Chase Sapphire 175k BONUS + Black FridayY Deals ALREADY Started

In this video, I want to talk about a 175,000 point welcome bonus on the Chase Sapphire Reserve that you can check to see if you are eligible for right now. We also have a 40% transfer bonus from Amex to a certain airline, and we have Black Friday deals already starting. We're going to take a look at what's on offer. Hey, credit warriors, welcome to the show. My name is Ben Hedges, a.k.a. The Credit Shofu, and on this channel, I cover U.S. credit cards, personal finance, and luxury travel. If you like the sound of that, please subscribe, but let's get into it. Oh, and this video is brought to you by Silo, but more on that later. Okay, so a few days ago, I noticed someone on Reddit talking about a banner they saw on Chase's website, but when they refreshed the page, it was gone. I actually struggled to find their original Reddit post again this morning, but what they were talking about was this banner, okay, that shows bonuses of up to 175,000 points on Chase's highly popular premium travel credit card, the Chase Sapphire Reserve. Well, now this banner is actually public at the top of the credit cards page on chase.com, and it's one of these Amex style up to 175,000 points. So if you start an application, or in this case, if you check to see if you have pre-approval with no impact to your credit score, you then might be offered a bonus from a few possible bonuses, the highest one being 175,000 points. I tried it, but I was offered nothing. But I'm guessing that many of you in the audience could see an offer in your account, all right? So you should go and try this. The public offer is 125,000 points for spending $6,000 in three months. So this is definitely worth it if you're thinking of getting the card, okay, since it's 50,000 points more, that's quite significant. It could be $500 or even $1,000 more in value just for taking that extra step to see if you've got a pre-approval. Now, I'm not sure what the spend requirement is though. Google seems to think it's $8,000 if you use AI mode, but I can't actually find where they're getting that information from, okay? AI is not necessarily that reliable. So do try it. If you go to creditcards.chase.com, it will show the banner and you can click in and see if you're approved. 175,000 points could be worth up to $3,500 if you book travel that gets you that two cents per point through the travel portal with their new points boost feature. But there is another welcome bonus out there on the Chase Sapphire Reserve, and that bonus is even higher. So in addition to this 175,000 bonus that we are seeing, there is another bonus that's supposedly available in branch only, and that started on November 16th. And that bonus is for 200,000 points. Now I had a look around on Reddit to see if anyone had actually got this offer, and I didn't find anyone who had opened a card with this bonus, but I did find comments that confirmed that this is a real thing. Check this out. Not eligible. Chase Banker said he saw a few throughout the day, so it is live for sure. Went into Chase today and they did see the notification described for the 200,000 bonus, but the lady said I wasn't eligible. So you can see a few people saying that Chase Bankers confirmed it's real. However, they weren't targeted for it. Not sure what the requirements are to be targeted for it. We haven't got any data points on that, but you know, maybe it's people with high spending, that sounds logical. In addition to that though, there are a lot of people criticizing Chase's refresh of this card on Reddit, like this one. Instead of making the card an actual viable travel card against our competition, let's beg targeted customers to enter our nerfed ecosystem. There, translated it for us all. And yeah, I do kind of agree. I mean, I think the refresh of the reserve doesn't provide as much value as cards like the Amex Platinum. That's why I have the Amex Platinum instead of the reserve now. But everyone is different and depending on your habits or if you often fly out of an airport with a Chase Sapphire lounge, it might work out great for you. So nothing is absolute. Personally, though, because I travel a lot less these days because my kids are in school and they're working really hard on their education and they're doing dance classes and a lot of after school programs and stuff. We just don't really have time to travel. We basically do one trip a year, normally to the UK. We're about to go on it pretty soon in December. So for that reason, I redeem a lot of my Amex points at 1.1 cents per point to enlarge my investment portfolio with Charles Schwab. OK, that's 10 percent more value than you can get from Chase with cashback or with a cashback redemption. And in addition, I find the Amex credits just a lot easier to use than the Chase credits would be. But all right, let's move on to a 40 percent bonus on Amex transfers to a certain airline and some early Black Friday deals. But first, I know that you are a credit card enthusiast. Credit card, Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover Card. You love rewards, points and cashback. I thought credit cards were only for broke people. No, not at all. Actually, I make thousands doing it this way as I earn points that I can exchange for free flights and cashback. But your bedroom perhaps looks like this because you're also spending a lot of your time investing. And perhaps you always wished that you could get more from those investments, perhaps rewards on your investing balances, like you can earn points on credit card transactions. Well, now you can. You may have heard me talk about Silo in previous videos. Silo is an investing app where you can buy U.S. stocks, ETFs and both corporate and government bonds. Silo is working with interactive brokers to bring in their first ever credit card style rewards program for brokerage accounts. You can earn up to one point per dollar, up to five hundred thousand points per year on your portfolio balance paid out monthly for the launch of this program. Only until the end of the month, they're offering an insane three hundred thousand point welcome bonus for new members. Right now, these points are redeemable for cashback at a one cent per point rate. But Silo is currently working to bring on a suite of transfer partners. Think Hyatt points, Delta SkyMiles, etc. This