My 2024 credit card gameplan: 2-player strategy, no more Venture X??

we're already in March but in today's video I wanted to go over my credit card strategy for 2024 and discuss the credit cards that I'm looking at what happened last year and hopefully this will be helpful for your personal credit card Journey so let's get started 2023 was a bit special because we bought a house and that definitely influenced our credit card decisions on when to apply to new credit cards and which to actually get and when you buy a house at least if you're planning on getting a mortgage loan your credit score needs to be in Tip-Top shape especially with the interest rates of last year and my credit score was at $7.95 by the end of the year when we bought the house but earlier that year I kept in mind that I needed to keep my new credit card applications at a minimum I just didn't want anything to affect my credit score negatively so as a result I only applied to two credit cards at the beginning of 2023 and funny enough I think I was pretty late in the game to apply for build because this credit card is geared towards people who pay rent and the biggest factor to my delay was just the need of having to use that card five times a month but after doing some deep research I realized that there wasn't too many penalties with the card if I did happen to forget to use the card five times a month I would only be getting 250 points for my rent but the card has no annual fees and if I decided to discontinue using the card there's really not that many negative factors so built was really just a nice to have card that would give me extra benefits and indeed it was as I got 30,000 points by the end of the year just on my rent and as for the Marriot cards since it's been a year I now have a free night certificate for them so keep an eye out for a video in the future where I'll be comparing the Chase Marriott and the Hyatt and I think that will be a pretty interesting comparison now let's go over a recap on my 2023 card strategy since we were pretty new with the capital 1 Venture X card we were pretty happy that at a minimum we would be receiving two times the points on any purchase which that pretty much beats most of Chase's cards where we would either be getting 1 or 1.5 times the points in the other category and as a result we ended up not really thinking about which card to use when we were making a purchase which is a good and bad thing I guess the good thing is I don't need to think but the bad thing is we missed out on a handful of times when we could have received better benefits from our other credit cards for example the freedom Flex had five times the points during the fourth quarter of last year and that category was focused on Wholesale stores AKA Costco so we totally forgot about this and we ended up using Venture X at Costco so last year we ended up using Venture X for most of the time and then built five times a month next next up let's go over last year's points redemptions in March last year I went to Taiwan with my husband and I would say that the Venture acts the two Hyatt cards that we have and the chase cards they made up the bulk of our redemptions to start off we got two roundtrip economy flights from SFO one flight was redeemed for 94,000 Mi from Capital 1 and the other flight was redeemed for 990,000 Mi with Chase and looking back I think we could have done better to get that flight for Less points but I'm learning new things and I will actually be sharing a secret hack that I just learned at the end of this video so please stick around but also with that we were restricted on dates and it was Spring Break season last year we also got pretty good redemptions on hotels so with our two Hiatt credit cards we were able to get two free nights at any Hiatt category 4 and under so we ended up staying at the Grand Hyatt in Taipei for two nights and then we used our points for an additional two nights and we ended up saving over $600 and then closer to the end of the year we had a big camping trip SL Hotel trip in Zion Bryce Canyon and the Grand Canyon and for those Hotel nights we ended up using our $45 Hotel credit from the sapphire preferred and we used $200 from the travel Credit in our Venture X also the hotels were pretty cheap because it was low season November and that definitely helped to cut costs and I'm actually at of water right now so while I go fill this up would you mind hitting the like button now let's get into my 2024 strategy already this year we got the chase Inc business preferred and that card got us 100,000 points as long as we spent $88,000 within the first 3 months of opening the cart so we had a big purchase coming up which was a kitchen countertop so that was definitely a sign to get a new card so my husband actually applied for that card but as for me I'm still making the decision of which card to get because right now we're closely watching our expenses and we're trying to pay off our house early because we got stuck with a 7% interest rate so we're going to be keeping track of that for the next 2 months and I just want to make sure that for any new card I'm get I'm going to meet the welcome bonus and anyway there are some more cards that we do have in mind so my husband is up for his second Sapphire as it's been 4 years since he got his first welcome bonus now we're deciding if it makes sense to to get the Sapphire Reserve or the preferred the new Sapphire lounges seem pretty promising to visit but there's just none in my area but I do think that they're popping up pretty quickly at least quicker than the Capital One lounges but I guess that covid was to blame for the delays and then for me I'm thinking about getting the MX Hilton but I'm not sure which and very possibly I can also get the Venture X maybe my husband will downgrade his let's see so as for which card we're going to be spending end in this year last year we know that we were mostly using Venture X but this year we're going to be steering to a different direction the main driver for this decision is due to Capital One not having one particular Transfer Partner and that is Hyatt so we really like the value that Hyatts have been giving us in the past so instead of pulling all our points into Capital One and potentially not having enough points for Hyatt we want to split things off and even things out so for this year we're going to be using our Chase cards for when they make sense when we get higher Redemption and then for other purchases we'll be using the Venture X that way we'll make sure that for every dollar that we're spending we're getting the highest value instead of not thinking about it and only get two times the points now let's get into the last part of this video which is redemptions so we actually have a Redemption this year and I wanted to talk a little bit about this so this April we'll be going to Japan and I'm super excited for this trip because one it's Japan but two we were able to redeem these flights for Less points so this is my hack that I was talking about earlier and this is where I think built will come in handy even though I don't rent anymore so built has a partnership with a Search tool called point. me it can search for flights using points there are a few things that make this Search tool a bit inefficient such as you can only search by the exact date and you can only search with builds Transfer Partners but nevertheless it's a starting point and plus it's free so I was able to find a flight to Japan roundtrip for 60,000 points it is economy but it's a direct flight and I think it was much better from what I was looking with the cash values so when I was searching on Google flights the best flight would have been for $1,200 per person economy and it had a 9-hour layover or I could have gotten this flight with cash but it would have cost cost $2,000 so it's a pretty good deal there are other search tools that are similar to point. me but a lot of them do cost money but I did hear that a lot of times it's worth paying the $5 so then you can quickly find your flight for a good deal and as for finding hotels in Japan that's still a work in progress because unfortunately the beds I've seen they're pretty tiny and I'm pretty concerned because my in-laws are coming with us and although we do have a good relationship with them it just seems like we'll have to order two rooms it just seems like most hotels in Japan can only fit two people so maybe we'll have to end up going with the Airbnb do you have any tips about hotels in Japan so that's my strategy for this year and I want to ask you all what credit card are you looking out for this year thanks for watching I'll see you next time bye