3 ms·

Chase Sapphire Reserve gives you 3% back on dining. What do you mean by "effective 4.5%"? The $450 annual fee means you have to spend $15,000 to make up for th

Chase Sapphire Reserve gives you 3% back on dining. What do you mean by "effective 4.5%"? The $450 annual fee means you have to spend $15,000 to make up for the fee alone, although it gets better if you're spending the $300 annual travel credit.

CydeWeys 7y ago
It's 3% points, and the points are redeemed at 1.5X on travels (hotels/flights/rental cars/etc.), for a total effective 4.5%. For a concrete example, $10k spent on dining/travel will yield 30k points, which can be redeemed for $450 worth of flights/hotels/etc. And the effective annual fee is $150 because the only way to not earn the $300 travel credit is to essentially not use the card at all, at which point you definitely shouldn't have the card anyway. So at the end of the day you "only" have to spend $3,333.33 on dining/travel to pay back the fee, and that's before considering the other perks it gets you like: It pays for Global Entry/TSA PreChek, it comes with included primary insurance for rental cards, and it effectively upgrades the value of points earned on other Chase UR cards, since you can transfer the points to the Reserve first before redeeming them, to get that 50% bonus. For example, I'm currently doing the 80k point intro offer on the Chase Ink Business Preferred. With the 25% bonus of that card, those points "only" redeem for $1000 worth of travel, but, transfer those 80k points to the Reserve before spending them and now they redeem for $1,200 worth of travel. So the Reserve is more than paying for itself this year just by increasing the value of the rewards from another card I have.