68. Racking Up Points with Chase Spending Offers

Welcome to Point Me to First Class, the only show for employed professionals, entrepreneurs, and business owners who are looking to optimize their higher-than-average expenses to travel the world. I'm your host, Devon Gimbel, and I believe that your expenses are your greatest untapped asset if you know how to leverage them. Ready to dive into the world of credit card points and miles so you can travel more, travel better, and travel often? Let's get started.

Welcome back to the podcast, everybody. I hope you're all having a great week. Now I recently received an email from a podcast listener that I want to read a portion of because it's what got me thinking about the topic that we are going to focus on for today's episode. So here is what someone wrote me.

“I am self-employed with a P2.” So, for any of you who don't know what a P2 is, it just stands for player two or your partner in points earning. So this person says they spend about $25,000 a month on credit cards. “My main objective at this point is to optimize that spend, but,” this person notes, “even if we are aggressive, there are only so many new cards we can prudently sign up for each year.”

They went on to highlight their approach for continuing to earning points beyond earning welcome bonuses on new cards, including optimizing rewards credit card bonus categories. But they asked if there was anything they were missing, which got me thinking about one specific points earning opportunity that I don't think gets as much attention as it deserves and that has been really useful for me the last few years in terms of boosting my points earning opportunities beyond that initial earning a welcome bonus on new credit cards or even just optimizing the bonus categories of my existing credit cards.

But before I dive into that, I wanted to take a minute to thank this listener for reaching out. I love hearing from you all, especially when you have questions about how to earn more points strategically or how to use your points. So for anyone who wants to share a part of your points story or ask me a question, please feel free to send me a message anytime you want. You can email me directly at [email protected]. 

Okay, back to this email that I received. What I loved about this particular message is that it really highlights one of the unique aspects of having high spend and also wanting to maximize your points earning ability. This podcast listener happens to be self-employed, and so likely they have business expenses as well as personal expenses. 

But even if all of your spend is personal and you don't own a business, at a certain point, if your spend is high enough, your points earning strategy is going to have to include more than just signing up for new credit cards in order to earn welcome bonuses. 

On the one hand, getting new card signup bonuses is usually the single easiest way to earn a huge amount of points per dollar spent. So there is absolutely a place for applying for new credit cards and earning welcome bonuses as a foundational points earning strategy. 

But at a certain point, either because you've been in the points hobby for a long time and have been steadily accumulating new credit cards and reach a point where you have a lot of cards or because your spend is high enough that it's not actually practical or feasible to always be using all of your spend to earn a new card welcome bonus, or even just because your personal preference is that you don't want to apply for any new rewards credit cards, you likely will want to incorporate or rely on points earning approaches that go beyond earning signup bonuses on new rewards credit cards. 

On prior episodes of this podcast, I've touched on some of those additional points earning methods, including optimizing bonus categories on your existing rewards credit cards, utilizing online shopping portals like Rakuten and taking advantage of referral bonuses or retention offers as a way to ensure that you're always earning more than one point per dollar spent as often as possible. 

But for those of you who have Chase credit cards specifically, there's an additional points earning opportunity that often flies under the radar that I want to make sure that you know about so that you can take advantage of it. That is what's known as Chase spending offers. 

Again, just to be clear, these apply specifically to Chase issued rewards credit cards. So this is not a point turning opportunity that applies equally across all rewards credit cards or points currencies. So just keep that in mind for the rest of this episode. 

Chase spending offers are targeted offers, which means that they are not always available to every single Chase card holder. But when they are, they're an opportunity to earn more bonus points than usual in designated expense categories for a specific period of time on a specific Chase credit card, usually for about three months or one quarter of the year. 

Now, just to be clear, Chase spending offers are not the same thing as a welcome offer or sign up bonus that you earn on a new rewards credit card. They're not the same thing as just leveraging the standard bonus categories on one of your Chase rewards cards, like being able to earn three times points on dining expenses with your Chase Sapphire Reserve card. They're not the same thing as earning bonus points for doing your online shopping through the Chase shopping portal. 

