Every Credit Card I Keep (And Why) — $3,000 in Annual Fees Explained

I pay almost $3,000 a year for a stack of credit cards in annual fees. And we've always been a pretty frugal family, and that's actually more than our monthly mortgage payment. So why would we do this? Let's take a look. I'm gonna show you every card that I keep and pay an annual fee on year after year. I'll talk about the benefits I get from those annual fees and how you can do your own cost-benefit analysis to make the decision about what's best for you. I'm also going to be transparent about some of the decisions that are different for me as a content creator than they would be for the average person. Welcome back to Points for Normal People. I'm Katie, and I believe travel isn't just for the rich. I'm here to share easy-to-follow tips to help you supercharge your travel points so you can pay for entire vacations every year. This video is dedicated to cards that my husband and I keep year after year. In any given year, I also have other cards with annual fees that I might be keeping for just that year, so I'm not gonna go into those cards that I happen to have right now, but I don't consider keepers long-term. And to be extremely clear, I do not think that what I do is prescriptive. I'm going to tell you exactly how I value the benefits on these cards, but in no way do I think this is how other people should value them. Only you know the value to yourself, your family, and your own lifestyle. Let's start with my most expensive card, the Chase Sapphire Reserve. The annual fee on this one is $795 a year. That means I have a lot of work to do to make up for that high fee. I need to be seeing a lot of value to make it worth it to keep it. On my blog, I have a benefits calculator where you can walk through this exact process for this card and many others to see if it's worth it for you. So the first benefit that this card has is a $300 travel credit, and I value this at the full $300 because it is absolutely the easiest $300 travel credit to use of any card. If you use the card to make any purchase that codes as travel, even parking or public transportation, you'll get an automatic statement credit until you get to $300. This card also has a collection of DoorDash credits. It gives you Dash Pass through December 31st, 2027, and two $10 non-restaurant credits per month, and then another $5 credit per month. It's actually very easy for us to use this credit because there's a Speedway, like the gas station convenience store, pretty close to our house, and we can get pickup orders there. So we're always using this for Ben & Jerry's or jugs of chocolate milk, which my daughter uses as a recovery drink after wrestling practice, or I don't know, different snacks that we're buying there. So even though the potential value of this is $25 a month or $300 a year, I actually mentally value this as more like $150 a year because the things we buy with it are a little bit more than what we would buy at the grocery store. But we're already up to $450 of value per year. This card also has two $150 dining credits per year at select restaurants for a total of $300. We easily use these either when we travel or for a date night in Chicago. And it's even easier to find these now because my team created a map you can search to easily find all these locations, which doesn't exist on the Chase website. Still, I only value this at $200 since it does force us into more expensive restaurants. I kind of like that, but it's still not the full value for me. So now we're up to $650 total value. This card also comes with two credits each year for StubHub for $150 each, a total of $300. This one, I actually do value at the full 300 because we use StubHub for a lot of last minute tickets in Chicago, especially Cubs games and theater tickets. Sometimes those last minute tickets are really great prices for us. So you can see that I'm already at $950 of value, and that's now more than the $795 annual fee. That's not even including some other credits like for Apple subscriptions, Lyft, some hotel credits. If I also use those credits, it's even more of a bonus for us. And that's also not even including lounge access, which this card includes for the cardholder plus two guests. Again, your value will be totally different, but that's the beauty of these benefit calculators that let you assign your own values. You can easily see if it makes sense for you. If you want the full breakdown on this specific card, I have a detailed blog post that I'll link down in the show notes. My husband doesn't have a Sapphire Reserve, but he does have a Chase Sapphire Preferred card. I've actually thought that I should do the calculators to see if it makes sense for him to also have a reserve, but I can only manage so many credits right now. The Sapphire Preferred has a $95 annual fee. So my husband keeps it in addition to my reserve because we like to be able to transfer to his or my loyalty accounts easily. Chase lets us pool points across our household, and then we can decide where to move them from there. Now, $95 annual fees are fairly commonplace, but even so, I like to know what value I'm getting. So this one also has monthly DoorDash credits. It has $10 per month through December 31st, 2027. My husband had been loving using that at local liquor stores because in our area, there were a lot that offered pickup on DoorDash, so it was his beer money. But unfortunately, in Illinois, they just changed that, and you can't use more than 30% of your credit for alcohol now. So he's gonna have to find another way to use his $10 per month. Now, I've never been big on maximizing my daily spend because for years and years, our monthly spend was just barely enough to cover the minimum spend on whatever new credit card we had. But now that I have more business expenses and our kids are bigger and everything costs more, I have started to pay more attention to certain spend categories. So I also like knowing I can use either of those cards and earn three points per dollar whenever we're dining out. In that