The BEST Credit Card Strategy in 2025 *After Chase Trifecta Dies* | WLT Report

Kevin: Well, it’s official after 15 years as a Chase and JPMorgan trifecta and Sapphire user, which is basically what the JPM card is. It’s the Chase Sapphire Reserve card branded for JPMorgan clients. I am leaving Chase, and it has sent me down the credit card rabbit hole. In this video, while I’m still going to break down how good Chase is and what it’s good at, I’ll also break down why I’m pretty pissed off at Chase and why there are better options elsewhere for some of your banking needs.

But we’ll still have good things to say about that Sapphire card. I want to give you a breakdown of credit cards and exactly what to look for in them. Keep in mind, if you overcomplicate your life with credit cards, you’ll end up getting burned. That’s ultimately what credit card companies expect: that you’re going to confuse yourself with all the perks.

There is value in keeping things simple. I broke this down, and we’ll keep it simple here. First up, everyone needs a daily driver. This is going to be the card you use when you don’t know about the categories or you don’t care about them.

You’re at the payment terminal and thinking, “Dude, I don’t have time to go through this. I just need a good card right now.” The best card is going to be the one that gives you the highest cash back all the time. We don’t yet know about the Coinbase crypto card that’s coming this fall in terms of how much cash back you’re going to get based on how much you stake with them or hold in an account. They’re pitching it as a simple four percent, but we don’t yet have the details, so it’s too soon to say.

If you get invited to the Robinhood Gold card, this is probably hands down the simplest card you could ever have. Three percent back on everything. Robinhood is basically giving you all of their profit for making a card, and the goal obviously is to get more people to have the Robinhood Gold membership. If you don’t have Robinhood Gold and you can get that simple three percent back on everything, your life gets a little bit more complicated, but that could be okay.

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Your next daily driver would be something like a Citi Double Cash card, simple two percent back. Fidelity’s cash card gives you a simple two percent back. I’ve used the Citi Double Cash card for years and I’m a big fan of it. I don’t use it anymore today because we lost a lot of benefits on the card, which I’ll explain soon.

Wells Fargo’s Active Cash is another example. I personally use this one now. The Capital One Venture, if you travel a lot, which I do, also gives you two percent back on everything, and it simplifies your life. I also have the Apple Card, which is a great card.

The problem with the Apple Card is if you use the actual titanium card itself you only get one percent back, so you really want to use the Apple Card through Apple Pay; that’s how you get the two percent. That’s complicated, though. So I really prefer, if you have the Robinhood Gold card, just use that. Otherwise, use a two‑times card somewhere.

Most cards are going to default you to one percent or one and a half percent, and this is where you have to be very careful. For example, the American Express card that gives you six percent back on groceries, the Amex Blue, drops to one percent after you spend six thousand dollars on groceries, which is annoying because it has a ninety‑five dollar fee, which means you need to spend about three thousand one hundred dollars in groceries just to break even. Some of the higher cash rewards cards you have to be careful with, and if you don’t manage them right, they’re just not worth it. After your daily driver, it’s really important you have the best possible store card for the place that you regularly shop.

For me, I actually put little rust stickers on my credit cards because I like rust a lot. Here’s my blue card, or my green card. This is actually an Amex Platinum right here, and this is a Lowe’s card because we do a lot of shopping at Lowe’s for our business, our real estate start‑up. So you need to have a five percent off Lowe’s card if you shop at Lowe’s.

I just put the Target store card in my app. I never actually activate these cards, but we shop at Target all the time. You put the Target card in your app or you put the Amazon card in your app and then you always get that five percent off over there. It’s simple.

You should always have that if you spend money at Amazon or Target or Lowe’s. They’re free cards and they’re great options. Now, the third thing to consider is banking. I’m a big fan of QuickBooks, and it’s just a quick shout out on banking.

If you ever use QuickBooks for accounting, you could literally create a QuickBooks bank account right now. It basically automatically reconciles because your QuickBooks is your bank account now. It’s amazing and it’s great for your regular transactions, and it cuts down on your accounting and makes your CPA’s life easier, which ultimately saves you money. So I think that’s a big thing.

Or consider something like Mercury — way easier, by the way, to use over JPMorgan or Chase because their technology is not old and antiquated. It’s very easy for bill pay and wires, and the app is mega convenient. Okay, great. Now you have to get into the family of credit cards.

Which family do you want to use? You really have three main families you could use here: Capital One, Chase — I’ll have a lot to say about Chase — and Amex. Those are your three big categories that you’re going to choose from, and you basically have to pick one family. I just recently left that JPM family, and for many different reasons, but I personally think the bank has lost its edge, and there are way better opportunities elsewhere.

