topic Re: Reward math in Credit Cards

Reward math

wasCB14 — Mon, 15 May 2017 03:05:58 GMT

Hypothetically, say you can book a flight with any one of:

a. $300 cash
b. 10k MRs (giving 3 cpp)
c. $200 cash and 2.5k MRs (giving 4 cpp)

How do you decide between b and c? Option c gives a higher cpp value, but I expect most of us would want to use as many MRs as possible given a good opportunity like 3 cpp.

Any favored calculations?

Re: Reward math

AverageJoesCredit — Mon, 15 May 2017 14:00:11 GMT

1+1=2 ?

Re: Reward math

yfan — Mon, 15 May 2017 17:11:07 GMT

@wasCB14 wrote:
Hypothetically, say you can book a flight with any one of:

a. $300 cash
b. 10k MRs (giving 3 cpp)
c. $200 cash and 2.5k MRs (giving 4 cpp)

How do you decide between b and c? Option c gives a higher cpp value, but I expect most of us would want to use as many MRs as possible given a good opportunity like 3 cpp.

Any favored calculations?

Unless you are saving up MRs to transfer to something big, option B is best. With option C, what you're doing compared to option B is that you are paying $200 to save 7500 points. That could be looked at as "buying" those 7500 points for $200, which comes out to buying each point for 2.67 cents. That's not a good tradeoff.