back on all that spend makes it effectively an 88.7% cash back card on the first $30,000 until you hit that bonus the Capital One Venture X is $75,000 points or $750 at least on $44,000 of spend which makes it effectively a 20.75 % cash back card but again only on that first $4,000 there's another offer for 60,000 points on $4,000 spend makes it 16% back there's a hotel card that earns 175,000 Hotel points that I'd probably value at around $875 and and you get those after spending 6,000 so that's 15.5% and I can go on and on and on there are so many cards that earn meaningful percentage of cash back if you look at the effective cash back from the welcome bonus in fact I went through all 59 welcome offers I have list listed on the page and and which is normally sorted by best offer and there isn't a single offer where the earnings you'd get from spending your way to that offer is less than 7% effective cash back and that's valuing every single point in mile at one cent and all the hotel points except Hyatt at half a Cent and it doesn't factor in the fact that many of those cards are going to earn more points when you're spending your way towards that welcome bonus in different categories whether they earn in travel categories dining categories Etc so I want to share some of the analysis that I did because it really changes my mind on how I think about spending so from the analysis I learned a lot of things but first off there are actually way more than 59 cards out there that's how many I had listed on the site with a welcome bonus so as I was going through the list first I decided to add another 30 to the site so hopefully by the time you're here there's 89 or more cards on the site and there will always be some cards I don't include but I am trying to include everything I find that's worth adding if you look at the long taale of random Cruise cards cards just for people that have poor credit and are unsecured cards and have no bonuses or even earning I'm not including all of them now I think you all know that some of the links on the website are partners of the show and we earn an affiliate commission when you use those links so first off thank you to everyone who does use those they're a big way to support the show and it means a ton to me Amy and all of us but there are many cards where we don't have a partnership and I'm still going to add them to the site I'm still going to try to link to the best offer and what we're going to do is I'm going to ask all the members from the all the hacks membership if they have any referral links and I'll use those links and if they don't I'm just going to find the best offer I can on the website probably on the issuer's website however I do want to make one big change today which will definitely cost us money but I think is worth doing in the long run and that is that even for cards where we do have links that we earn an affiliate commission from if there is a better link out there whether it's a public offer or a referral link from our members I'm actually going to use that link instead of our affiliate link but it also means that you can hopefully learn to rely on our site as the best place to find any card offer anytime now I know I'm supposed to make business decisions that increase our Revenue not decrease it but my hope is that in the long run it doesn't matter and that this actually ends up being a great choice and the first reason is is that if we make our site the best place to find the best offer for any card I think more of you will come to the site I think it'll save you time you won't need to go searching around if that happens maybe the links where we do have partner links and the offers we have are the best offers out there maybe those links will get used more second it will help us continue to earn your trust as being a valuable resource and I can't quantify how much that's worth but I definitely know it's not zero and finally since we'll be Shar in a lot of member referral links the value of being an all the hacks member will go way up in fact most credit card referral offers are worth anywhere from $100 to $500 so if your link gets used even just once or twice a year you'd earn way more from that credit card referral then you even pay for the membership and it would be such an obvious decision for people to join and in fact we do that currently with some referral links and I know one member that told me she's made back over 10x the cost to join just in a few months so obviously if you have credit cards with referral links and you're interested in joining the membership and participating you can go to all the hacks.com jooin now keep in mind that offers do change all the time so it's not possible that the site will be perfect if you ever find a better offer out there please email us podcast allthe hacks.com but also I want you to get the most points so by all means if you ever find a better link use that link but for everything where we do have the best offers thank you so much advance for supporting us and using the links on the site at all the hacks.com cards okay sorry for that detour back to my analysis of what I found digging into all these welcome bonuses the median welcome bonus was $600 and the medium spend needed to hit that bonus was $4,000 which is an effective 15% cash back or 16% cash back when you account for the points earned from spending to get that bonus and I'm just assuming that card earns at least 1% back on its spend now the biggest bonus on the list was the spark Cash Plus card with a $2,000 bonus on $30,000 of spend but accounting for the 2% back you'd get on that $30,000 a spend it's really a $2,600 bonus that you'd end up earning from that spend 8.67% pretty interesting but 8.67% is not actually that high given that 21 of the cards on this site which is over a third of them had an average cash back rate or effective cash back rate on on the welcome bonus spend of over 20% with the top card earning 61% back in the form of a $300 bonus after only $500 of spend so obviously that's a small bonus in the absolute terms but in terms of the percent back 61% is pretty amazing though part of what I realized when I said that was there were a couple cards I forgot so the barlay Hawaiian card which hopefully is on the site by the time you look at this is 70,000 points after your first purchase so let's assume that first purchase is $1 that means that if you get the card put $1 on it you'd earn what I'll call at least $700 of value on $1 of spend which is actually a 70,000 per effective cash back rate which is just wild this episode is brought to you by built rewards which is an amazing points program with so many ways to earn including on your rent where you don't even need to check with your landlord so let me explain first there's no cost to join bill and as a member you'll earn valuable points on rent and on your everyday spending built points can be transferred to your favorite