They're not even the same thing as card specific Chase offers, which you might be familiar with. Those are where you can activate offers on individual Chase rewards cards after you log into your Chase account online in order to get, for example, 5% cash-back on eBay purchases up to $10 in rewards, or 10% cash-back on your next Shake Shack order with a $3 cash-back maximum.

To be honest, I don't get all that excited about chasing credit card specific offers like the Chase offers because I personally find it pretty tedious to have to go through and manually add or activate these offers to my individual Chase cards. The promise of earning 10% cash-back on a $12 Shake Shack order just isn't really incentive enough for me personally to overcome my general malaise and laziness. So the reality is I almost never actually take advantage of Chase credit card specific offers. 

What I'm going to be talking to you about today, Chase spending offers, are very different from these Chase credit card specific offers that you can add to your card directly from your Chase account. I don't mind admitting to you all that I don't get particularly excited about Chase card specific offers because one of my core points earning philosophies is that you don't need to chase every single points earning opportunity that exists. 

Rather, you should pursue the points earning strategies that give you the biggest impact for your spend or are points earning methods that you find rewarding, interesting or fun. For me personally, the regular Chase card specific offers are none of those things. 

So for those of you who also are not enthusiastic about combing through Chase offers on your individual rewards cards or have no interest in traditional stacking methods to earn an extra few points here or there, I have good news for you. Chase spending offers, the offers that I want to talk to you about today, are different. 

In today's episode, we are going to cover everything that you need to know about Chase spending offers, including what they are, why they're great, and how you can find them and take advantage of them. So first things first, let's talk about what Chase spending offers are. As I mentioned before, these are targeted offers on individual Chase credit cards, which means that sometimes they will be available on your Chase cards and sometimes they won't be.

Chase spending offers usually come out once per quarter and are opportunities to earn additional bonus points on your Chase rewards credit cards for that three month period of time. They can be available not only on the Chase Ultimate Rewards points earning credit cards like the Chase Sapphire Preferred or the Chase Sapphire Reserve card, for example, but they can also be available on Chase co-branded airline and hotel credit cards, like the Chase United Airlines cards, the Chase Southwest Airlines cards or the Chase Hyatt cards, just to name a few.

Chase spending offers also are not just limited to the personal Chase rewards credit cards. They can also be targeted on the Chase business credit cards for these quarterly spend bonuses. So here are a couple of examples of Chase spending bonuses that have been offered in the last year or so. 

So I remember earlier this year, the first quarter of 2024, some Chase United credit cards were targeted for a spending bonus where you could earn five United miles for every dollar spent at grocery stores, gas stations, and restaurants up to a thousand dollars spent. So if your Chase United credit card was targeted for this spending offer, and you activated or added it to your account, you could potentially earn 5,000 extra United miles by maxing out the spending bonus on a thousand dollars spent on the card during the offer period. 

I've seen similar spending offers on Chase Southwest credit cards and Chase Hyatt credit cards, sometimes with even higher spend amounts for earning bonus points like being able to earn five points per dollar spent on specific expense categories up to, say, $2,500 spent during the bonus period.

So here is something that you'll notice about the Chase spending offers. They usually have four important designations that you will want to pay attention to. First, they'll tell you how many bonus points you can earn per dollar spent. Second, they'll tell you what purchases qualify for earning those bonus points. Sometimes it's on all spend regardless of the category of spend. Sometimes the bonus point to the bonus points offer will only apply to specific categories of spend that will be explicitly laid out in the offer like gas and grocery spend or restaurant spend.

Third, the offer will tell you the maximum amount of spend the bonus points will apply to. Definitely do not overlook this because most of the time you'll only want to put additional spend on your specific Chase cards up to the maximum bonus spend allowed. 

For example, if you can earn an extra five Southwest points per dollar spent up to a thousand dollars, you'll most likely not want to put more than a thousand dollars of spend on that specific credit card. Since after you hit the bonus threshold, you'll go back to earning the standard number of points for that category of spend on your card. You absolutely don't want to be putting thousands of dollars of spend on a card thinking that you're earning tons of bonus points. When in actuality, the bonus points only applies to a specific spend threshold.

