Chase spent months engineering a credit card overhaul that somehow manages to give you more rewards while simultaneously making them worthless. The Sapphire Preferred now offers enhanced earning rates on categories you'll actually use. They're also gutting a transfer partner that made the points valuable in the first place. It's like getting a raise and a divorce on the same day.
The bank calls this an improvement. They wrote a press release about it. Someone at Chase got promoted for this.
Credit card enthusiasts are performing mental gymnastics to justify why this is still a good deal. They're building spreadsheets. They're calculating breakeven points. They're convincing themselves that 3x points on dining matters when the airline transfer they used for business class tickets just vanished. These are the same people who optimize their grocery spending to earn an extra $47 per year while ignoring the $5,000 they lost on Tesla calls.
The "crushing transfer partner change" is doing actual work here. Chase figured out you were getting too much value. Can't have that. So they enhanced the earning structure and demolished the redemption options. It's brilliant really. They get to run ads about improvements while quietly ensuring you'll never see Lisbon.
Every personal finance blogger is already writing their "Is the Sapphire Preferred Still Worth It?" article. The answer is the same as it always was: if you have to ask whether a credit card with an annual fee is worth it, you're already f*cked. You're going to pay the fee anyway. You're going to convince yourself the lounge access matters even though you fly Spirit twice a year.
Chase knows this. They know you'll keep the card because closing it might hurt your credit score by four points, and you need that imaginary number to stay high in case you want to finance a jet ski someday.
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