Another Card In My Wallet in a Heraclitean World

by Robert McGarvey

I couldn’t resist the offer. The mailer popped in my box – genuine US mail – and the headline blared Earn 40k 65K Bonus Miles.

The sender was Delta where, despite me having no memory of having have ever paid for a flight on it, I have cashed in miles and points (via Amex) to get three roundtrips to Europe in the past 10 years.

The 65K miles had my attention. I had scorned prior 40k mile offers but at 65k it got a second look from me. Probably I could cash that in for two roundtrips to NYC from Phoenix.

This is an Amex card with a $99 annual fee, free in the first year. The only requirement for collecting the mileage bonus is spending $2000 in the first six months.

The card has the usual airline card perks – free first checked bag, priority boarding and an intriguing wrinkle where award flights are discounted 15%.

What about my cashback strategy? It remains in play but as I’ve said I don’t see it generating more than $2000 or $3000 for me this year and while that is a pleasant spiff, it’s not ample for me to change my life course. Getting more cashback would necessitate me putting a lot more time into this than I am prepared to do.

But the 65k miles in effect just fell into my lap. The value of the 65k points is around $900, per The Points Guy’s calculation. It may even be higher with that 15% discount on awards tickets.

It will be effortless to get the bonus. I’ll probably spend the $2000 on groceries and, yeah, I sacrifice 3% back on a Venmo card – but the Gold Card offers 2% back (in miles) on groceries so that’s, what, a $20 loss. No big deal.

I also pat myself on the back for resisting the Alaska Air current 50k miles account opening bonus, but that’s mainly because Alaska doesn’t go a lot of places I want to go to.

Will I keep the Delta Gold card after the first year? Hard to say but probably. If I dump any card in my wallet it’s likely to be the Southwest card which I got for a 50k miles signing bonus that I already know what I’m spending it on.

But there is and likely will continue to be lots of motion in my credit card inventory. I’ll tell you this: after years of having a static deck of credit cards, this year there has been more shifting and additions to my cards than I can recall before in this century. But there’s a reason: it just is getting harder to intelligently play the credit card rewards and airline mileage rewards games and win. The rules keep changing, the “prices” keep going up, and the only way I see to play this is to keep in motion myself. The era of having one mainstay card – Amex Plat for me – that was used everywhere that accepted Amex simply are over.

Heraclitus called it right: The only constant in life is change.