Delta SkyMiles Gold Card: To Keep or Cut Up

By Robert McGarvey

When I signed up for the Delta SkyMiles Gold card, mainly to get the welcome bonus cache of miles, the fee was $99. Now it’s been bumped up to $150.  Do I keep it or cut it up?

Know that in the past year or so I’ve cut up a United Explorer card and a Barclays AA card.  I live in Phoenix where the United presence is slender so it went. Delta doesn’t have many more flights but it does have a swank new Phoenix terminal and club and it also is an airline with a real relationship with Amex and its Platinum card (club access, yes, that will be capped in 2025 but it’s better than the bupkis at United).

As for American, I’d gotten a  Southwest card for the welcome bonus and it flies to pretty much all the useful AA domestic locations and I saw no point in carrying both cards. So AA went through the shredder.

Is it now the turn of the Delta card?

I’ve already used the welcome bonus – it plus existing miles bought two coach tickets to Madrid in the summer and that wiped out my stash of around 300,000 miles.  Pricey? You bet. But in the era of devalued air miles, if you have ‘em, burn ‘em.

As for my verdict on the pricier Delta SkyMiles Gold, I just transferred it from a tertiary wallet into the wallet I carry every day.  I have decided to keep it.

Amex raised the fee but also threw in a new perk: Spend $10,000 in the calendar year and get a $200 Delta credit. That’s up from $100, which hadn’t been enough to entice me but the $200 does.

The $10,000 spend also earns 10,000 SkyMiles, worth around $120 at a valuation of 1.2 cents per mile. Yes, I could put the spend on Amex Plat and get putatively richer miles…but, honestly, in my redemptions I am probably only getting around 1.2 cents per mile anyway.  Sure, I could play the redemption game more cleverly but I know me and my appetite for that kind of gaming.  

Other perks with the Delta card include a free bag check, priority boarding in the main cabin, and a 15% discount on awards travel. There’s also a $100 credit on a hotel stay booked through Delta and paid in advance.  I especially value the 15% discount awards – which saved me upwards of 40,000 miles on my Madrid tickets.

Perks I won’t use include a discount on inflight purchases and secondary insurance on rental cars. I don’t recall the last time I did either.

Aren’t these calculations tedious? They are. But they have emerged as essential in today’s credit card world.  Used to be, most of us could get by using a few mainstay cards for just about all purchases but nowadays as we pursue welcome bonuses, cashback, and in my case a Bitcoin reward (via a Venmo card and, thank you for asking, I’m up 73.5% on my holdings), cards are in a state of continuous churn.

As cards approach their renewal data, instead of just letting them renew, I find myself doing a quick and dirty cost benefit analysis. I also find myself weighing adding a new card with a rich welcome bonus instead of keeping a veteran card.

That means, in 2025, when the SkyMiles Gold card comes up for renewal, again I will do a fast calculation: keep it or cut it.  

That decision all comes down to how much value I have gotten from the card and timeframe is the past year and a forecast for the coming year.  What happened long ago no longer figures in the decision.

Does card shuffling hurt one’s credit score? I’ve seen a tiny dent, a loss of a few FICO points, mainly due to a loss of some credit capacity.  The two cards I recently cut had huge credit lines and no utilization.

But I don’t see any meaningful consequences of a loss of a couple points. Your mileage might vary.

It’s up to us to get the most value out of our credit cards.