10 UNDERRATED Credit Card Benefits You NEED to Know About

Hey credit warriors, welcome to the show. And on this channel, we talk a lot about high-level credit card benefits, things such as the Amex Centurion Lounge or collecting points and miles to stay in five-star hotels and fly business class. Now it's these things that make the headlines, but there are so many credit card benefits that are actually really useful and people don't talk about that often. So in this video, I am going to go through a load of these benefits and many of them I have personally used and have found super useful. So let's get started. Number one, collision damage waiver. This is basically insurance for rental cars and it means that as long as you pay for your rental with the credit card that offers the collision damage waiver or CDW, you can decline the rental company's insurance that they always try to sell you and costs quite a lot extra. But not all collision damage waiver is equal. There is primary and secondary insurance and you want primary. And this means that you do not have to claim on whatever insurance you have first. For example, if you rented a car in the United States and then you crashed that car and your CDW was secondary, you'd have to first claim on your own car insurance if you have a car and you're insured on it and your own car insurance will often cover rental cars. You'd have to claim on your own insurance first and then only what your own insurance didn't cover your CDW would pick up the bill for. But letting your car insurance company know that you had an accident will normally raise your monthly payments. So you don't want to do that. And thus, I always recommend primary CDW cards like the Chase Inc. business cards or the Chase Sapphire cards offer primary CDW, for example. And you should check your own card that you're thinking of using for your car rental just to make sure that it is primary. I'll also put links to the Chase Sapphire and Chase Inc. cards below if you're interested in checking those out. Number two, car rental status. This one is a real help. Personally, I normally rent cars from National and the Amex Platinum and also the Chase Sapphire Reserve both give national executive status. This means that you can skip the line and take any car you like from the executive area. And if you get to the airport at like midnight and there's no choice, like one time I got to Las Vegas at midnight and there was literally a choice. I could have had a pickup truck or a minivan. OK, I'm not taking either of those. And so what I did was I just said to the lady, hey, look, I'm executive status. Can't you give me something from the luxury area? And then she was like, sure. And she gave me a choice between a Cadillac and an Audi Q5. And that was only because I had executive status. Also with the Amex Platinum, since the card gives you Hilton Gold status, you should actually be able to match to national executive elite because National will match Hilton Gold status to their higher status executive elite. There's a national status match page that you can go on. You upload a photo of your Hilton card and they should give you that match. The most recent information from status match.com shows that this status match is still working. So try that for yourself if you have Hilton Gold. And you can also get Hertz President Circle or Avis status from credit cards as well. Number three, hotel collections. Now, this is a benefit of a lot of premium cards that I personally didn't use for a long time because at that time I didn't have enough money to book hotels with cash, you know, in the old days. But people who do use these collections really rave about them. The most famous of these would be the Fine Hotels and Resorts Collection or FHR from American Express. Let me give you an example of how it works. Later this month, I'm going to stay at the Fairmont Orchid in Hawaii, and I booked it through FHR. Here are the extra benefits I get simply because I booked through FHR. 12 p.m. check-in when available, room upgrade at check-in when available, daily breakfast for two, experience credit $100 food and beverage to be used during your stay, complimentary Wi-Fi and a 4 p.m. late checkout guaranteed. So it is a great way of getting extra benefits without having to be loyal to a particular hotel chain. And often the benefits you get through FHR or other hotel collections are better than you'd get even if you are a high level of loyalty status with a certain chain. I've also used it to great effect at the Conrad in D.C. and also at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. There are also hotel collections on other premium cards. For example, the Chase Sapphire Reserve has the luxury hotel collection and the Capital One has their recently launched new Premier collection. And with both of these collections, you can get similar benefits to FHR, things like free breakfast, room upgrades, $100 credit, etc. This can save you a lot of money. Let's now move on to some other travel benefits that you may not have thought about. But first of all, if you do have a lot of credit cards, a great way to keep track of all your transactions, your balances, your points and miles balances, is to go to FHR.com and download the FHR app. It's a great way to keep track of the