@ryanbush wrote:
@FutureBillionaire wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:After running some numbers in Excel for fun, it does look like the CSP's 7% annual dividend applies to UR mall bonus points (at least in my case for last year). So if you make a UR mall purchase with a 10x aggregate return (1x standard spend + 9x UR mall bonus) on your CSP, you're really getting 10.7x with the 7% annual dividend factored in. If you made that same UR mall bonus purchase on your Freedom card with the 10% Chase Exclusives bonus, you'd be getting only 10.1x since the 10% bonus is only on the base spend (not total points), so CSP would be the way to go in this case.
If you do a little algebra [1.1x+Bx = 1.07(B+1)x where x is the base spend and B is the UR mall bonus premium], that means if you have equivalent UR mall bonuses for a particular purchase on both your CSP and Freedom cards, you should put anything with a 1.43% aggregate bonus (including the UR mall bonus) on your CSP, and anything below that on your Freedom card. Since the minimum aggregate bonus is >=2.00%, every UR mall bonus purchase, assuming equal bonus multipliers, should be made on your CSP card. Because I didn't think of this last year, I lost out on 282 UR points, which is worth about $8 with my personal UR points valuation of 3 cpp. Woe is me.
My head hurts.
Excellent post though.
mine too, any I thought I was good with numbers.
I didn't even factor in the 10 fixed point Freedom bonus for those that have the grandfathered Chase Exclusives (aka 10 & 10) program. 
For those lucky enough to still have the program, the bottom line is to put any UR mall purchase in excess of $100 with an aggregate bonus of 3x and over on CSP, 2x and under on Freedom.
@ryanbush wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:
@Creditseeker93 wrote:
@xiownthisplacex wrote:I got the 7% on my signup bonus as well!
How much is that? 2800 pointS/$$28?
3,500 points if you were lucky enough to get the 50k signup bonus. Those 3,500 points are worth $100+ to me, so it's a nice surprise.
Holy cow!!! How do you make you're points worth that much?
One way is to take flights to Asia, for me the tickets would cost upto $2,800 in high season for a economy ticket. $1,200 low season. 65,000 points would be required. of course this isn't booked through Chase it's transfered to United on a 1:1 ratio.
32,500 one way ticket x 2 = 65,000 if you do the math it's worth 4.3 cents per point. Now if you use it for a first class saver award (mixed business for short flights, and first for the longest flight) 130,000 points are required, but tickets costs towards $12,800 high season, so you would be looking at close to 10 cents per point in this way. Samething can be done with hotels in some nice cases.
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Rule about Ultimate rewards points
1. NEVER redeem 1:1 ratio for gift cards, it makes MUCH more sense to buy a gift card with your credit card, then you'll earn the points for it and then use points as statement credit
2. NEVER book international flights on Chase.com international flights should be transfered to a airline like southwest or united you'll get more bang for the buck. Domestic flights can be ok since you get 1.25 cent value for travel per point.
For instance 25,000 points to fly from Florida to Newark NJ cost $179
Option 1. Transfer to United and fly for 25,000 points
Option 2. Use Chase.com for booking the flight to get a 25% bonus = 14,300 points
Option 3. Purchase the ticket with Chase Sapphire and get 358 points for the flight, then use 17,900 to pay for the flight. Total cost after purchase points post is 17,542
Option 1. is FAR the worst case scenario for domestic flights cause you wasted close to double the number of points. You might say HEY it's not double, but it is. Why? Cause with Option 1. you do NOT get frequent flyer miles for miles flown. Tampa FL to Newark NJ is 998 miles so let's say 1,000 to make it easy.
You would get 2,000 miles for flying 2,000 miles with United + Option 2 (14,300 spent) but you would be getting 2,000 frequent flyer miles. So it feels like you spent 12,300 just under 50%.
With Option 1. you wouldn't get frequent flyer miles flown with award travel.
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Now for international tickets my family always flies in July upwards of 2200-2800 to Asia from Tampa.
Option 1. Transfer 1:1 to United and spend 65,000 points round trip
Option 2. book through Chase.com and spend 176,000 points for round trip ($2,200 ticket)
Option 3. purchase the ticket with Sapphire $2,200 spent = 4,400 points back and redeem for statement credit = 220,000 points - 4,400 points earned = 215,600 points required.
So the option to chose is VERY obvious in Option 1. but the problem with this flight is the flight is about 10k miles flown. So you would NOT get the miles flown in this option. So technically the real cost of this flight is 85,000 points. If we paid cash it would be buy 3 get 1 free almost (3 x 20k miles flown= 60k United miles). and it is if you fly from Tampa to NewYork to Asia to get extra miles flown (22k x 3 = 66k miles) which is an option sometimes depends how miles hungry you are lol.
Although if you fly first class the choice is super obvious.
