I'm kind of surprised by the all the responses here and how everyone seems to sleep on the BofA cashback cards. So, here we go.
My philosophy is to choose credit cards that work with my lifestyle, rather than to bend my lifestyle to take advantage of credit cards. If I look on hotels.com and find a reasonable hotel for, say, $200/night, or I could use credit card points to book a swanky hotel for, say, 40,000 points, and the cash rate of that hotel is $800/night, a lot of people here will say that that was 2cpp (40k pts for what that particular experience goes for: $800), but I would value it at 0.5cpp (40k pts to achieve what I was trying to accomplish which was just staying the night somewhere).
We also mostly fly Southwest when we fly, since Midway is the most convenient airport for us. That was why I was interested in the BofA Premium Rewards Elite: at a time it had Southwest flights on there, for 80% off! But looking now, it seems they've removed them, so thanks for calling out the Premium Rewards Elite, @redpat . (Also, I admit, I was looking at it because the physical card seems pretty nice, which I do value somewhat in and of itself.)
Lastly, I downloaded all our CC transactions from 2023, categorized them according to BofA categories, and with 4 Customized Cash Rewards cards and 1 Unlimited Cash Rewards, achieved a $3,030 cashback, for an effective rate of 4.11%. That's $1,550 more than we actually got with Fidelity, so it seemed worth it to me to set this up once, and then not have to think about credit cards again for the next decade. (Like with our Fidelity card 10 years ago).
And the SUBs aren't bad. There's a $250 transfer bonus for sending the funds to Merrill, $200 x 5 for the CCRs and UCC, assuming we spend $5k on them in 90 days (which we will). $1,250 straight up cash, for $5k spend is pretty competitive, no?
Okay, so I'm pretty set on this set of credit cards, but am open to other options if people see where I'm coming from and value cash back and flexibility like I do. I'm not really a fan of churning unless there's a particularly unique or great bonus. I just remembered I *did* actually churn Southwest Rapid Rewards card, in order to get a Companion Pass. But most "point" cards don't work well with my philosophy because they restrict how I can use the rewards, or to take advantage of them I have to live above my comfortable means, when I'd rather just save the money. And I haven't found any cashback cards that beat this. Most are more limited.
US Bank Altitude Reserve actually does improve things a bit. I also categorized every transaction from 2023 as to whether it would work with Apple Pay, and for a handful of purchases (e.g. Geico, groceries) its effective 4.5% cashback rate beats the BofA cards, contributed to an extra $100 in cash back after accounting for the annual fee. And with its Realtime Rewards program, the points can be redeemed on any travel, including Southwest. But at this point it's kind of diminishing returns for me. But I'm considering it.
So with that out of the way, I'm back to soliciting advice on how to set this up. Or pitfalls with using Merrill that I'm unaware of. I don't see fees to hold the ETFs, and I believe I see that I can set up Bill Pay to pay the credit card out of my Fidelity cash management account like I do now.
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