The hefty $550 annual fee on my Chase Sapphire Reserve card comes due this month, so of course I had to make the call to downgrade to the regular Sapphire Preferred card, with a far more manageable $95 yearly fee. In these times of COVID that’s still showing no signs of abatement anytime soon, there is absolutely zero chance for me to do enough traveling in the next calendar year to justify the high cost of the Reserve card.
Remember back a few years ago when the card was all the rage? A premium travel card with a 100,000 bonus points after you spend $4,000 within the first three months of sign-up (I spent a majority of it on books, believe it or not). I use the bonus points to score first-class seating on the return leg of the trip to South Korea, a thing I wouldn’t have otherwise ever pay for. The Reserve card also paid the application fee for Global Entry, allowing me to breeze pass through TSA heading out, and immigration coming back in like a special VIP.
The then $450 annual fee was quite a lot for someone used to paying nothing fo credit cards, but in combination with the $300 travel credit, the affective fee was only $150. Chase have since raised the fee by a hundred dollars, which in a normal year I still would have been able to “break-even” with the amount of travel I typically do. As we are well aware, the global pandemic effectively shutdown all of our plans to get on an airplane, so the economical move is to downgrade to a lesser tier card and wait until the world returns to normal to upgrade back to the Reserve.
Another sad reminder of what is the wildest and strangest year. I’m optimistic though; soon as big Pharma figures out a proper vaccine, I’ll be back in the skies off somewhere alongside the rest of you.
Why not?