Fourth and finally, make sure to take note of the time period that the spending bonus offer applies to. This will almost always be the three month period for that quarter of the year, but make sure that you take note of it so that you allocate as much spend as you want to that card to take advantage of the bonus points offer during the time period that you're eligible. 

Just to make it easy on myself, I like to take screenshots of any Chase spending offers that I activate on my credit cards just so that I don't have to remember any of these details. I save them in a folder on my computer so that I can pull them up to remind myself of what the spending offers are that I want to make sure to take advantage of each quarter.

The reason that I really like Chase spending bonus offers is because oftentimes, especially airline and hotel co-branded credit cards have relatively weak bonus categories compared to other rewards credit cards. Many of these cards ordinarily only earn one point per dollar spent on many categories of spend, including restaurants, gas stations, and grocery spend. 

So very rarely does it make sense to pull out a United card or a Hyatt card for these expenses when you likely have other rewards cards that bonus these typical categories at three, four, or five points per dollar. But the Chase spending offers actually make it worthwhile to put some spend on a co-branded credit card if you're going to be able to earn a solid return on that spend in the form of additional points or miles. 

Now I also generally prefer to earn flexible or transferable points currencies like Chase Ultimate Rewards points or Amex membership rewards points over airline or hotel specific points or miles. But getting a Chase spending offer on a co-branded credit card, again, can justify using these cards to earn bonus points or miles, at least up to the maximum bonus points amount specified in each one of the offers. 

But the great news is that Chase spending offers are not just limited to being available on the Chase co-branded hotel or airline credit cards. Sometimes the Chase Ultimate Rewards points earning cards are also targeted for spending offers. These are some of my favorite offers because they make already strong points earning cards even better. 

Last winter in the end of 2023, Chase had a spending offer available on my Chase Ink Business Unlimited card to earn 15,000 bonus points after spending $15,000 on the card, up to three times. So essentially that increase the points earning ability of the Chase Ink Business Unlimited card from its standard points earning of 1.5 points per dollar spent to 2.5 points per dollar spent on up to $45,000 of spend during the bonus offer period. Now that is a fantastic points earning rate for a no annual fee business card that earns really valuable, flexible, transferable Chase Ultimate Rewards points. 

Unfortunately not all the Chase spending offers are winners every single quarter, and some of them are outright duds. For example, there's a Chase spending offer available right now, this current quarter on my Chase Sapphire Reserve credit card, where I can earn a $35 statement credit when I spend at least $99 on Max streaming services. So I'm going to spend about zero seconds of my life trying to take advantage of that specific offer. 

So even though not all of the Chase spending offers are amazing, it is still well worth checking them out to see which ones are available on your Chase credit cards as they can be pretty easy, low effort opportunities to earn increased points or miles on the cards that you already have in your wallet.

So let's talk about the logistics of finding and activating these Chase spending offers. As I mentioned before, these are targeted bonus offers, meaning that if you hold any of the Chase points or miles earning credit cards, you might have a spending offer available on that card each quarter, but you also might not. It's not guaranteed that your cards will be targeted for any individual spending offer. So it's important that you actually take the time to be sure to check. 

Now I've heard of some folks automatically receiving emails from chase, alerting them to specific spending offers available on their Chase credit cards, but I've had Chase cards for about 12 years now. I can't remember ever getting a single email directly from Chase about specific spending offers. So it's definitely worth it to manually check your cards yourself to see if you've been targeted for a spending offer. 

Remember if you happen to be like me and hold more than a few Chase rewards credit cards, each individual card could be targeted for a spending offer quarterly. So you'll want to check each of your Chase credit cards to see if they have a spending offer available.