launch offer is only available until the end of the month. So if you want to get a three hundred thousand point welcome bonus and earn up to five hundred thousand points every year, go to Silo market dot com slash Ben or click the link below. So let's actually look at the Black Friday deals first. The ones that I follow closely are Amazon and Rakuten. OK, let's look at Amazon first. So for Black Friday week, I'm now seeing up to 45 percent off or I already started today. This page is obviously personalized to me. So you can see things that I've been looking for on Amazon, like Kindles that I'm going to get for Christmas for my kids. Hope they're not watching this. Those around 30 percent off right now. They wouldn't be watching it. They're like nine and seven. All right. They don't watch credit card stuff on YouTube, but I definitely recommend checking this out. If something isn't discounted enough, maybe wait until Thanksgiving and Black Friday for hopefully a bigger discount. And remember, if you sign up for the Amazon Prime Visa signature credit card right now, you can get a two hundred and fifty dollar gift card instantly upon approval. No requirement. Just boom. As soon as you're approved, that gift card will be in your Amazon account. All right. This is not sponsored. Chase refused to work with me now. I sold like 30 or 40 of those last year. All right. When Chase was working with me. But sadly, they stopped working with pretty much all the credit card YouTubers. OK, actually, they stopped doing YouTube advertising completely. Even the credit card YouTubers they work with, they only allow website advertising. So you have to drive people to your website and then you can advertise a chase car. But anyway, I rant over. All right. Let's not get into that. But it is a no brainer deal. All right. Just giving you a heads up about that. You do have to be a prime member to get that card. All right. Let's check out Rakuten, which is an online cashback slash Amex points portal. I choose to redeem as Amex points. So every one cent in cashback that I would earn is equal to one Amex point. Oh, and built points are also now an option, too. But anyway, you can see on their homepage today that they already have a load of Black Friday deals starting. So here is their site on the homepage. There are a few deals advertised that you can get eight points per dollar or 8 percent cashback on a new Sam's Club membership. They have this one with so far where if you set up a new checking and savings account, you get twenty five thousand points slash two hundred and fifty dollars in cashback. Here's the small print on that. You just have to deposit five hundred dollars in your first forty five days. Then we also have many stores already offering up to 10 X points or 10 cashback places like Lululemon. Great. If you want to use your Amex Platinum Lululemon credit, click through Rakuten first. Then with Kraken Crypto Exchange, you can get twelve thousand five hundred Amex points for setting up a new account. There's also Bloomingdale's at 10 percent cashback slash 10 X points and many more stores like you can see on screen in this screen recording. So it's great for Christmas shopping. I expect to see up to 15 percent at Saks, too, by the end of week. So you can use your Amex Saks credit and earn extra points or cashback. And guys, Rakuten works just by you clicking through their site first. Basically, they're advertising a load of stores to their users and they're sharing some of that marketing revenue with you in the form of cashback. You activate the extra cashback or Amex points, and that is going to be on top of whatever Black Friday deal the merchant is offering and on top of whatever you earn on your credit card and on top of whatever credits you receive, like the Saks credit, et cetera. So it could be like three layers of deals, sometimes even four layers if you can get like an additional 10 percent off for opening a new account with the merchant or something like that. If you are new to Rakuten, you can use my link down below and get an extra fifty dollars bonus cashback or five thousand Amex points when you make your first purchase at any of the stores on their site. It's a great time to sign up now and then either buy something today if you see a good cashback rate or wait until the end of the week when it's all going to go bananas with like 15 to 20 percent cashback slash 15x, 20x Amex points at many stores. Link is below. OK, let's talk about our last story of the day, a 40 percent transfer bonus from Amex. All right, guys, so very quickly, I want to show you this deal. It is a 40 percent transfer bonus from American Express to Virgin Atlantic, and it runs from now until the end of the year. You see that date there, 12 31 2025. Now, Virgin is a great airline to transfer to, actually, since they're in Sky Team. So for us, U.S. folks, you can book Delta through them. So you could potentially be doing, you know, U.S. domestic on Delta. But since they are not a U.S. airline, you don't get hit with that pesky transfer tax thing that Amex hits you with when you transfer directly to Delta. OK, now, obviously, do more research if you want to take advantage of this. All right. Find award availability first through Virgin, whether that's award availability on Delta or another airline you want to book and make sure that, you know, the rate of points going through Virgin to book that airline is competitive. But, yeah, it's a really great thing. Obviously, if you are confident at using Virgin and if you've used them a lot before and you're confident you can actually use those miles, then you could just transfer without finding award availability. But for people who are less experienced, definitely find the availability first. You don't want to get those points stuck there without a use for them. But that should be live in your Amex account now if you have like the Amex Gold, Amex Platinum, etc. All right, guys, that is the video for today. Don't forget to earn up to 300,000 points as a welcome bonus and 500,000 points every year with Silo in the links down below. I will also put the links to other things I talked about below that as well in the description section. Things like Rakuten, etc. Please subscribe to the channel if you're new for more credit card and personal finance tips and tricks. We'll see you next time. Bye bye.