same ecosystem, my husband and I both have Freedom cards from previous Sapphire cards we downgraded, or I even have a Freedom card that I've had since about 2006. These are no-annual-fee cards, but they do give us some opportunity to earn five points per dollar in rotating categories and three points per dollar on pharmacy spend. We also have three Inc cards for our businesses. So in my husband's account, we have a no-annual-fee Inc Business Unlimited credit card. It technically earns cash back, but we can combine it with our Sapphires to turn that into points. We put our general spend for our Airbnb that we own onto that card. Then on my account, I have two cards for Katie's Travel Tricks. I have an Inc Unlimited, which is my general spender on recurring expenses. And then I have an Inc Business Preferred credit card, which to be honest, the main reason I got was because as you might guess, I have a lot of business travel expenses. And that let me get three points per dollar on travel expenses. The annual fee is relatively low at $95. And then I also get the $10 DoorDash credits per month on that card right now. You can see we have DoorDash credits coming out of our ears in our house. Right now, I actually need to make a decision on if it makes sense for me to keep the Sapphire Reserve for Business that I got last year instead of the Inc Preferred. When I use my own benefit calculator for the Sapphire Reserve for Business, I come out with about a value for myself of $700. And that's for that card that costs $795. So that's similar to what I'm paying for my Inc Preferred, but with some more robust benefits in some ways. Now, I'm not gonna go through all the benefits on that card here, but the ones that hold some value for me are the travel credit. So I would give that the full $300. The Google Workspace credit is $200. And that's another straight credit for me because I do use that for my business. The $100 giftcards.com credit is another straight $100. So that's up to $600. And then it does have DoorDash again, which I gave $100 this time because I'm getting tired of using my DoorDash credits. But even then, it has some additional hotel credits that I might use as well. So one possibility that I'm considering is I could keep my Sapphire Reserve for Business, get rid of my Inc Preferred, and get rid of my personal Sapphire Reserve. And then I could upgrade my husband's Sapphire Preferred to a personal Sapphire Reserve. That way we'd both be covered for lounge access, we wouldn't be duplicating credits, and we'd actually be saving about $200 out of pocket each year in annual fees. As you can see in this episode, I'm talking about keeper cards, but sometimes those keeper cards change, especially when banks are reevaluating or refreshing cards. Chase has been one of the big flexible rewards currencies I try to keep earning and keep a stash of. I also try to keep a stash of American Express membership rewards, Venture Miles with Capital One, and moving forward, Citi Thank You Points. You'll hear a lot of people talking about how their strategy is earn and burn when it comes to points. And what they mean is it's better to just earn points and use them as you earn them. This is because generally speaking, points suffer from inflation just like any currency. So if you hold big stashes, they're probably worth less theoretical value over time. I'm gonna tell you right now that that's not what I do. I like having a big old stash of points at my disposal for when I get an idea of where I want to travel with my family. I accept that my points might be worth less than they were a few years ago, but I just prefer to hold onto them and have options. And so because of that, I pay a little bit extra in annual fees to keep my options open. Now, I don't always have to do this. With American Express, we don't pay any ongoing annual fees to keep our membership rewards points a lot. My husband and I both have the no annual fee blue business plus credit card, which does that for us. It keeps our American Express points a lot. And actually, if you can believe it, I have never had any personal cards that earn American Express membership rewards points. I'm sure that I will at some point. I just haven't gotten around to it yet, even with 15 years in points. I've earned my membership rewards just through business cards. My husband has had a few of the personal cards, but I haven't had any. We also need between us one card to keep Capital One Venture Miles alive, those miles that we're stashing for the future. Now, Capital One makes it really easy to share miles. So that's nice that we just need one of these cards. Now, up until this year, we'd been keeping the Capital One Venture X rewards credit card. Overall, this card still provides decent value. You pay a $395 a year annual fee, and you get $300 in travel credits for Capital One Travel, and 10,000 miles on your account anniversary. So it's pretty easy to break even on this card. But now that this card has dropped lounge access perks for guests and authorized users, I'm personally ready to downgrade my card. As you can see, even just in the cards I've talked about so far, I have a lot of credits to manage. And even though value exists for this card, it's just one more thing for me to think about. So my hope is to get an offer to downgrade to the Venture One card. Capital One doesn't always let you do this though. So other options I'm looking at would be just opening a new Venture One card. Now I'm eligible since I've had my Venture X for 48 months, or possibly to open the Spark 1.5X Mile Select, which also has a no annual fee. Both of those cards would add to my 524 count, but it might be worth opening a new card just to be able to keep those miles alive with no fee going forward. The last major points currency, and honestly the one I'm most excited about right now, is Citi Thank You Points. Now my husband and I both got the Citi Strata Elite in December to take advantage of the triple dip. I went into more detail on that on my episode on Citi Thank You Points, so if you missed