The Chase 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). Just make sure that you transfer your points to a card you’re going to keep BEFORE you cancel!
(SEE ALSO: Transferring Chase Ultimate Rewards between accounts before closing an account)
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.
Quarterly Chase Freedom categories – 2015
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 Grocery stores (not including Walmart or Target), Movie Theaters and Starbucks stores.
As you can see, the new Chase Freedom categories bonus for 2015 Q1 is at Grocery Stores, Movie Theaters and Starbucks. Remember that the bonus is good on the first $1500 of spending, so up to 7500 Ultimate Rewards. Any spending you do over and above $1500 will just earn the regular 1%.
The link to activate your Chase Freedom 5% is right here!
I know that some people are just buying Visa gift cards right away (3 $500 ones will do it!) but personally, we actually already spend quite a bit at grocery stores (you know, food for 8 costs a lot!!). I think that I’ll wait until closer to March to see if or how many gift cards I need to get to make sure to get the whole $1500 in spend. Any other tips for maximizing the Chase Freedom categories 5% bonus?
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