I’m a little biased because I think JPMorgan is a terrible bank for, frankly, real estate investors because they really want you to invest your business’s money with their wealth managers, and they don’t give great loan products to their real estate customers. They’re limited by the Dodd‑Frank Act in terms of what they can do with even Fannie and Freddie loans. So they’re generally not a competitive lending bank, and I want to set up my real estate start‑up for when rates come down to be with a really competitive lending bank, and I just don’t think that’s JPM. So that’s my personal bias.

This sent me down the rabbit hole of what family of cards to get. After I went down the rabbit hole, I personally chose the Capital One Venture X card. I’ll explain why as a result. This is not sponsored.

I’m making this video because I did the hours of research. I chose the Capital One card. I still have the approval sheets they give you with the card and the activation instructions on my desk right here — here’s your new Venture X card. In fact, because I just went through all this last night, I still have the FedEx envelope that it came in, so it’s new and I’m excited about it.

Anyway, here’s the thing. The Capital One card — any of these families of cards, whether Capital One, Chase, or Amex — requires you to travel to make these cards make sense. Otherwise, just use your daily driver. If you travel, these cards are great.

Alchemist: I just wanted to say thanks for everything, you saved my life.

Kevin: Thank you for that shout‑out and five dollars, I appreciate that. But anyway, with Capital One you have to travel for these cards. There’s no question that if you’re going to go into one of these families of cards and you’re going to look at credit card fees, you must travel. If you don’t travel, this isn’t worth it.

Just stop the video, use a daily driver and don’t keep going. Now, if you travel, you want to use the portal for Capital One. It’s actually a really good portal. Just this week I booked a flight for Lauren because I spent four million points that I have with Chase, because I’m going to spend these points.

I’ve been collecting them for fifteen years. I booked a trip to Japan. The Chase travel portal is excellent. The people were very nice.

I actually had to change one of the dates, and they helped me cancel and rebook it all. They were really nice. The Chase Travel people made me really, really happy about that. I think it’s wonderful.

Now, what I’d like to make clear is that with travel portals you usually have to be careful because when you use them you want to compare to market rates and make sure you’re actually getting a fair market rate. You don’t want to be in a place where all of a sudden they’re charging you more through their travel portal. I have not found that to be true. In fact, I found when I was booking a trip through the app, which was pretty smooth and easy to do, they actually gave me advice in terms of when to book directly through the app, which was great.

This is kind of what it looks like — there’s a Tokyo trip coming up in seven days. When we went to search for the flight on Monday, it said, “Wait, don’t buy yet,” and the flights were maybe a total of six thousand dollars or whatever it was. Yesterday night it was forty‑five hundred dollars for the total and it said, “Oh, buy this — this is a good price.” That was built into the portal.

Then I compared to United to make sure I was getting a fair price, and it was the same. So I’m like, okay, as long as there’s no premium on the portals, I’m good with it. So you get ten percent back on redemptions through the travel portal if you book hotels and rental cars since they’re worth one cent each. It’s basically ten percent back on hotels and rental cars, five percent back on flights and vacation rentals, and two percent back on everything else.

That’s why I see this as like a daily driver, because you get two percent back on everything else if you redeem it through the travel portal, which I will anyway. It’s not a cash back card; it could actually be your travel card and your daily driver, which makes your life really simple. I’ll tell you, simplicity is critical. I actually used to in the Chase Freedom days print out labels with a label maker and stick them to the back of the card to say which quarter had which benefit for five percent.

Now I just put a label maker sticker on the back of the cards. I give it to Laura, my wife, and I’m like, “Hey, this is where we’re going to use this card. Use this for everything or whatever,” and she can see the benefits. It makes it nice and easy for her. That’s why I think it could be a travel card or a daily driver as well.

There’s a three hundred dollar annual travel credit. This is why I say you have to travel because it has a three hundred ninety‑five dollar fee. So you pay three hundred ninety‑five dollars. I just bought tickets and I immediately got three hundred dollars back, so now the card cost me ninety‑five dollars.

Every year when you renew the card, you get a hundred dollars, and in your first year you can also get a new card bonus. So basically the card doesn’t really cost you anything if you travel. The other cool thing that’s really important to me is I get primary rental car coverage. That’s very important to me.

Okay, that’s the Capital One card. I think the best pairing here is the Robinhood card plus the Capital One Venture X card. Great pairing. If you don’t have the Robinhood card, you could just use the Venture X card.

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If you want to get special, pair it with the Saver card because you get three percent back at places like Disney, Six Flags, movies, sporting events, bowling; three percent back at dining; three percent back at grocery stores except for Walmart and Target. So, not bad. Nice pairing if you want a little bit more complexity. It does mess up the whole daily driver idea a little bit, but it does get you a little closer to that Robinhood card for some of these other things that you’re spending money on generally.

