Very often, when I recommend a credit card for rewards to friends and family, I immediately receive the question: “But is that one of those cards with an annual rate?”
It is true that many Rewards cards worth having Come with an annual rate. But, in my opinion, it is generally a much lower investment that offers a huge value year after year.
Take my CHASE SAPPHIRE PREFERRED® card (see rates and rates) as an example. This card has an annual (quite modest) rate of $ 95, and I can’t see myself undoing myself.
Here is why.
Win points in daily spending
He Preferred sapphire It has some solid gain rates that include:
- 5 points per dollar spent on reserved trips through Chase Travel℠
- 5 points per dollar spent on Lyft trips (until September 30, 2027)
- 3 points per dollar spent on dinners
- 3 points per dollar spent on selected transmission services
- 3 points per dollar spent on purchases in the online groceries (excludes the Target, Walmart and wholesale clubs)
- 2 points per dollar spent on all trips not reserved through Chase Travel
- 1 point per dollar spent on everything else
I use this card to cover all online service expenses, meals and transmission for my home and my father, which cost around $ 1,200 per month. That beat me approximately 3,600 Chase Ultimate Rewards points per month for much of 2024 that I then transferred directly to me Hyatt world account.
Related: 7 preferred benefits of Chase Sapphire that may not know about
Does the value compensate for the annual rate?
At the moment, I will put aside the fact that you can currently obtain a huge 100,000 final rewards points After spending $ 5,000 on purchases in the first three months of opening the account, the highest welcome offer on this card and possibly One of the best card offers of all time.
Daily Bulletin
Reward your entrance tray with the TPG Diario Bulletin
Join more than 700,000 readers to receive news, in -depth guides and exclusive agreements of TPG experts
Let’s focus on the value of this card beyond the welcome offer.
To start, it comes with benefits like a Annual $ 50 credit For reserved hotels Persecution and a variety of travel protection That saves me hundreds of dollars every year by not having to pay for things such as car rental insurance and travel cancellation insurance. These automatically neutralize that annual rate for someone who travels even only a couple of times a year.
But beyond those benefits, the points I obtained using this card for my daily expense in 2024 covered more than $ 2,000 in hotels in hotels.
Related: Is it worth the annual Chase Sapphire rate? I say yes
More than a dozen free nights worth more than $ 2,000
Hyatt’s world can be The most valuable transfer partner In the Ultimate Rewards program, and it was the perfect place to move my points.
That is because, last year, my wife and I welcomed our first child, and in a double effort to preserve our sanity as first year parents and maintain my Elite status with World of Hyatt During a lighter trip year, we use these points to cover a room in our local Hyatt Regency approximately once a month.
Then we alternated which of us had the free night of the parents’ tasks and enjoy a quiet night in the center at the hotel. That is what I call value in which you can’t even put a price.
He Hyatt Regency Rochester In New York is a Property of category 1 Hyatt (And quite pleasant, in that). A standard room costs around $ 175 or 5,000 points per night on average, but we could get most of our stays for only 3,500 points per night when verifying World Hyatt awards chart and cherry peak nights.
At the end of the year, we had been more than a dozen nights in that hotel at points, and practically all these reimbursements were obtained in real time every month only by using the preferred sapphire for those categories of daily expenses.
Final rewards points are among the most valuable that can be gained, for a value of approximately 2.05 cents each on average, according to our April 2025 Valuations. But by transferring them to World of Hyatt and using them in this way, I obtained approximately 250% more value than theirs. If we had paid effective for those stays, it would have cost us about $ 2,100.
That is a large part of value to win simply use the right card in your usual expenses.
Related: 23 best Hyatt hotels in the world
End
For anyone who wants to capitalize on the income potential of this card, fortunately you can still obtain the 100,000 points welcome offer in it Preferred sapphire for a limited time.
Remember that these 100,000 bonus points alone have a value of $ 2,050, according to our valuations, and that does not even include the other $ 2,000 more of value that I have demonstrated here simply using the card in the course of a year.
Will I have to pay that annual rate every year to use this card? Certainly, but in reality it is costing money or saving I money? With all the value I get from this card, mathematics are obvious.
For more information, read our Complete review of the Sapphire Chase Prefereted.
Apply now: Chase Sapphire preferred
