Okay – last quarter I was really behind the times. I didn’t get my new Chase Freedom card (as part of my credit card churn last month) until the middle of June.
The Freedom is a great card to have, and one of the reasons is that it’s a no-fee card that still earns valuable Ultimate Rewards. Also, if you have a premium Chase card (such as the Sapphire or the Chase Ink card) that you want to cancel, you can transfer it down into a Freedom (and keep your Ultimate Rewards points)
If you just have say, a Sapphire card, and you cancel it, then your Ultimate Rewards points are just gone! Obviously that’s not what we want to happen, so downgrading to a Freedom is an option. Now one disadvantage of not having a premium Chase card is that you can’t transfer your points to Chase’s partners (like United, Southwest and others).
Another downside is if you already HAVE a Freedom card (because you downgraded from an Ink or Sapphire) is that you’re not eligible for a signup bonus. And with the bonus at a relatively high point (20,000 Ultimate Rewards points instead of 10,000), I decided to add it to my latest churn.
All of that is just a long-winded way of saying that now I have a Freedom card 😀
Quarterly 5% categories
The other nice part of the Freedom card is that they have quarterly bonuses, where each quarter, you earn 5% back in a select number of categories. This quarter is 5% on Restaurants and at Lowe’s.
As you can see, the new bonus for Q3 is at Gas Stations and Kohl’s. This is probably a little better than last quarter’s bonus, as Gas Stations are pretty good at finding manufactured spending opportunities. You can activate the bonus starting today, but of course don’t actually start spending until July! Remember that the bonus is good on the first $1500 of spending.
The link to activate your Chase Freedom 5% is right here!
Any tips for maximizing the 5% bonus?
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Dan Miller travels with his wife and 6 (SIX!) children. He loves to help families travel for free / cheap, especially larger families. If you are looking for help, drop him an email at 
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