All right, Chase Preferred. Basically, the Chase Preferred card just got nerfed along with the whole trifecta benefit because they got rid of the Chase Travel one‑point‑five‑times bonus if you have the Reserve card or the one‑point‑twenty‑five‑times bonus if you transfer your points to the Preferred card. This makes it not make sense to care about the Preferred anymore. I kind of think they killed the trifecta because what they did is they raised the fee for the Reserve card and they did increase the benefits.

Now, the Reserve card you could basically get for free. The way you do it is you make sure you use it for dining and travel; it’s seven ninety‑five. If you do, you’re going to take off three hundred dollars for dining, three hundred for your annual travel credit, and make sure you use it for DoorDash. As long as you order DoorDash once a month, you get twenty‑five dollars per month, which works out to three hundred dollars a year.

The card basically can cost you as much as negative two hundred twenty‑five dollars, offsetting that DoorDash monthly benefit and that annual membership. As much as I don’t have great things to say about Chase — I think they’re an antiquated bank, they don’t do great for their real estate customers and they really try to shield their wealth management products, which I don’t really believe in — this card still is good even though you have a seven hundred ninety‑five dollar fee. I’ve been a Chase Sapphire member for about fifteen years, so I can’t really say it’s bad. I’ve been there for fifteen years and if I had to choose between these two, it could be close.

These are good benefits, but you have to make sure it’s one or the other. You don’t want to use Capital One Venture X and Chase. You want to pick; you don’t want to mix and match these or Amex Platinum. That’s your third family.

Just use it always for your dining, your travel, your DoorDash, and you’re good. You should not book directly. You only get four times on the rewards — so four percent back — if you book directly for hotels and flights. Don’t do that.

Use the eight‑times Chase Travel. This is actually very similar to the Capital One Venture X in that with the Venture X you’re getting ten percent on hotels and rental cars, five percent on flights and vacation rentals, and here you’re getting a flat eight percent if you book through the portal. Why would you book directly if you could get twice as many points on the travel app? The Chase travel app, I personally have found to match market pricing as well.

So again, as much as I’d love to bag on Chase, this is actually good. Their travel platform is good. Their customer service is good. The people are very helpful and nice there.

I have to give them credit where credit is due. They also potentially have a points boost, but there’s an asterisk here because it’s only on certain flights and hotels, and I don’t like assuming that I’m going to get the asterisk. The Chase Business Ink used to boost up from one and a half percent cash back to two and a quarter percent with the unlimited travel, which they now call Chase Travel, but it’s not really worth it anymore since you don’t get the one‑point‑five‑times boost. This is why I say the Ink and the Freedom categories kind of just died.

Sapphire alone is partnered with it because you get the primary rental car benefit in my opinion. You take your daily driver, which could be the Robinhood three percent or another two percent card, partner it with your Chase Sapphire. That’s it. That’s your family number two.

So again, family number one: you go Capital One and Robinhood card, Capital One Venture X solo, or maybe you do the Saver card. If you’re in the Chase family, you do the Chase Sapphire Reserve card plus your daily driver, but some of the whole trifecta benefits have somewhat died. Okay, cool. Then we get to Amex.

You also have to travel. The fees are going to go up and the benefits are going to change toward the end of 2025, so we’re not sure if some of these benefits are going to stay the same. I’ll talk lounges in just a moment. I don’t think these benefits are really going to evolve.

Well, let me rephrase that: these benefits could change a lot toward the end of the year. I don’t know in what direction they’re going to evolve, so some of this on Amex might be dated soon. But understand this: if you buy flights or hotels through their portal or directly, you get five points. Each point is basically worth one cent.

It’s basically the same as Capital One. The Sapphire is better though because you get eight times for flights versus five times, and at Capital One you get ten times on hotels and eight times on the Sapphire. So, in my opinion, the Capital One or the Sapphire beats the Amex Platinum. I think that’s why they’re going to reboot their Amex program, because Sapphire just lit the Amex benefits on fire.

Amex is going to have to play catch‑up here, and we’ll do a new video at that time. If you do have the Platinum Business card, you do get the thirty‑five percent redemption bonus. This gets complicated; you’re now paying two annual fees, and you have two different cards to get redemptions on. If you play it correctly, it could work out to six‑point‑seven‑five on flights and hotels.

Again, I’d rather have the Sapphire eight times or the Capital One fifteen to ten times. The card can also get close to free because if you look at it, you could get two hundred dollars in annual statement credits for airlines, two hundred dollars toward hotels, two hundred dollars toward Uber — that’s six hundred dollars off already. Thirteen dollars a month for Walmart Plus basically pays for the card. Again, if you’re in one of the individual families, there’s a way to make the card pay for itself.

