A number of months ago, the annual fee posted on my Chase Sapphire Reserve card and I downgraded the card to become a Freedom Flex card instead. (Of course I first used up the $300 travel credit before downgrading. 🙂 ) My biggest motivation to have the card was the 1.5 cents value from Pay Yourself Back, but I don’t need to have it all the time and pay the hefty $550 annual fee.
Flush with some new Ultimate Rewards points, I decided to upgrade again to the Sapphire Reserve. The card I chose to upgrade – a different Freedom card – had a very low credit line, and the Chase rep was easily able to transfer over some credit from another card to bring my credit line up to $10,000, the minimum needed for upgrading to the Reserve.
The timing of this Reserve upgrade isn’t great since Pay Yourself Back benefit on the card has been degraded to the current redemption rate of just 1.25 cents per point.
Hopefully I’ll be be able to cash out some points throughout the year using the Chase Ultimate Rewards travel which offers a value of 1.5 cents per point. The new PYB categories of Grocery and Gas are easy to use, though, and I’m considering cashing out some at the 1.25 rate.
I’ll also be sure to find $300 of Travel over the course of the year to get the $300 Travel credit. The Sapphire Reserve credit works on all a wide variety of travel charges so that should be easy enough. I’ve even had success with tolls in the past.
I’ll use the card on all Travel and Dining purchases throughout the year for the 3x rewards on those categories. The card also offers primary car rental insurance and some other benefits will will be useful. I’m not aware of any easy way of using up the Instacart $15 monthly benefit, and I’ll probably let that one go to simplify my life. I might use the $5 monthly ($15 quarterly) DoorDash credit, though I’m not honestly sure if they yet stopped giving that to me since my prior card was cancelled some months ago.
The Chase rep told me that the annual fee would post on the 1st of the month, but I haven’t seen any charge yet. Interestingly, a reader tells me that with Sapphire Reserve upgrades it even takes a few months until they charge the annual fee, so upgrading actually gives us a bit more than one year for the $550 annual fee. Nice.
Source: doctorofcredit.com