Farewell for now, CSR

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.

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Why not?

Time to pay up to Chase

Yesterday I got charged the annual fee for my Chase Sapphire Reserve credit card, a quite hefty sum of $450 dollars. My Asian mother would never approve of paying a yearly fee for a card, much less one in the hundreds. Indeed, on the surface I do not fit the salary profile of a person who carries credit cards with high annual fee, but the beauty of Chase Sapphire Reserve is that it literally (?) pays for itself.

It’s just one of those things that catches you off guard when it shows up on your bank statements, like the annual membership for Amazon Prime. Just yesterday I wrote about being austere through the rest of 2019, and this charge was certainly a sudden shock. Thankfully, unlike Amazon Prime which has hiked its rates many times (I can remember when Prime membership was only $70 dollars), at least the Sapphire Reserve card has stayed consistently at $450 per year since inception. I’m very glad Chase did not follow the footsteps of American Express, who raised the fee of their premium Platinum card to $550.

It’ll be my fourth year with the Sapphire Reserve card, and as long as I remain traveling on a consistent basis, I completely make the annual fee back through points accrued. The $300 travel credit is still there, and that not only can reimburse for obvious stuff like airfare and hotel, but Uber rides and public transportation also count. Via rudimentary math, that cuts the net annual fee down to a manageable $150, which will get canceled out once I spend a cumulative $4,000 on travel and restaurants next year (a very easy target for me to hit.)

I reckon there will come a time when I will divorce from the Sapphire Reserve card and switch over to a pure cash-back variety (hello, Capital One!) I don’t suppose I’ll keep on traveling as I have done for the past few years, and at that juncture there won’t be enough appropriate spending to offset the annual fee. In the meantime I think Chase would be smart to split up the annual charge into monthly payments, because us millennials love that sort of accounting: my phone only costs me $40 dollars a month!

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The new Salesforce Tower appears quite literally everywhere you go in the city.

I got declined for the Apple Card!?

I obviously don’t need yet another credit card. I happily bank with Chase - except for their savings products which pay absolutely peanuts in interest rate, and currently have their line of credit cards with excellent rewards. I mean, 5% back on Amazon with the Amazon Prime Card! How on earth is Chase making money from me - someone who always pay the full amount on time - on that particular card is beyond me.

But I am a huge fanboy of Apple products, (typing this on my brand new 15-inch Macbook Pro, and getting distracted in the process by twitter on the iPhone X next to it) so when Apple announced a credit card product of their very own - replete with the usual Apple design flare - I was completely onboard. In a landscape full of metal-backed cards, Apple went and produced the Apple Card out of titanium, which sounds awesome. Of course, the entire thing is colored in white.

As far as perks and rewards go, the Apple Card is wholly inadequate. Zero sign-up bonus to speak of, and you only get the industry-typical 3% back when you shop with Apple. Using the actual physical card only nets 1% cash back, which is very pedestrian.

A credit card made out of titanium, though!

So like a good Apple shill, I applied for the Apple Card as soon as the sign-up was available to the general public (I was not amongst the lucky few to get an early invite). To my utter surprise: I got declined! I guess even a near 800 credit score means nothing these days. To Apple’s - and Goldman Sach’s - credit, they do send you an email explaining the rejection, and for me it was because my debt to income ratio was too high(?)

At first I thought this can’t be possible: the only solid chunk of debt I have is the car note on the GT3, and that only amounts to around $750 a month; I comfortably make more than that. Then I realized it was because the loan for the GT3 is uncollateralized; Goldman is treating it as simply a huge lump of debt, something of an albatross that needs to be paid off as soon as possible. Obviously, in reality that’s not structurally true at all.

This probably means it’s not only the Apple Card: I likely won’t be able to apply for any other credit card until the GT3 is entirely paid off. Which is just as well, because like I said, I don’t need any more credit cards.

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Highway rest stops in the U.S. are solidly disappointing compared to those in Asia. Where’s the restaurants? Where’s the amenities?

How long you've had a credit card matters

One of my major New Year's resolutions this year was to implement austerity. The past few years I’ve been highly cavalier with my money, mostly towards doing an immense amount of traveling. I don’t regret any of it as it’s been some of the best times in my life, but what with me turning 30 I figured time was right to store up some cash for headier times.

Midway through the year however I decided I was going to purchase a Porsche 911 in the near future, so austerity could not have come at a more perfect time. Slavishly save money just to then squander it all? That’s just how life works. To paraphrase Ludacris’ character in the Fast and Furious franchise: what’s the good of making money if you don’t spend any of it?

Nevertheless I’m still keeping to my resolution, and it’s been going great. With less expenditure I’ve whittled down the number of credits cards I use to only a few (the Chase line of Freedom and Sapphire cards are awesome). With no activity on the spare cards, I was content to let the credit card company close on them, thinking that it won’t do much damage to my credit score.

Well I was wrong. A few weeks ago I did my periodic routine check of my score on Credit Karma, and a particular item serendipitously caught my eye: the age of credit history. Turns out the length of time a credit card is open bears a positive attribution to the credit score, with it signifying trustworthiness and whatnot. Unfortunately for me, the cards I haven’t been using are the one’s I’ve had the longest.

I can’t let those cards expire now and risk damaging my credit score, not with the need to get financing for the Porsche next year. So in the past few weeks I’ve put tiny purchases on each formerly disused card to restart the closure clock, so to speak. My score is currently in the low 800s, and I aim to keep it that way.

Pro tip: don’t let your old credit cards expire unless you’ve got an equally old credit card you plan to keep using, because it will impact your credit score greatly.

The lonely nights.

Currency exchange

In preparation for the Taiwan trip next week, I went to the Mechanics Bank downtown today to exchange for some Taiwan dollars. It's always good to have some cash on hand to at least get from the airport to the hotel. 

In doing so I was reminded of the last time I visited the same bank this past May: to buy some Korean currency. Both times I purchased around $200 worth of local money. 

On the Korea trip, I could have easily not used any of the cash I exchanged: the country is fabulously accepting of credit cards. From the airport bus kiosk down to the elder ladies peddling food in front of the baseball stadium, I was amazed at how often i can use card to pay. For a person living in the States used to seeing 'cash only' signs in many storefronts, it's a pleasure and convenience I wish America would adopt. 

Unfortunately, Taiwan isn't nearly as friendly to credit cards as Korea, at least from my previous experience two years ago. Perhaps it'll be different this time: on the last trip we had to take a one-hour bus ride from the airport to get into Taipei, now there's a dedicated subway line taking half the time. 

I for one cannot wait for a true cash-less society, with my wallet's contents all residing in the smartphone. To pay for anything, all I have to do is hover my phone over an NFC device. Apple Pay on the iPhone is getting there, but there still exist a huge dearth of places that accept it. I will not be surprised if Korea is the first country to go truly/completely mobile wallet.

Wait, would that mean I'll have to switch to a Samsung phone and get Samsung pay?