Nobody has asked an important question: do you want to take the easy path of having 1 (or possibly 2) all-purpose credit cards, or are you willing to expend a small amount of effort to use 3-6 cards for different categories, and thereby substantially boost your earnings?

Chase Sapphire Preferred is a good card -- I just paid the annual fee to renew, and I almost never keep a card with a fee past the complimentary first year -- but anybody using that without also using the Chase Freedom for rotating quarterly category spend is leaving a metric ****load of money on the table.

For a variety of perspectives on these questions, read through the comments in http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/miles...et-2012-a.html

And welcome to FlyerTalk, OP!