hotels and Airlines and even the ones you haven't heard of there are over 500 Airlines and 700,000 hotels and properties around the world you can redeem your built points toward points can be redeemed towards a future rent payment and unique experiences that only Built members can access so if you're not earning points on rent my question is why not start earning points on rent you're already paying by going to Chris hutch.com built that's Chris hutch.com built BT make sure to use our URL so they know we sent you Chris hutch.com built or the link in the description to start earning points on your rent payments today finally if you were to somehow be able to sign up for all 59 cards on the site today you would need to spend $37,000 to get all 59 bonuses which would be worth $4 41,9 which is a 13.66% return on all your spend effective cash back now obviously that doesn't include the 30 cards I mentioned I'm going to try to add and if you have a partner or a player two you can double all those numbers so my guess is by the time I add all these cards and all these bonuses and if you and your partner got them all you'd probably be able to earn at least 133% back on a million dollars of spend could you practically get approved for that many cards in a year probably not but I do know there are tons of people who open 5 to 10 cards a year and their partner does the same thing and as they do it their credit score continues to go up so I think that number seems totally reasonable so I just looked at 10 offers that you could get to hit $30,000 of spend and if you really want to maximize things you'd get $6,800 back which is effectively a 23% cash back rate and if you wanted to do that same $30,000 of spend on just five cards you'd lower the bonus to $4,125 but it's still 13.75% back at least as an effective cash back rate obviously some of these points can be worth a lot more if you use them the right way but even if we're just valuing them at one cent a point that is an incredible amount of cash back compared to the first half of this episode we were just talking about earning a Max of 4% so I could obviously keep going this is a lot of fun for me but I think this is a good place to stop and the big takeaway here is I think that you should be thinking about earning the most back by first deciding how many cards you're comfortable opening up each year to hit bonuses then look at the best cards at the time you're opening them and the best bonuses on them and if you can account for all of your spending in a year right if you only spend $30,000 a year I would make a case that you shouldn't open up any of these cashback cards and you should instead open somewhere between five and 10 cards a year and if you're with your partner that's two to five cards per person and that would get you 13 to 20 3% back on all of your spending and more if you value points more than one cent and so I think that's the right strategy now if you're someone who spends a million dollars a year I don't think you can do this strategy I think you're going to run out pretty quickly Because by the time you open your 30th credit card in a year I think you're going to get a lot of declines from Banks and issuers that said if you're someone who's spending a much smaller amount of money which is probably more like all of us I think there are a lot of options that give us way more cash back way more points than any of these other things so I just push you all to think about whether welcome bonuses is actually the best way to manage your spend and you can go look at all the cards to decide what the effective earning is and also how much you have to spend because if you're someone who spends a lot of money yes you might get the best absolute value from that Hawaiian card but you only have to spend $1 on it and so it doesn't last very long whereas that spark Cash Plus Card sure the earning rate was lower at sub 10% but you could use it for $30,000 of spend and so obviously also that's a business card so those kind of things come into play as well but I'd say if you're listening to this show there's a decent chance that you do something in your life that would qualify you for a business card as a sole proprietor at a minimum so I'll put a link in the show notes to an article about that but there are a lot of ways that you might be eligible that you weren't even thinking of after you figure out how much you're comfortable opening up cards for welcome bonuses whatever spending you have left then look at whether it makes sense to go get a cashback card like the smartly card or one of the others we talked about I know for me this is an area where I struggle I just went through this analysis to tell you that you shouldn't be spending money on a 4% card a 3% card or or really any card because I can't think of any card that earns better than welcome bonus spend but I can tell you that I'm not going to go open 10 cards a year and I don't know why because I know that it's not going to really affect my score I actually understand the mechanics of it and the different approval rules but for some reason it just feels like a lot of Hassle and that's something I'm going to work on this year because it's not actually that much hassle and in fact it's January 30th as I record this and I think between Amy and I we've probably opened at least two cards so far in January so I am trying to live by this new thing but I get why it feels like a lot because I've been there it feels like ah do I really want to open another card but then I meet people who opened 30 cards last year and had zero issues and in because they were earning an average of 10 to 20% back throughout the year they just got so much more out of their spend and so I challenge you all to think about this and push yourself to look up some of the different rules for issuers There are rules that limit how many cards you can open in a window there are some issuers that are more sensitive to recent Card openings I believe back in an episode I did with Sebastian fun from ask sebbi we talked about some of the sequencing here so go back and look for that episode but I hope this was helpful if you want to go deeper on some of these questions or even ask me or our community I invite you to join the all the hacks membership where I try to answer everyone else's questions and I even put out some mini episodes in the last few months that go deeper and into areas that I just can't share too publicly about so you can find more of that on all the hacks.com jooin I hope those stories were awesome if you have some of your own please continue sending them in I love hearing them thank you so much for listening I really appreciate all the time you put in here hopefully all the rabbit holes I go down are helpful for you all to earn points earn status maximize your cash back and everything else that is it for this week email is podcast at all the hacks.com I will see you next week