When I frequently recommend a reward credit card to friends and family, I get the question right away: “But is that one of the annual fees?”
It is true that many reward cards are worth wearing annual fees. But in my opinion it is usually a very small investment and provides value over the years.
Take my Chase Sapphire Preferred® card (see Fees and Fees) for example. This card has an annual fee of (very modest) of $95 and I can’t see it being able to get rid of it.
This is why.
Earn points with daily spending
Sapphire Preferred has several solid returns, including:
- 5 points per dollar spent on a trip booked with Chase Travel
- 5 points per dollar spent on Lyft Rides (until September 30, 2027)
- 3 points per dollar spent on meals
- 3 points per dollar spent on selected streaming services
- 3 points per dollar spent on online grocery purchases (excluding Target, Walmart and wholesale clubs)
- 2 points spent on all trips not booked on Chay Travel
- 1 point per dollar spent on everything else
Use this card to cover all household and father’s online groceries, meals and streaming services costs. This earned approximately 3,600 Chase Ultimate Rewards points per month throughout most of 2024.
Related: 7 Chase Sapphire Likes Benefits You may not know
Does the value offset the annual fee?
For now, I’ll put aside the fact that you can get what you currently have After spending $5,000 on a purchase in the first three months of opening an account, the ultimate reward point of 100,000 is the highest welcome offer on this card and perhaps one of the best card offers ever.
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Beyond the welcome offer, focus on the value of this card.
First, it comes with benefits such as $50 per year credit for hotels booked with Chase Travel, as well as a range of travel protections that allow you to save hundreds of dollars each year by not having to pay car rental insurance or travel cancellation insurance. These automatically neutralize the annual fees for those who travel several times a year.
But beyond these benefits, the points I earned using this card for my daily spending in 2024 covered over $2,000 hotel stays.
Related: Is Chase Sapphire worth the annual fee? I say yes
Over a dozen free nights worth more than $2,000
That may be the case in the Hyatt world He was the most valuable transfer partner in the ultimate rewards program and was the perfect place to move my points.
It was last year that my wife and I covered our local Hyatt Regency rooms once a month, using these points in a double effort to welcome our first child, stay sane as first grade parents, and maintain my elite status in the Hyatt world in a light travel year.
We then alternated what we took the night out of our parent duties and began to enjoy a quiet night in the hotel. That’s what I call a value you can’t even multiply the price.
Hyatt Regency Ciro Chester New York has a Category 1 Hyatt property (and is very nice). Standard rooms average around $175 or 5,000 points per night, but by checking out the world of Hyatt’s awards charts and cherry picking off-peak nights, I was able to earn most of my stay for just 3,500 points per night.
By the end of the year, we had stayed at that hotel over 12 nights in points, but in reality, all of these redemptions were earned in real time every month, as we used sapphire, which is preferred for our daily spending category.
The ultimate reward points are worth about 2.05 cents on average, according to an rating in April 2025, and are one of the most valuable points you can earn. But by transferring them to the World at Hyatt and using them like this, I got about 250% more value from them. If you’re paying cash for these stays, it costs around $2,100.
This is a huge chunk of value to make money simply by using the right cards in your normal spending.
Related: 23 Best Hyatt Hotels in the World
Conclusion
For those looking to capitalize on the revenue potential of this card, we are fortunate enough to be still there. A 100,000 points welcome offer on Sapphire is recommended for a limited time only.
Don’t forget that these 100,000 bonus points alone are worth $2,050 for each of our ratings. This doesn’t include the other $2,000 or more value we demonstrated here, just using the card for a year.
Do I have to pay that annual fee to use this card? Certainly, but does that actually cost me or Save money My money? Mathematics is easy as there is all the value you can get from this card.
Check out our full Chase Sapphire review for more information.
Application Now: Chase Sapphire is desirable
