@Anonymous wrote:
My company allows me to use a personal card for business expenses. Which is great but they added a rule that only business expenses can be made on the card and not personal. I guess people are bad at blacking out their personal expenses.
This news is going to alter my plan. I was going to get the Chase Trifecta as I just got the CFU last month. The plan was to use the CSR for business expenses as I spend $5,000 a month of which 90% is coded as travel. If I cannot use the CSR for personal use then I will have to:
A. Come up with a new strategy
OR
B. Do not use the CSR for personal use
Plan B seems unlikely as I do 2-3 trips a year for pleasure. So I would want to get the points and use the travel perks.
I am thinking for the business expenses:
1. Open the Chase Ink. I do sell stuff on eBay but have not sold anything in a year. Nor do I have anything listed although I can probably start posting things around the house. I also tutor on the side but it is for cash and it is a small amount so filling out a 10-99 would not be worth it.
2. Co-Branded Hotel or Airline - I can use my UR for whichever I do not get. I can easily the SW companion pass with a $5000 a month spend and the SUB. I like Mariott hotels so that is an option too.
3. CSR - I can use business expenses here only and use a FU and F card and use the points to book travel but will have to book it using my FU card. I will then get a Hotel Card or Airline card as listed above.
What advice would you give me?
That's a very unusual policy. Usually, it's the other way around; they give you a corporate/business card that they can track expenses on and you can't use that card for personal expenses. Without them having some access (to your personal card!) to track your spend, how would they even know/enforce such a rule? I'm not advocating that you break their rule, but you might ask for clarification if you haven't already as that's a very, very strange one...in fact, this is the first I've ever heard of an employer with such a policy.
If indeed this is the case, I'd do some math over an annual basis to see how much dining/travel you're missing out on with personal spend vs. business spend. If this is working out to $60,000/year business dining/travel versus $10,000 for personal dining/travel, the clear choice is to let business expenses go to the CSR and you find an alternate for your dining/travel.
If a bulk of your personal dining/travel is dining, and a bulk of your business dining/travel is travel, that's also something to factor in. For example, if $4,000 of that $5,000 per month is airfare/hotel and you can book direct, I'd consider something like an AmEx for 5x. If your personal dining/travel is mostly dining, there's viable alternatives to the CSR you can use.
The hotel/airline cards aren't a bad idea, but I also don't know what your endgame goal with UR is. If your plan is to transfer all UR to one airline, then you've found your goal and build around that with complimenting airline cards. I'm not going to casually recommend to get any of them without knowing what your long-term strategy is, though.
The key point here is that there's (usually) more than one "good" card for each category, so what I would recommend is that you figure out which point program means the most to you (think airline or hotel here, then build off that with UR/MR/something else) and allocate the best earning card for that to the highest-spend category (business travel on CSR, for instance), then build downward from there, complimenting that point program where you can. Since we don't have enough of that information here, you'd still have some homework to do, but I think you get the general idea.