transactions. It's also a great way to keep track of your total transactions. It is a smartphone app that pulls data from all your different credit cards, even if they're from different issuers in one easy to use app. It also tracks spending categories, even the ones that change every quarter, and always recommends the right credit card so you can earn the maximum rewards on every purchase. If you have American Express cards, the pro version of Max Rewards, Max Rewards Gold, is especially useful because it activates all of your Amex offers for you, adding them to your card so that you never miss a deal. I've even bought stuff online or gone out and bought stuff and then got an email afterwards saying that I saved some money, even though I didn't even realize there was a deal for the store I was shopping at. The average user saves around $700 per year, utilizing Amex offers that are automatically added to their card. If you're interested in Max Rewards Gold, you can get a free month of the service with my link below, or just download the app and check out the free features. Number four, travel insurance. Now I'm lumping a few different things together as travel insurance, but basically they include trip delay insurance, which covers reasonable expenses when delayed, normally have to be delayed six to 12 hours depending on the card, trip cancellation and interruption insurance. This will reimburse costs of flights or hotels that you missed. And baggage insurance covers baggage on Amex Platinum, for example, it covers up to $2,000 for your checked baggage and another 1,000 for your carry on. And I will not book a flight with a card that does not feature these three insurances. I learned my lesson having to use two of these insurances after a ski trip in France. My flight was forced to abort its landing and turn back from the UK because of high winds. And their escape airport, I think they call it for that day, was actually right back down in the south of France. So it basically flew all the way back, close, you know, 20 miles from where it started. Now I ended up having to get a train through France, stay in a hotel for a night and then book new flights from Paris to New York instead of going through London. And I was able to claim a combination of expenses on these two insurances, trip delay insurance and trip cancellation and interruption insurance. I have a whole video on this experience. It looks like this and I will put it on the end card of this video if you guys want to learn more about how to use these different insurances and what exactly they are for. The card I used on that trip was the Chase Inc Preferred. Obviously, everything had to be bought on that card for it to count. I will put a link to that card down below as well in case you want to check it out. Number five, cell phone protection. This is such a no-brainer benefit, but you would be surprised the number of people that forget they have this provided on their credit card and just pay their cell phone bill with a debit card or something. The cell phone protection I currently use is on the Amex Platinum and all I have to do is pay the phone bill with the card and I will get, quote, reimbursed for your repair or replacement costs following damage or theft up to $800 per claim with a limit of two approved claims per 12-month period with a $50 deductible. So it covers me for theft or damage, including cracked screens, which is something some cell phone insurance plans don't cover you for. The thing that it doesn't cover you for is if you just lose your phone. They quote that as mysterious disappearance. Now, I haven't actually ever had to use this insurance, but if you have a cell phone, which is like everyone, be sure to pay with a credit card that has cell phone protection. It's just such a no-brainer. And do check out what the coverage offers, so the level of deductible, what exactly is covered and how much money you are covered for, okay? If your cell phone is $1,000, but you're only covered for, say, $600, then that's no good, okay? Try to get the money that it covers you for to be as close to the price of your cell phone as possible. Number six, roadside assistance. Now, this is a super useful benefit that certain credit cards, notably the Amex Platinum, have got rid of in recent years. But I have used this benefit twice, once right outside my house and once on the road when I had a completely drained battery and I had to call them out to give me a jumpstart. So, make sure your credit card has this benefit if you think you'll need it. Now, all Visa credit cards offer roadside assistance at a call-out rate of $79.95. But many credit cards that run on Visa and MasterCard network issued by a variety of banks will offer the benefit for free. And obviously, the more premium the card is, the more likely it is to be free. Like we said, American Express does not offer roadside assistance now and neither does Discover or Citi on most of their cards. I think that the Costco card might offer it, I don't know, but most of them don't. There's quite a good article on Forbes, which tells you exactly which credit card offers roadside assistance and the levels of coverage. I'll link to that article below in case you want to check it out. But again, super useful benefit if you have it. Number seven, paying