I guess that's where we were disconnecting, because I was discussing future CO offers specifically, not future Chase offers in general. I see that your concern is that opening CO credit now ruins your ability to apply for any future Chase offers in general, whereas we have & have had multiple UA cards and the BA card so as far as I'm concerned (you must not agree since you've had them as well) we are already tainted for UA & BA & will remain tainted. I believe you're saying you feel your UA & BA cards will "age out" and without spoiling that scenario by applying for what you perceive as insignificant CO bonuses, you'll be ready for the mega-bonus you predict.

In other words, you absolutely see a huge Chase bonus on the horizon, and you see a work-around to having had previous Chase cards.

Whereas I see the possibility of a huge Chase bonus on the horizon, but I see extremely difficult or non-existent work-around to having had previous Chase cards, which led me to go for the only Chase option I hadn't used, which were the CO cards.

I hope you're right and I'm wrong!

In case you're not, and Chase remains strict or becomes stricter about churning, for those truly outstanding bonuses you are predicting, I have my group travel Mom and non travel brother to fall back on. As their guru (and I use that term extremely loosely, compared to my awe for the average FTer), I keep them "virginal" and basically don't promote churning with them. I think I've used Mom twice over many years & I don't think I've ever used my brother. If an out of this world offer came along, I'd do what I did before, I'd guide them thru applying, pay any fees that are necessary, do their spend for them, and they can get us tickets, since they have no use for the miles. I guess they are a form of travel insurance!

I'm pleased with my decision to go for the CO credit card offer in tandem with the checking/debit card offer, you're pleased with yours not to, life is good! I'm uber-willing to hope that your prognostications about future credit card bonuses are right and mine aren't. I think we have been OT for the OnePass checking long enough. :D

Do you know if the fee's are per card or per account. In other words will adding each additional debit card incur and additional $65/$25 fee?

Annual fee
* $65 for the Chase Continental Airlines Preferred Debit Card
or
* $25 for the Chase Continental Airlines Debit Card

Read the fine print on the link in Ingy's post. It answers your question.

4You can add up to 3 cards for free for others on your joint checking account.

I am fairly confident we will see better offers in not too distant future. :)

Different strategies because we have enough miles from different programs that would be good for First / Business class travels for the next 3 to 5 years, so I am not anxious to accumulate more miles. OTOH, I am more interested to find ways to trim my hotel bills because for the multiple weeks of trips we are taken, God knows we need more hotel points! I just tallied our 2010 away from home days, it was only 76 days, slightly better than my guesstimate 80 days... While 33 out of the 76 were on 3 cruises, the remaining 43 days were hotel stays... Free tickets without free hotels would still take a big bite from the bank account, right?

Fully expected. This matches almost exactly to one of the 2 Surveys we got a while back - asking how one would rate the benefits and bonuses of the various products. Yup, the highest bonus seen in the Surveys was only 2,500 miles, but it does not mention about multiple cardholders though.

+1. This is exactly the case when people were rejected for the Chase-BA Visa or the Chase-Priority Club Visa (with the Crack the Case offer) because they had just applied for whatever small promos they had come across and got shut out of the really good ones. This is also the exact same thing Ingy has advocated in his blog not too long ago urging people to wait or choose the really good offers instead of applying for everything.

Perhaps my mileage/point accounts have enough inventory for at least 3 years, so I have the luxurious option to be more selective when it comes to applying for new cards.

At one point I did consider getting the CO credit card but decided against it. I would not do it for 30K miles and a credit inquiry for two years.

Yup, Ingy is right on this one.

For those of us who have healthy balances in our accounts we want to wait for better offers to come. I dont need any CO or UA miles for the moment when I am sitting on almost $2000 worth of their vouchers, plus several tens of thousands of miles in each program. I do the checking accounts due to no hard pull. But 30K is not enough for me for the same reason you cited. Given PC comes out with 80K offer, I am hoping MR would eventually up its offer, given it is one of the 3 Chase hotel cards.

The 2008 stuff finally completely fell off and now we start to look more pristine... I like to keep it that way for a few more months... ;)

Anybody else notice the SkyTeam logo on the card?

Anyone know what the current terms to not have a monthly service fee are on the personal checking acct?

It is the same up till Feb. Then it changes to $500 DD (has to be one single DD at that amount) or 5 Non-Pin debit card transactions.

My wife & I both signed up for the personal account last May for the first time ever. Signed up online as there are no Chase banks in our area. If we now close our accounts (both over 6 months old), we can sign up for new accounts & each add 3 debit cards to both get 10,000 Continental or United miles for $25 each?

If so, how long should we wait before opening the new account?

Am I correct that no coupon code is required?

For what it's worth, our bank suggested when we signed up in December, that we sign up for Chase Better Banking Checking. The printout we got says that to avoid the monthly fee, it requires either $5,000 in "combined average balances in qualifying deposits" OR "maintain $1,500 or more in this account" OR "link to a qualifying checking account." Not sure what that last one is; the bold one is what we're going for.

We each made 5 debit purchases in our accounts to get the miles last month (which have posted all but the last 2,500) and we're supposed to be charged the same $25 annual fee, but my wife called the bank yesterday to double-check that there would be no monthly fee this month, even if we didn't use the debit card five times, as long as we had $1500 in the account. They said that was true.

My wife pointed out that the second page of the print-out said "Personal account products, Chase checking... beginning February 8, 2011... blah blah," need $500 DD or five purchases, "otherwise $6," with no mention that keeping a minimum balance would avoid the monthly fee.

The person said those rules only applied to "Chase checking" but not to what we had, "Chase Better Banking Checking."

Not sure. I'll believe it when I see it. But for now, we're going with the assumption that letting $1500 sit in each account till we want to close them in six months will eliminate the monthly fees. Does anyone have experience with that actually being correct?

Hey Pup, about the last fee-free option, the link to a qualifying checking account. If you meet the minimum balance in, say, a business checking account, you can have the personal account too without needing to maintain the minimum balance in that one as well - as long as one has enough $$ in it to avoid the fee, your banker can link them and you don't have to qualify the personal accoun by $500 DD, 5 transactions, or minimum balance.

It works in reverse too, but Mrs FTF and I didn't really need new personal accounts so we did it that way. You could flip it and have the minimum balance in the personal instead. It's probably lower.

FTF

More mergers, fewer cards
 

About the big debate above whether or not to open a CO card right now or wait for a better offer:

I'm working off the supposition that this is a special case, that there probably won't be CO cards in some months, and that they will reduce their stable to just the United cards. For that reason, I opened the CO Onepass card a few months ago (because I'd had a Chase UA card years ago and aren't eligible any more). Likewise, I'm having Mrs FTF open a CO biz card instead of the UA one, figuring (hoping) she can do UA some time in the future since she hasn't had that.

I was about to open the NWA biz card when they pulled that one from the market, and I wished I had done it then. Don't want to miss that same way again, :td: and figure our credit can handle it.

(Begging the board's indulgence; I know this thread is about the debit card :o but there were a lot of posts on this and I wanted to add the "vanishing options" perspective.)

FTF