This post lays out my best strategic suggestions for great cards that someone just getting started with miles and points will likely want to get and why. If you are itching to get started and want a quick and simple guide about what cards to start with and in what order, this is for you. You may not even be ready to figure out where you want to go with these points, but the great thing about all these recommendations is that they’re all for transferable-points cards. And if you read the last installment in my intro series, you know how great transferable-points cards are.

If you already have any of these cards, congratulations! You’ve already gotten a great start. Skip the card(s) you already have and move on to the next ones.

I’m anticipating that you’d get these cards in this specific order, but if there are ever any elevated offers that come around for ones later in the list, consider whether it makes sense to jump on those whenever you see them to take advantage of the higher offers. This is just a loose guideline for what order to go in; your mileage may vary. (Sorry (not sorry), I know that was a groaner of a pun.)

#1 Best all-around card for anyone, including beginners

Chase Sapphire Preferred. This is a classic for a reason. It always provides at least a 60,000-point welcome bonus (and sometimes goes up to 80,000 points, and on rare, rare occasion, 100,000 points) for a $95 annual fee, which is 100% worth it, because you can use the points you’ll earn for at least $750 worth of travel without knowing a darn thing about how to use miles and points. And if you do know how to travel with miles and points (which you will before you know it), you can potentially get even more value from these points than just $750.

The points you’ll earn with this card are called Chase Ultimate Rewards points, and they’re pretty much everyone’s favorite type of points because they’re incredibly versatile and can get you a ton of great redemptions. Ultimate Rewards points can be transferred to airlines and hotel programs, and this is a great way to earn a big chunk of those all at once.

This card is key in everyone’s wallet because having one of the two Chase Sapphire cards (the other one is called Chase Sapphire Reserve and has a higher annual fee) means you can also use any Chase cash-back points you may earn from other cards you sign up for later on, such as the no-annual-fee Inks or the Freedoms, to transfer points directly to travel partners. You just go into your Chase account and move your points from your other cards’ accounts to your Sapphire Preferred account and the voilà, they’re now all Ultimate Rewards points. Without a Sapphire card or the Ink Preferred card, you are limited to using those points only as cash back. So the Sapphire Preferred is like a superhero card that supercharges your cash-back points into becoming Ultimate Rewards points. If you played a lot of Super Mario Bros. (all the iterations!) in the ’90s like I did, this is the equivalent of Mario being normal big Mario (cash-back points) but then being supercharged to have firepower or the raccoon tail (Ultimate Rewards points).

Benefits:

• 60,000 Ultimate Rewards points welcome bonus
• Gets you into the “supercharged” Ultimate Rewards points ecosystem that means you can transfer points to Hyatt, United, Southwest, and other travel partners
• $50 annual hotel credit for hotels booked through the Chase travel portal
• Earns 3x on dining purchases
• Earns 3x on online grocery purchases (this usually includes curbside-pickup orders)
• Earns 5x on travel purchased through the Chase travel portal
• Earns 2x on all other travel purchases
• Primary rental-car collision insurance and a bunch of other trip insurance benefits, like reimbursement for lost luggage

Things to be aware of:

• $95 annual fee
• If you don’t want to keep this card after you’ve held it for one year, you can downgrade to a Freedom no-annual-fee card and keep the account open instead of closing it, which helps your credit score.
• Chase lets you have either the Sapphire Preferred OR the Sapphire Reserve, but not both at the same time. If you are just getting started but know you’re going to have at least $300 in cash travel purchases coming up and/or you want the extra benefits the Reserve offers and think the $550 annual fee is worth it, you may want to consider getting the Reserve instead of the Preferred. I’ve been doing this for a long time, so I have the Reserve and not the Preferred, and I love my Reserve, but the $550 annual fee is generally a hard sell for beginners, so there’s absolutely nothing wrong with getting the Preferred when you’re just starting! I still recommend it as the best starter card even though I don’t have one right now myself.
• Chase lets you earn a bonus for any Sapphire card only once every 48 months. So if you meet your spending requirement and get your bonus points in, say, November 2023, you won’t be eligible to apply for either another Sapphire Preferred or a Sapphire Reserve until December 2027—even if you downgraded the Sapphire you already held or closed the account entirely in the meantime. This is why it’s critical to make sure you’re picking which Sapphire card makes the most sense for you, because once you do, you’re limited to that card for 48 months.