The last thing that you need to know is that Chase spending offers are not automatically activated or added to your Chase rewards credit cards. You need to actually manually add them to your card accounts in order to be able to take advantage of them. So you're not just going to accidentally benefit from a Chase spending offer. Unless you clicked that you want to add it to the specific Chase credit card that it's available on, you're not going to get rewarded with the bonus points. 

The good news is that it is not hard to find or activate Chase spending offers on your cards. Once per quarter, usually at the beginning of the quarter, I like to go to the Chase spending offer website. You can very easily find it by going to https://www.chase.com/mybonus. Now don't worry about trying to write that down. I'm going to make sure that we include that link in the show notes and the episode description so that it is very easy for you to find.

So once you go to that chase.com/mybonus website, you're going to see a box where you can input in your last name that's on your credit card account, the last four digits on your Chase credit card, and the zip code associated with the billing address on your credit card to see if there are any Chase spending offers available for that specific card for that specific quarter. 

Again, this is where you're going to want to check each of your Chase credit cards one by one to see if any spending offers are available and to activate them on your individual card accounts. Keep in mind that if you have business credit cards that have a different billing address or zip code than your personal Chase credit cards, you'll want to be sure to use the zip code of the billing address associated with each card when you're checking for bonus offers. Also, if you have a partner or spouse who has their own Chase credit cards, they should be sure to check their cards for spending offers as well. 

Even if you have a plethora of Chase credit cards like me, it shouldn't take more than a few minutes each quarter to run through entering the details of each of your cards to check if any spending bonuses are available. Remember that these spending bonuses are targeted, so it's entirely possible that even if there are reports of a spending offer being available on a given Chase credit card, like say, for example, the Chase United Explorer Mileage Plus card, that doesn't mean that your Chase United Explorer Mileage Plus card is guaranteed to have that spending offer. 

In my anecdotal experience, I usually have a spending offer available on one or two of my 12 Chase personal and business cards each quarter. So don't get discouraged if you don't always get targeted for these offers. 

But that's really all you need to know, everybody. That is the details about the Chase quarterly spending offers, a lesser known, but nonetheless potentially valuable way to rack up extra points or miles on your Chase rewards credit cards with very little effort. For those of you looking to add points earning strategies for when you're not actively allocating all or most of your spend toward earning the welcome bonus on a new rewards credit card, Chase spending offers are a great opportunity to boost the points earning potential of your favorite Chase rewards credit cards. 

As a quick reminder, here's what you need to do to take advantage of these quarterly spending offers. First, remember to check the Chase My Bonus website to check your individual Chase cards for any targeted spending offers. You'll want to go specifically to chase.com/mybonus, not your online Chase account, and check each of your Chase rewards cards for any available offers. Make sure that if you have personal and business credit cards with different billing addresses, you input in the correct billing zip code for each of your credit cards when checking for available spending offers. 

Finally, for each spend offer, make sure to take note of how many bonus points you can earn, whether you can earn bonus points on all spend on that specific card or just on specific expense categories, the maximum amount of spend the bonus applies to, and the period of time, it's usually three months, that the spending offer is valid on the card. Take a screenshot of any spend offers you activate on your Chase cards to make it easy to keep track of these details. 

All right, everybody, I hope this episode has taught you something new about earning points with your Chase rewards credit cards and adds another points earning strategy that goes beyond the welcome bonus on new rewards credit cards. Remember, if you have a question about your points earning or points redeeming approaches and are curious about what I would recommend to optimize either, you can email me anytime at [email protected]. 

If you want more personalized in depth support creating your best fit rewards credit card portfolio or learning how to redeem your points for maximum value so that you can spend more time traveling on points than searching for great points deals online, you'll want to be sure to join me inside my Points Made Easy online course that's opening for enrollment the first time this year on July 13, 2024. 

To learn more about the course and get your name on the wait list so that you will have the first chance to join when doors open, just go to https://pointmetofirstclass.com/pointsmadeeasy. Have a great week, everybody. I will see you again, same time, same place next week.

Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of Point Me to First Class. If you want more tips on turning your expenses into travel, visit pointmetofirstclass.com to learn more. See you next week.