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As part of my credit card churn last month, I picked up a new Chase Freedom card. The Freedom is a great card to have, and one of the reasons is that it’s a no-fee card that still earns valuable Ultimate Rewards. Also, if you have a premium Chase card (such as the Sapphire or the Chase Ink card) that you want to cancel, you can transfer it down into a Freedom (and keep your Ultimate Rewards points)
If you just have say, a Sapphire card, and you cancel it, then your Ultimate Rewards points are just gone! Obviously that’s not what we want to happen, so downgrading to a Freedom is an option. Now one disadvantage of not having a premium Chase card is that you can’t transfer your points to Chase’s partners (like United, Southwest and others).
Another downside is if you already HAVE a Freedom card (because you downgraded from an Ink or Sapphire) is that you’re not eligible for a signup bonus. And with the bonus at a relatively high point (20,000 Ultimate Rewards points instead of 10,000), I decided to add it to my latest churn.
All of that is just a long-winded way of saying that now I have a Freedom card 😀
Quarterly 5% categories
The other nice part of the Freedom card is that they have quarterly bonuses, where each quarter, you earn 5% back in a select number of categories. This quarter is 5% on Restaurants and at Lowe’s.
As you can see, you have to activate the bonus by 6/14 (i.e. tomorrow!) and then you have until the end of June to earn your bonus (you get 5% on the first $1500 in spending). I actually probably won’t take much advantage of this since I don’t have a ton of time but we shall see.
One option might be that Lowe’s has a lot of gift cards to other merchants, and there may be some there that I’ll need (or can transfer into other things that I need).
I realize that I’m a little late to the game here since the 2nd quarter is almost over, but if for some reason you’ve already got a Freedom card and haven’t activated your bonus for this quarter, hurry and do it! The link to activate your Chase Freedom 5% is right here!
Any tips for maximizing the 5% bonus?
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Dan Miller travels with his wife and 6 (SIX!) children. He loves to help families travel for free / cheap, especially larger families. If you are looking for help, drop him an email at 
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