If you have ANY kind of small business at all (and if not, skip to the next one)

Chase Ink Business Cash or Chase Ink Business Unlimited. Neither of these cards has an annual fee, and they each have a 75,000-point welcome bonus, which is great! [UPDATE: In Fall 2023, these bonuses are up to 90,000 points. With no annual fee! Jump on these if you can!]

Those points can be moved into your Sapphire (or later on, your Ink Preferred) account and supercharged into becoming Ultimate Rewards points. So in theory these cards are each even better deals than the Sapphire Preferred, because there’s no annual fee and the bonuses are bigger. They also have great earning potential, because the Ink Cash gets you 5x per dollar spent at office-supply stores, on cable, internet, and phone bills, and the Ink Unlimited gets you 1.5x on every purchase, period.

If you have a small business or a small side hustle, you’re eligible. And if you’re thinking about starting up a small side hustle, do it! You’ll be eligible to apply for a business card. If you haven’t been thinking about starting up a small side hustle, it’d honestly be worth doing just to get these cards.

Business cards are a critical part of a good long-term miles-and-points strategy because if you’re eligible to apply for them, you can rack up points much faster. Why? Most business cards don’t count against your 5/24 status.

A Brief Interruption to Explain 5/24 Status

Wait, what is 5/24 status?

If you’re just starting to earn miles and points and haven’t opened any new cards in a while, this probably won’t pertain to you just yet, but it’s something you definitely need to know about.

Chase has a rule that they won’t approve you for new Chase cards if you’ve had 5 or more new accounts opened within the past 24 months. So people refer to that as the 5/24 rule. (I just literally say “five twenty-four” but some people call it “five over twenty-four” or “five-in-twenty-four.” Whatever makes you happy.) This means that you have to think strategically about how you space out your applications with Chase and the other banks so that you don’t max out your number of new accounts too quickly and then get effectively blocked from getting any more Chase cards for a long time.

Other banks don’t have this clear of a rule, which can be good and bad. It’s good because you might be able to get approved for another bank’s cards even though you’ve had a decent number of recent applications (but then again, you might not). You always have a chance, or at least it feels like you do. But it’s bad because the application process is more opaque and you don’t really know what your odds of approval are at all. My husband and I have the same credit scores and history, and I was approved for a Citi Premier on the same day he was denied for one. Neither of us had had a Citi card in the past five years before that. (Make it make sense?) So at least with Chase, you can pretty much count on what their rules are, even if they feel strict.

The upshot with the 5/24 rule is that you’ll want to include business cards in your applications whenever you can, as sort of intermediate layers in between personal-card applications, so you can space out the personal cards as much as possible. Personal cards count as part of the 5, but most business cards don’t. So if you apply for 3 personal cards and 3 business cards over a 2-year period, you’re at 3/24 and you’re eligible to get more Chase cards if you want. But if you applied for 6 personal cards over a 2-year period, Chase would deny any applications. You’d have to wait until 2 cards fell off the 24-month clock to be able to apply for any more Chase cards.

And to be very clear, business cards don’t count against your 5/24 status, but you do still have to be under 5/24 to be approved for a Chase business card. Got it?

Okay, now back to the best cards to get.

#1 Best card with lounge access included (my current favorite card)

Capital One Venture X. If you’re interested in getting access to airport lounges to make traveling more enjoyable, this card is essential! The Venture X comes with Priority Pass lounge access, which means you and up to two guests can get into any lounges in the Priority Pass network for free. The Venture X also allows you to add up to four authorized users on your card for free, and each of those authorized users can have two guests, as well, so if you do your math correctly and plot this out, you could get a lot of family members in for free. [UPDATE: In Fall 2023, the bonus on this card is a whopping 90,000 Venture miles instead of the normal 75,000! If you’ve been thinking about applying, now is a great time.]

One thing to think about: Adding someone as an authorized user needs to be done with their permission, and you need to be sure that you’re only benefitting their credit history by associating them with your account. Don’t add someone and then forget to pay your bill, because that will reflect poorly on them as well as on you. Only take others along for a good ride, ok?

