BofA Cash Rewards vs. Travel Rewards

[nycyclone9]

I currently have a no-longer-offered BofA Rewards card that earns 1x points on every purchase. I never use the card; rather, I use my CSP and Amex BCP. That said, I recently discovered I can PC my Rewards card to either Cash Rewards or Travel Rewards with no hard inquiry on my credit report. Seems like a no brainer. My limit on the Rewards card is $7,500 so I might get the Visa Signature Cash/Travel card upon PC (though my CSP is of course also a Signature card).

Question is which one should I get? Cash Rewards seems like the better card in a vacuum -- especially since I bank with BofA and would get the 10% cash back bonus as a result -- but my Amex BCP gets better cash back on both gas and groceries, so I'm not sure how practical that is. The Travel Rewards card obviously is not as good as the CSP for travel and dining but earns 1.5x points on all purchases, so that seems like a positive. I suppose it's conceivable it's also accepted more broadly than CSP since it's not made of metal.

Does my logic make sense? Or does the 10 percent cash back bonus on the Cash Rewards card trump the Travel's benefits? Am I wasting my time with this exercise in the first place?

Thanks in advance for your sage advice.

[trumpet-205]

You get 1.5% return on Travel Rewards only if you redeem your points on travel expenses made within 90 days.

One advantage of Travel Rewards is that there is no FTF, but you already have CSP covering this.

[Trivolve]

You get 10% extra on Travel Rewards as well, but it's comes annually instead of during redemption.

I would recommend you use Travel Rewards for general spend (with the 10% bonus it reaches 1.65% return vs 1.1% for Cash Rewards), since you pretty much have BCP covered for gas and groceries and CSP for dining/travel. You can put say $25 of gas on the Travel Rewards when you're ready and redeem the points. Or if you don't expect to use the card much (i.e. sock drawer or netflix recurring charge), you can instead get Better Balance.

[Chris679]

Here's what I do when I have a tough decision to make: flip a coin and while it's in the air I know what side I want to come up and never even need to see the result.

[genz]

I PCed from Cash to Travel.

It's 1.6% on every purchase, not 1.65%. You also get 3.1% for travel purchase on bofa travel center (air fare price very reasonable, i.e. same as the lowest of expedia, priceline, airline website). I thought it was 1.65% as well before seeing the actual annual bonus.

It is advertised that you can use it to erase expenses in the past 180 days. In fact, the system lets you do 360 days.

You may redeem for any amount of $25 or more. You may apply it partially (eg. get $26 statement credit by applying 2600 points to a $500 purchase once, and then get $27 credit by applying 2700 points to the same purchase 2 months later). You may apply it to multiple purchases (eg. get $30 statement credit by applying 3000 points to a $20 purchase + partially another $20 purchase).

Travel expenses include: public transportation ticket (e.g. Caltrain, Light Rail), public transportation card (e.g. Clipper), car rental (e.g. zipcar, enterprise), air ticket (e.g. united, expedia, bofa travel center), park ticket (e.g. disney, universal studio)