I wrote a post in 2022 about the updates to the Chase Sapphire Reserve credit card. I thought that post was kind of cringe at the time, but lo and behold the credit card is updating again in 2025 and I went back to that post to reference some of the math. Who’s cringe now??
So let’s make another post.
Credit card basics, like “downgrade, don’t cancel”, are covered in the 2022 post so we’ll skip those and get right into the meat.
CSR new annual fee = -$795
Benefits I use = +$420
Semi-fake or annoying-to-use benefits = conservatively: +$0; optimistically: +$300
→ My Effective Annual Fee = -$375 to -$75
Benefits that I don’t really care about = $0
The CSR is useful for:
| Category | Main Card | Points | Backup | Points | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dining in US | AMEX Gold | 4x | CSR | 3x | |
| Dining interntational | CSR | 3x | Hyatt | 2x | |
| Groceries | AMEX Gold | 4x | - | - | |
| Flights, booked direct | AMEX Plat | 5x | CSR | 4x | |
| Hotels, booked direct | Hyatt, Marriott | 4-6x | CSR | 4x | |
| Uber | AMEX Plat | 1x* | Hyatt | 2x | |
| Lyft | CSR | 5x | Hyatt | 2x | |
| Public transit | Hyatt | 2x | - | - | |
| Car rentals | CSR | 1x⁺ | Plat | 1x⁺ | |
| Airbnb, misc travel | Freedom Unlimited | 1.5x | - | - | |
| Everything else | Freedom Unlimited | 1.5x | - | - |
*Uber needs to be paid on an AMEX card to make use of my $25 monthly credits from AMEX Plat and Gold.
⁺CSR I think still has the best rental car insurance coverage, so we want to use it here. Plat is the next best.
The math here on value boils down to:
The CSR for me right now is mainly a Hyatt / transfer partners machine, now made more expensive.
Not sure what I’m going to do yet, but eating a nearly $400 effective annual fee would be pretty bad.
$N + $N format denotes that you get $N back on transactions in Jan-Jun, and $N back for Jul-Dec. Hence annoying. (source; ctrl+F ‘$150’) ↩︎