Originally Posted by
SP03
For most people, the incremental benefit of Ink Preferred probably doesn’t justify the annual fee and complexity.
You would have to spend $5000 on no “other travel” to just break even. And it’s even more if you have a Freedom Unlimited.
I agree, it would, long term, be a barely profitable card for me. However, I am not looking at it with a long term perspective. I don’t usually get more than 1-2 new cards every year, and this one is the first one in 2025. I will get 90k UR for $8k spend, and I have some travel spend come up thanks to several trips this year, so a significant portion will be at 3X (of course, some of it would have been at 3X anyway). I have no special insights, but I don’t expect Chase to keep its current Ink card earning structure in place for much longer, so I think this will be a card that only stays in my fleet for a year or two.
With the earnings from this card and other UR earnings from ongoing spend, I expect we will have a UR balance at the end of 2025 that will support our travel for about 2-3 years (we have other large loyalty accounts to work with, too).