Another thing to think about: If you have a big family, you may be thinking that you need to add your spouse as your authorized user so you can get all your kids in the lounge for free with you. But I generally advise not to add your spouse/partner as an authorized user because it complicates their 5/24 status. Basically, any time Chase sees a credit-card account in your history, that initially counts as 1 of your 5 slots in the 24-month period. When you become an authorized user on someone else’s card, that shows up in Chase’s system as a real new account, even though you know that it’s just being an authorized user, not a primary cardholder. But if you argue with them (in a nice way) and ask that it shouldn’t be considered a new account, since you’re really just an authorized user, they’ll usually cut that from their consideration and give you back that one slot out of your 5/24. But you’d have to call Chase (ew, phone calls) to ask them to take that authorized-user account out of consideration when they’re approving you for your next card, and it’s not guaranteed that they will, and it would be a shame to waste a 5/24 slot on just being someone’s authorized user, right? I prefer to just avoid the whole hassle and not add anyone as an authorized user. So think about maybe making one of your kids an authorized user and seeing that as an opportunity to also build their credit history along the way. Capital One doesn’t have a minimum age requirement for authorized users. Then your authorized-user kid can get two of their siblings in as guests. Problem solved.

The Venture X also gets you unlimited visits into the Capital One Lounge at DFW, DEN, and IAD (and will later get you into their new lounge at LAS, when it opens), which look amazing. I got my first chance to check out the lounge at DFW in October and it was phenomenal. Definitely my favorite lounge in the US so far.

Benefits:

• 75,000 Capital One Venture miles (transferable to travel partners)
• $300 annual credit for travel booked through the Capital One portal (I like to use this for hotel bookings I can’t use points for)
• Earns 2x on every purchase
• Primary rental-car coverage
• Priority Pass & Plaza Premium lounge access
• 10,000 bonus miles on every card anniversary
• $100 Global Entry or TSA PreCheck credit (can be used for anyone, not just the cardholder)
• Earns 10x on hotels & rental cars booked through the Capital One portal and 5x on flights booked through the portal
• Price-drop protection on flights booked through the portal

If you’re just beginning and in your first six months to a year you’ve gotten a CSP, an Ink or two, and a Venture X, you’re in great shape and you will probably have learned a lot more about traveling using miles and points and be ready to branch out into other card options.

Two Other Really Important Things to Consider

If you fly Southwest and want to earn the Southwest Companion Pass

If you’re just starting with miles and points and want to earn the Southwest Companion Pass, be sure that you leave at least one 5/24 slot open in preparation for applying for two of the Southwest cards in the fourth quarter of the calendar year you’re in. The Companion Pass can be an incredible value, and the absolute best time to apply for cards that will earn it for you is in the fall. So you need to think ahead and make sure that you won’t be above 4/24 in October. Let’s say you are currently at 4/24. Then you can apply for a Southwest business card first, which won’t count against your 5/24 status, and apply for a Southwest personal card 31 days later, which will take you to 5/24. If you were currently at 3/24, it wouldn’t matter which card you applied for first, but if you only have one available slot left, you need to apply for the business card first so you don’t go over. I’ll cover the process for getting the Companion Pass in a later post, and why it’s so valuable. But for now all you need to be sure to do is leave that one 5/24 slot open.

Tip for people who have a Player 2

If you have a second person who also wants to travel using miles and points, you can coordinate which cards you apply for so you can each take advantage of referral bonuses.

Here’s how that works.

If you, Player 1, get a Chase Sapphire Preferred first, then have your Player 2 get a Capital One Venture X first instead of also getting the CSP.

Then once you’ve each gotten your first cards and are getting close to meeting the spending requirements, refer each other for the card you each already have. Then you’ll each get the new bonus points for the new cards you’re getting AND you’ll get referral points for the cards you already have and referred each other for. As long as the referral offer is the same as the publicly available offers online, you’re coming out ahead. This can really be great whenever the referral bonuses are high. For example, the referral bonus for the Ink Cash and Ink Unlimited has been 40,000 points for a while now. That’s huge!

If you were to each get a Sapphire Preferred at the same time, you’d lose out on those referral points.

Questions? Drop them in the comments!