Yes, you get some random benefits as you do with the JPM card, like Lyft for Apple TV or Dunkin’ Donuts for the Amex card. But some of these are limited time only, so they change all the time and they’re complicated. Remember, that’s the goal of these credit card companies — to make it complicated for you because they want you to sign up for the card assuming you’re always going to use all the benefits. But then you forget which category they’re on and you end up paying all these credit card fees and not redeeming everything.

So those are the three buckets to go for. If you do pair the Amex, obviously pair it with a daily driver for the Platinum card — great. I’m not convinced that the Blue or Gold cards are worth it. Some people say you could partner the Gold card at a three‑hundred to three‑hundred‑twenty‑five dollar annual fee for four times groceries, but you have to offset twenty‑five dollars of extra fees after the annual dining credit.

That means using your Gold card sometimes for dining and the Reserve or the Platinum card other times for dining. A little complicated, not my favorite way to create these complexities. Even if you just solely use the Gold card for dining, which you could do, you still have to offset those other twenty‑five dollars in fees at that higher yield amount for the Gold card. My take here: I do think Amex is going to catch up with better benefits over time, especially now that Sapphire is really strengthening their competition against some of these other cards.

So that’s my take. Either you take a daily driver and combine it with your Capital One Venture X, or a daily driver plus the Sapphire, or a daily driver plus the Platinum. You have to pick a family. That’s my credit card update.

A lot of people have been asking for this. Again, there are a ton of great credit cards out there and there’s by no means a way to say here that I’ve comprehensively covered everything. The goal here is just to give you a bottom line of what I found. Now, some people ask me, “What about the lounges or whatever?”

I’ve done all of them — legitimately been through all of these before. I’ll just hold up some of these cards here. These are old cards that I have: Platinum card, American Airlines Advantage card, United card, Marriott Bonvoy card. I’ve gone through all of this.

The Bonvoy card is not very desirable anymore because you get around six percent directly with hotels for Bonvoy. But I don’t want to be stuck in an ecosystem. I want to buy any hotel. What if I want Hyatt?

I could get ten percent back with the Capital One card. So why would I do six percent on Marriott and be stuck if I could do ten percent through the portal at Capital One and have any company I want? So that’s why I’m out of Bonvoy. Oh, that’s so funny.

I have an example here because I always do this. You can see how it’s faded — I’ll just cover up some of the credit card numbers here. On the back, you can see how I did my little stickies. I always put the little stickies on to remember what the cards are because it’s so hard to keep it all straight.

American Airlines, I’ve had the Delta cards, all of these. The problem is you get married to that airline, and if one time you take a slightly higher fee because you want to be married to your airline, all of the benefits go out the window because you just wasted more money. My old Chase Freedom card is right here, Freedom Unlimited. I’ve got a whole lot of cards, and there’s a benefit to simplicity.

What I encourage you to do is get the stickies for your credit cards on Etsy or something like that and then customize your cards with a little sticker. That’s how I did the red card, blue card, and green card for rust, which I think are really cool. They’re just little Etsy stickers. As far as lounges, I personally find that this has been my experience with airport lounges.

Airport lounges are really cool when they’re not full or mega crowded. Those two things are different. Sometimes you will go to the airport and they will literally shut down the lounge because they’re at capacity because everybody has one now. Everybody has lounge access now.

They’re not really that exclusive anymore. They’re usually overcrowded or they’re at capacity, which sucks. Some of them offer free drinks, which is great. But if you’re rushing to the airport to be early to sit in a lounge, if you even get in, you have to ask yourself if it would be better to just go to a restaurant and sit with your family in a booth and get waited on.

My experience with the food that you get at the lounges — you’re hoping it’s better than buffet food. The Amex Centurion lounges have by far, in my experience, been the best. I’m not the biggest fan of some of the airline ones. The United lounges were probably the next nicest.

Amex Centurion probably had the best food, but the problem is they have so few of them, mostly just at the international airports, and it doesn’t necessarily align with where your terminal is. So I generally don’t factor in lounge benefits to credit cards because I’m just going to look at my daily driver. If I happen to be by a lounge and I happen to have extra time to kill, cool. But beyond that, I want to know that on a daily basis I’m reaching for the card that’s going to give me the most rewards.

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For me, I’ve got the Capital One Venture X card — I think that’s great for travel. It gives me my two times. I don’t yet have the Saver card — I’m going to consider the Saver card for those three percent categories. If I had the Robinhood three percent though, I would just do Robinhood three percent, Capital One Venture X, or Robinhood and the Sapphire.

That’s where my bottom line is on these. Platinum’s got some work to do to catch up.