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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

Even they have their limit. I remember banks going crazy with cash back for opening credit cards, and then 6 years ago, Chase released Sapphire Reserve which basically gave people $1,500 to $2,000 upfront, and then after that I feel the churning scene significantly died down since Chase ended up taking huge losses for that. My wife and I basically got $3k or $4k I think for taking a few minutes to fill out a credit card application.

I imagine all the other banks were not impressed, and ever since then, you can get a few hundred dollars here and there but nothing like the initial Sapphire Reserve promotion came out since.

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That is definitely still a thing. I get AMEX offers regularly equivalent to $1200 in rewards.

It is not the same as sapphire reserve and before times. Even the churning subreddit kind of died not long after. The Amex ones are rewards points, and you have to play a lot of games to get the value. Used to be really simple to get large basically cash or cash equivalent rewards.

> It is not the same as sapphire reserve and before times.

If I'm not wrong, cashing out Chase Ultimate Rewards points wasn't that lucrative until recently, when they introduced Pay Yourself Back — it was 1 cent per point before, and is much higher now for certain categories (groceries, restaurants) with Pay Yourself Back.

> The Amex ones are rewards points, and you have to play a lot of games to get the value.

For US residents, cashing out at 1.1 cents per point would be opening a Charles Schwab brokerage account and the linked Amex Platinum card, then "investing" the points. That doesn't sound too complicated.

(Speaking as a non-US resident playing the game myself: I do have extreme difficulty trying to get good cash value for my points, since Schwab refuses to open a brokerage account for me.)

Chase Ultimate Rewards got heavily nerfed since the Sapphire Reserve release. For the first couple years, you could get 1.5 cents per point for any travel (flight, car rental, hotel), and the price on the chase ultimate reward portal was the same you got via the actual airline or car rental or hotel website (i.e. the cheapest price.)

Then they made it so you had to use ultimate rewards via Expedia, and they bumped up all the prices, so effectively your UR points lost a ton of value. Searching the same flight on Expedia UR website was more expensive that directly going to the airline.

Then I stopped following because I had already canceled all my UR cards, but I assume they downgraded it even further because I heard they raised fees and substituted some benefits with door dash or lyft credits or something.

> For US residents, cashing out at 1.1 cents per point would be opening a Charles Schwab brokerage account and the linked Amex Platinum card, then "investing" the points. That doesn't sound too complicated.

I did not know this, but that seems okay. However, I have experience with AmEx being strict on people who constantly open cards for sign up bonuses.

Amex explicitly no longer offers me sign-up bonuses because I'm not a profitable customer for them.

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