rent with a credit card. This is a great way to earn some extra points because it gives you a few thousand dollars more in spending per month. Now, you probably can pay rent with any credit card if your landlord accepts credit cards, although there might be a little fee of like two or three percent tagged on there. However, there is one credit card that allows you to pay rent to any landlord with no fee, and that is the Bilt MasterCard. You can earn one point per dollar on your rent payments, up to $100,000 worth of rent payments per year. And the card also earns two points per dollar on travel and three points per dollar on dining. And on the first of every month, you get double points. So those travel and dining categories become four and six points per dollar. The card also has a load of useful transfer partners like Hyatt Hotels, which offers really good value and American Airlines, which is a pretty rare one. I'll put a link to this card below if you want to check it out. Number eight, extended warranty. Now, this is a benefit I have learned the hard way with. If you are purchasing any appliance or a computer, anything electrical, anything that could break, like you want extended warranty. Typically, the manufacturer will give you a one year warranty and then your credit card's extended warranty will extend that warranty by one year. But different cards may have slightly different terms. Now, I say I learned the hard way because we bought my wife's laptop with the B&H PAYBOO card, which refunds you the tax, which in New York state is about eight percent. So that's great. But the downside of the PAYBOO card is that it doesn't offer any kind of extended warranty. So when my wife's laptop overheated and shorted out just after the warranty finished, just after one year, we ended up having to pay ourselves like a thousand dollars for a whole new motherboard that absolutely would have been covered under warranty because that shouldn't break. OK, it shouldn't have that problem. So it absolutely would have been covered under warranty if we had used a card that extended the warranty by one year. In general, I think the extended warranty provided by American Express is really good, although they're not the only cards that do it. So you can check your card issuers terms and conditions to see what is offered. Number nine, points rebate. This is a feature of Amex business cards, and it is probably quite underused. When you book a flight through the Amex travel portal, if you have, say, the business platinum, they will give you 35 percent of your points back. This works for any airline in first or business class and only for your selected airline in economy or premium economy. So the airline that you selected for the 200 dollar airline credit. And this basically means that you are now getting about one point five cents in value per point, which is better than you'd get if you transferred to, say, Delta and booked economy. All right. You get like one point two cents or less. So this is a great option, especially if you are booking economy on your selected airline. Probably not such a great deal in business class since you can typically get higher value if you transfer over. But booking economy in a selected airline, it now rivals the Chase Sapphire Reserve in the value that you get for the points. The only difference is you have to have the total number of points that you would need at one cent per point in your account first, and then they refund you 35 percent of those points afterwards. And that's where you get the one point five cents per point in value. All right. Here is our final underrated credit card benefit. Number 10, priority boarding and free check bags on airline cards. U.S. domestic travel can be a nightmare. And if you have no status with the airline you're flying with, you will board last and you'll have to pay for every bag you check. And those fees can really mount up. Now, there are three ways that you can make your life easier. One, simply buy a business or first class ticket to have status with the airline because you fly with them a lot and then you will get some of the business and first class benefits like free check bags, priority boarding, et cetera, or three have a credit card that is co-branded with that airline and you'll enjoy some of those benefits, too. For example, the United Explorer card, it's $95 per year, but for that you get a free check bag for you and a companion that's worth up to $140 per round trip. You get priority boarding so you're not fighting for overhead locker space like you are when you're last aboard. And you get two United lounge passes per year. I'll put the link to that United card below so that you can learn more about it. But Delta, American Airlines and several other major U.S. airlines all have credit cards that do similar things. So you don't have to have status with the airline and you can still enjoy some of the benefits. All right, guys, that is 10 underrated credit card benefits. Which one was your favorite? Leave your comments below. A big thank you to today's sponsor, Max Rewards. You can get a free month of Max Rewards gold with my link in the description section as well. Thank you for watching, guys. Please subscribe if you're new. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.