that, that's linked in the show notes. But to be honest, I'm not even sure if one of these is a keeper card for us. The hotel credit is a solid benefit, but again, we have hotel credits coming out of our ears, and I don't like to manage them. But I could also see myself possibly getting rid of a few hotel cards next year, and just keeping this one instead. I'll go over those hotel cards in a minute, and you'll see what I mean. With Citi, you really need at least one card with an annual fee to keep your points flexible. If you have the no annual fee Citi Strata, your transfer partners are more limited, and you get some poor transfer rates with some of the partners. So about a year from now, we will have to decide what we're keeping. We had been keeping a Citi Strata Premier to keep some points alive, but now with both of us getting the Citi Strata Elite, we downgraded that Citi Strata Premier to a Citi Custom Cash. And then our plan is to use that Custom Cash just for groceries, because you earn 5X in the category where you spend the most out of a list of categories, and groceries is one of those, up to $500 per month. So that's just the overview of the cards that I keep that have to do with flexible points currencies. Again, you don't have to have all these different points currencies going on. This probably sounds a bit overwhelming and excessive if you're new to points. We've been doing this for 15 years, and this is where we're at 15 years in. So that covers all of my overall flexible points cards that are keepers for us. Now let's move on to airline cards. Airline cards that are keepers for you will be very specific to your home airports and preferences. In our household, the only airline cards that are long-term keeper cards for us are Southwest Airlines cards. I have two airline cards with Chase, two Southwest cards. Now this is one of those examples where my personal strategy diverges from the norm. Most people don't need two Southwest credit cards long-term, because with the way benefits work, they get pretty redundant now. But as a content creator, to be honest, I don't earn my Southwest companion pass the same way as most people anymore. Usually when you click on a link on my blog, you're getting my affiliate link if I have one. But with the Southwest cards, I first use my personal referrals, which helps me renew my companion pass. And I know that that's not relatable, and I'm sorry. I did earn a companion pass the regular way with multiple credit cards for 10 years before I started earning it this way in the process of growing this business. So my business Southwest card is redundant for me in terms of benefits, but I do pay $149 a year for it. I also pay $229 a year for my Southwest Rapid Rewards priority credit card. Strictly speaking, I don't think this card has amazing value. I get 7,500 points each year on my account anniversary, and that's worth about $100 in flights. But the reason I have this one over a lower annual fee card is that I really just don't wanna worry about seats when we fly. And this one lets me pick seats at the time of booking. And that's worth more than $100 for me for the peace of mind. My husband has those exact same two cards for the same reasons. So really, we are paying over $750 in annual fees on our Southwest cards, which is a lot. But that calculation is different for us since it allows us to earn companion passes and extra points via referrals. We open a lot of airline cards that don't end up being keeper cards for us, but Southwest are the only ones that we keep year to year because that's the only airline we fly often enough to warrant keeping the card. The last major category is hotel cards. We actually have seven hotel cards that we've held onto for a pretty long time. All of them come with annual free night certificates. One card we're planning to hold onto forever is an old discontinued card called the IHD Rewards Club Select credit card. This one is an oldie but a goodie. With a $49 annual fee, but also gives us an annual free night certificate for an IHG stay for a hotel up to 40,000 points. Now the current IHG cards, you can actually top off your certificate, which makes them a lot more flexible than this older card, which we can't top up. But we still think of this one like a prepaid discounted hotel stay. We often use ours at the Intercontinental Chicago, which we like to book in the winter because it has a really cool art deco pool and it's right on Michigan Avenue. We each have one of those cards and we plan to keep those long-term. Then we also both have World of Hyatt cards. These have $95 annual fees and also come with annual free night certificates. We honestly almost always use these at the Hyatt Regency in Chicago, which is another favorite staycation spot for us. Although that hotel choice might change in the future because we've been chasing Hyatt Globalist status the past few years, but we plan to stop doing that after a number of changes Hyatt announced recently. So I'm not as sold as keeping these Hyatt cards open long-term, to be honest. I can only manage so many hotel credits and certificates and these might not be doing it for me. Speaking of changing strategy, we also used to keep a Hyatt business card, which helped us earn Globalist status through spending. But that one is on the chopping block in 2026, since we've decided that it's no longer worth it for us to chase Globalist status. You can see though that we often double up on cards. That's actually intentional because if I'm going to have one free night certificate, I'd rather have two because then that's a weekend getaway for us. Another hotel credit card we have is the Chase Ritz Carlton card. I still haven't decided what to do about this one long-term yet. We worked hard to get this one, meaning it just takes over a year to get it, but I'm still not sure what my long-term plan is. This card has an annual fee of $450. So it's another one of those high annual fee situations. It does have a $300 a year credit for airline incidentals, which do have a variety of unofficial uses. In