The bonus categories for the Chase Freedom and Discover It cards have been announced. The bonus categories for the Chase Freedom are Gas and Streaming services. The set of streaming services includes Netflix, Spotify and Hulu. The Discover categories are Restaurants and PayPal.
The categories for both of these card are not very useful for me. All the streaming services I use, are already prepaid for the rest of the year. I’ve been buying gas on average once every 2 months and I despise PayPal.
The restaurant category would be useful if I didn’t have the American Express Gold or Citi Prestige. The AMEX gold gives me 4x Membership Rewards points at restaurants. Since I have the American Express Charles Schwab Platinum card, each MR point is worth 1.25 cents when cashed out. This effectively gives me 5% cash back at restaurants.
The Citi Prestige gives me 5x ThankYou Points at restaurants. With both ThankYou points and Membership reward points, I can get greater value from the fact that not only can I cash the points out but I can also transfer them to airline and hotel programs. Because of this I’ll be sticking with these two cards for my restaurant spend.
You can activate your 5% categories for Chase here.
You can activate your 5% categories for Discover here.
Will you be taking advantage of the Chase or Discover 5% categories?