Overhauling my credit card strategy

Bank of America giving this card the bougie Out Of Box Experience

(I'm adding updates in red to the original post as I learn)

After several months of having this card and doing a lot of flight shopping it's clear that in 2025 the airlines are all doubling-down on keeping cash fares high despite there being lots of signs that travel demand is weakening. This wouldn't happen if we had more than 3 national carriers, but here we are.

A round trip flight to Asia/Australia is still $9000 in Business Class (ie, 1,500,000 BofA points for 2 of us). To put that in perspective, I'd have to spend $429,000 on travel and dining on this card to earn that many points. 

Alternatively, If I'm slightly flexible on dates I can find a confirmable United Mileage Upgrade Award Business Class seat for $2700 + 60k miles. 

There are definitely times where the cash price is on-par with the points price (especially domestic flying, where points redemptions are often worth less than 1¢ each) and in those instances it makes sense to use BofA points to pay. But until carriers lower their cash pricing, these BofA points are more akin to "another useful arrow in my quiver" than they are to a magic bullet. 

My credit card strategy for the past few years has been: 

• Churn a new card sign up bonus once or twice a year
• Use the Amex Platinum for 5x points on airfare and access to their lounges
• Use the Amex Gold for 4x on dining and groceries
• Use the Chase Sapphire for all non-airline travel and for dining abroad (Amex isn't as widely accepted and they have a nasty habit of not counting foreign charges in the right bonus category)
• Use the Business Amex for the 35% points rebate (the Dell and wireless credits largely cover the annual fee)
• Use the United card to top up Kelly's PQPs so he'll stay Star Alliance Gold

I always told myself if my life became more complicated (like say for example I got a JOB), I'd probably just ditch most of my cards and get the BofA Premium Rewards Elite and charge nearly everything on there. Welp, that time has apparently come. No, don't be insane, I haven't gotten a job, but we are going to move to the BofA card and close a bunch of our other cards. 

There's no big impending life changes, honestly. I just want to devote less of my time to this hobby. I'm good enough at it now that we're almost always on a comfortable/direct flight for cheap/free and yet we're still collecting points faster than we can spend them. (Yes, I've given lots of them away to people in need.) My strategy might change once Kelly retires or Tim's green card comes through, but for now, this is where we're at. 

So here's the deal with Premium Rewards Elite:

• Have $100k+ with BofA or Merrill Lynch (their investment arm) and you get 2.65 points per dollar on all spend, 3.5 points per dollar on "travel and dining"
• Each point is worth 1.2¢ towards buying cash airfare through BofA's travel portal, with no restrictions on fare class or airline like Amex does. 
• Yes, Chase Sapphire nerfed its 1.5¢ pay-with-points option, but its new Points Boost 2¢ feature seems to include most United flights – making it more valuable than BofA points for cash redemptions and also remaining transferrable to airline programs when that's a better deal
• The effective value of each point is actually higher than 1.2¢ because your ticket will earn airline miles and status as a cash fare¹. Even a conservative valuation of airline miles puts this well above 2¢ per point.
• Ergo for travel and dining, each dollar spent will earn more than 7¢ back
• $550 annual fee (There's also a lower fee version that doesn't get the 20% travel bonus)

Simpler definitely has its advantages: my dear husband will no longer have to text me "Wait, which card am I supposed to use for the group dinner?" It will mean way less fussing with Amex's coupon book-style benefits like the Annual Airline Fee Credit, the Dell Credit, the Saks Credit, etc. It means fewer things to keep track of every month when it's time to pay the bills. It also means less worrying about trying to find a great points deal on an airline that I can transfer my points to.

Obviously there are some concerns: 

• What if I want to fly an airline that doesn't show up in BofA's travel portal? 
• What do they actually count as Travel and Dining? Will those categories apply abroad? So far so good on this – NYC and Sydney stuff all coding as expected
• What if their IT is crappy like the Expedia backend that Amex uses? (BofA doesn't use Expedia, they use BAKKT.) Just did my first booking and it was seamless – 10/10.
• What if I can find a fare on Google Flights that just isn't showing up in their portal for some reason? 
• Here's one I didn't anticipate: what if BofA likes to side with merchants rather than customers during a chargeback situation? Yeah, I rarely do a chargeback but Amex has always taken my side. I thought I had clear-cut case with BofA and they sided with the merchant. NO. 

Well, I'm about to find all of that out. I'll post an update (adding updates in red to this post) with any lessons I've learned. 

• One thing I didn't count on is how incredibly convenient it is to have ALL of our household spending on one single card! Such a huge timesaver versus looking at 6 different cards for a transaction!

<Queue the British Bakeoff music> That means I also have the difficult decision of deciding which cards to get rid of. 

• Kelly's Amex Gold for sure getting the chop
• Kelly's Amex Business Platinum: chop
• My United business card getting the chop once I milk all of those newly updated benefits from it.
• Maybe get rid of Kelly's Sapphire Reserve and add him as an AU on my account?
• Maybe get rid of the Spark 2% cash back card?

Shantay, you stay:

• Apple Card (stacks with Kelly's employee discount)
• BILT earns me 24,000 transferrable points a year on my HOA dues. As long as it has no annual fee, it can stay.
• My Amex Plat (and Kelly and Tim's Plat AUs) if for nothing else than the lounges and a holder for all of my Amex points.
• My Amex Business card (for now), because I'll probably spend down the Amex points by doing points-for-cash fare purchases and I want that 35% rebate. UGH! They're nerfing this benefit HARD!
• Kelly's United Quest card because he really likes being Star Alliance Gold (and it can accrue PQPs) but hates doing mileage runs 

Wish me luck!

The upshot here is that I'll definitely look at downgrading to a cheaper annual fee version of this BofA card in a year, after spending the bulk of the points at the elevated 1.2¢ rate.

***

¹ Someone pointed out to me that while I will earn airline points, I need to subtract from this math the 5 Amex points per dollar I would have earned if I'd paid for the ticket with my Platinum card… For example, for a United ticket I'll earn 8 United points per dollar while forgoing 5 Amex ones, so it's more like 3 points.