the show notes, I will link to my overview article on this card, which also mentioned some of those uses. It also includes an annual free night certificate at a Marriott hotel that costs up to 85,000 points per night. So effectively, it's like paying $150 for that certificate for me. The reason we initially got this card was for lounge access. One of the very best benefits it has is the ability to add authorized users for free, and they get their own lounge access for themselves, plus two guests. I haven't added extended family to this card, but I like that I could if I wanted to. We really like to be generous with our benefits when we can, and this card makes it easy to bequeath lounge access to people you trust. Then I also have two more hotel cards with American Express. I have an old Marriott Bonvoy American Express card that used to be an SPG card, and it's grandfathered in. It's a $95 annual fee, and I get an annual free night certificate that's worth 35,000 points, or it could be topped off with another 15,000 points. Then I also have the Marriott Bonvoy Business American Express card, which has an annual fee of $125, and a similar benefit where I get an annual free night certificate worth 35,000 points. We find it really easy to use these free night certificates. One place we often use them is at the Gaylord Rockies, which is outside Denver. That hotel usually costs around three or $400 per night, but we're often able to book it for under 40,000 points per night, so we use our certificate and just top it off a little bit. Or more recently, we've used them to book hotels for when we go to the state wrestling tournament for my daughter. I frankly thought about canceling both of them, but just haven't done it yet. So even though, again, I consider all of these keeper cards sometimes those keeper cards change. I'm also going to give a shout out to a few somewhat random no annual fee cards that we keep for obscure perks. One of those is a Blue Cash Everyday card, which was the first credit card I ever had. It's a no annual fee card, and I wouldn't necessarily open it now, but it does give me $7 a month back as a statement credit for Disney+, which is a great perk for a no annual fee card. We also have a PenFed Pathfinder Rewards card. On this one, you can get the annual fee waived if you're a military member or veteran, so my husband has this one. So no annual fee for him, and he gets $100 a year in airline incidental credits, and it also has a trusted traveler program credit. My husband and I also each keep a no fee Bank of America card open with our kids as authorized users. This lets us use the Bank of America Museums on Us program as a whole family. I'll link some info on that in the show notes, but basically the first full weekend of the month, there's a whole set of museums that you can get into for free with the Bank of America card. And then my husband and I both have a US Bank Triple Cash business card. This is a no annual fee business card, and if you have 12 months in a row of certain online business expenses like QuickBooks, you get $100 per year in statement credits. So I have one online service per card being charged to those monthly in order to get my $100 credits. That's a lot, right? I feel like it's a lot when I start listing and talking about all my cards. But the most important thing is it's actually really easy to try to see if any given card is worth the annual fee to you. And we've tried to make this really simple for you over on our website. So you just need to type a card name into the search bar and find our main card page for that card. Once you're there, for pretty much any card that has an annual fee, we've added a card benefit calculator to help you figure out if something is worth it to you. If we've missed something, let us know and we're happy to create another one. The most important thing is to be realistic about how you actually use benefits. If you get a hotel card with an annual free night, you've gotta use it. You can't let it expire and sit there in your account unused. When I total up all the cards we have, we are paying about $3,000 a year in annual fees. But we're getting a slew of benefits, including seven annual night certificates from various hotel programs, over $900 in value on my Sapphire Reserve, tons of DoorDash credits, seating benefits on Southwest and the ability for us to earn referral points, and another $300 airline credit. So all that's worth it for us, but it's a very individual choice. So let's talk about action steps for you. This is the perfect time to do a little spring cleaning for your credit cards. We have a post that's gonna walk you through how to do that. Everyone needs to do this once in a while. First, you'll need to take stock of every card you have open. If you use the app Travel Freely to keep yourself organized, this should already be done for you. Otherwise, this might be a good opportunity to sign up for that, or you can keep track on a spreadsheet. Step two would be to look at any card that has an annual fee and make sure you're getting value out of it that comes close to the annual fee. Again, you can use the benefits calculators on my blog to help you do that. Or if you know your benefits, you can just make notes and make your own calculations. And then the third step is to make a plan. I'm also linking the guide in my show notes, which we call The Ultimate Guide to Closing a Card so you can understand that evaluation process. I can't know what benefits you find valuable and what's worth it to you. Maybe your goal is to keep your out-of-pocket costs for annual fees as low as possible, so you'll approach it with that lens. Or maybe you're a points hoarder like me and you don't mind paying a little more to keep your options open. Maybe you value really high-end benefits. There's not a right and wrong answer here. And thankfully we can all do what's best for us. Thanks so much for spending time with me today and I look forward to seeing you next time where we will continue to unlock these secrets of Travel Points together.