Chase Freedom Flex vs. Chase Freedom Unlimited: 5% Bonus vs. 1.5% Non-Bonus

what's up everybody logan alec here with a comparison between the chase freedom unlimited credit card and the chase freedom flex credit card i reviewed both of these cards in their own respective review videos there will be links to each of those in the description below if after watching this video you want a fuller more robust analysis of each of these cards specifically be sure to check out each of their review videos uh but in this video of course i'm simply comparing these two products because one question i received a lot is which one you should get out of these two cards in the chase freedom line so i thought i would take a closer look at these two cards so in this video i will discuss how they're similar how they're different and then at the end of the video i will discuss the kinds of people that the freedom flex might be a better pick for as well as the kinds of folks the freedom unlimited might be a better pick for so let's get right into it first i want to go over the cash back rewards you can get with each of these cards both the freedom unlimited and the freedom flex offer five percent cash back on travel booked through chase ultimate rewards plus three percent cash back at drug stores and restaurants including dine in takeout and delivery now the freedom flex also comes with a five percent cash back in certain bonus categories each quarter so for example in the first quarter 2021 the five percent bonus category was wholesale club streaming services and internet cable and phone services we're currently in the second quarter the bonus categories for this quarter are gas stations and home home improvement stores they should announce the categories for the third quarter shortly before the end of june these bonus categories are not available with the freedom unlimited but on the flip side the freedom unlimited comes with 1.5 cashback on all non-bonus purchases compared to just a flat 1 cashback on non-bonus purchases with the freedom flex you can see the information summarized in this table both cards are the same in the first three rows the key difference is getting that quarterly bonus category versus getting an extra half percent cash back on other purchases that aren't included in one of the other categories now to be clear there are generally unlimited rewards with both of these cars okay the one exception is that the freedom flex card only provides five percent cashback in the quarterly bonus categories on up to fifteen hundred dollars in purchases per quarter so that's seventy five dollars in bonus rewards quarterly after that the rewards you get for those bonus categories will just revert to the base one percent rate which really cuts into how much you can actually get out of the rotating bonus category now it's a tough choice right i mean without looking at your particular spending situation it's tough to say whether the chase freedom flexes bonus categories will make up for its lower cash back rate on non-bonus purchases but i would point out that neither the freedom unlimited nor the freedom flex has a great base cash back rate on those non-bonus purchases obviously the freedom unlimited is 1.5 percent is better than the freedom flex is one percent but you may also want to look at the city double cash which comes with no annual fleet fee and a flat two percent cash back on all purchases one percent when you make your purchase and another percent when you pay your bill there is a link in the description below to that card as well as a link to my review of that card so if you pair the city double cash with the freedom flex and the one percent doesn't make much of a difference you can simply use the freedom flex for travel restaurants drug stores and the rotating bonus category and then use the double cash for everything else so then you're not losing anything with the freedom flex compared to the freedom unlimited on the other hand let's say this is going to be your first credit card then that 1.5 might be more important since you won't have another card to use for purchases that don't fall under one of the bonus categories there are a few more minor perks that come with both cards first you'll get five percent uh on all lift rides and subscriptions through the end of next march so nearly a full year this doesn't apply to things like gift cards and car rentals but for day to day lift usage you should get that five percent back whether you have a freedom flex or a freedom unlimited there are no limits restrictions etc on those extra rewards so that's a really helpful perk for anyone who uses a lot of rideshare services either you use lyft already or you're willing to switch to get that cash back another thing i want to mention is the doordash dash pass subscription you'll get three months free plus nine additional months at fifty percent off when you get a new freedom flex or freedom unlimited card and that essentially removes the delivery fee on orders from eligible restaurants with a subtotal of 12 or more that subscription applies to doordash as well as caviar it would usually cost 10 dollars per month but if you get it through your freedom flex or freedom unlimited then you'll only end up spending forty five dollars instead of one hundred and twenty dollars for your first year zero dollars for the first three months and then five dollars for each of the nine months after that one thing i highlighted in each of the individual reviews i did for these cards is the opportunity to transfer points to a chase sapphire preferred or sapphire reserve card you can do this from the app or the website and chase will let you transfer unlimited points between cards as long as they belong to you or someone in your household the advantage here is that the sapphire preferred provides an extra 25 credit when you use points to book for travel through chase and that bumps up to 50 with the sapphire reserve the sapphire cards only come with a base one percent cash back rate on non-bonus purchases so let's say you have a sapphire reserve and a freedom unlimited now you can get one point five percent right back on non-bonus purchases uh by using your freedom unlimited okay instead of your sapphire reserve and then you can transfer those points from your freedom unlimited to your sapphire reserve and get that 50 bonus on that 1.5 percent so that's an additional 7.75 percentage points uh so when you transfer the points you earned on your freedom unlimited over d them for travel on your chase sapphire reserve account that essentially turns into uh 2.25 percent right rewards on non-bonus spending with their freedom unlimited or if you have the freedom flex it will take 1 to 1.5 the same applies to other categories both the freedom unlimited and the freedom flex come with three percent back at drugstores compared to one percent with a sapphire preferred or sapphire reserve and with the extra fifty percent you get from booking travel through chase ultimate rewards on your reserve account you could turn that three percent into 4.5 percent again this works with both the freedom flex and the freedom unlimited obviously their cash back structures are slightly different but you can transfer points from either card to a sapphire preferred or a sapphire reserve and this is a really effective strategy for anyone who adds one of the sapphire cards so if you think there's a chance you might want to upgrade one of these later on you can save up some of your points right on your freedom flex your freedom unlimited and convert them into even more travel rewards in the future on one of the sapphire cards all right let's talk about some of the other benefits as well as fees both freedom cards are currently running the same offer for new card holders so you'll get a 200 bonus if you spend 500 in the first three months after opening either one of these cards they also come with zero percent apr for the first 15 months so you won't pay any interest for those 15 months as long as you make the minimum payment every cycle and you pay off any remaining balance at the end of the promotional period similarly both cards are offering five percent cash back on lift rise through the end of march 2022 and neither one comes with an annual fee unlike the sapphire preferred and the reserve which run ninety five dollars and five hundred fifty dollars per year respectively uh so you won't have to worry about whether you'll spend enough to offset the cost or anything like that that being said both cards do charge a foreign transaction fee of three percent which basically means that you should make sure to get another card before traveling outside of the united states three percent might not sound like a lot but it can certainly add up quickly especially if you're spending a lot of money while traveling and it's really easy these days to find cars with no foreign transaction fees for example either the sapphire cards i mentioned there's also a link in the description to some good options for those of you who are looking for a card uh for international travel that don't charge a foreign transaction fee all right at this point you're probably wondering which of these cards i would recommend the answer is going uh to really depend on your own spending and your overall credit card strategy so now i'm going to discuss two situations in which the freedom flex might be a better fit for you and then two situations where the freedom unlimited might be the better bet keep in mind that really this analysis uh is driven primarily by comparing the freedom unlimited uh 0.5 percentage point advantage on non-bonus spending versus the freedom flex's five percent cash back on rotating quarterly categories that you don't get with the unlimited all right situation number one with the freedom flex makes more sense is if you already have a double cash card or another card for rewards on general spending in that case the freedom flex is going to be a better choice than freedom unlimited because you will only be using it for the bonus categories anyway so the first use case for the freedom flex or the freedom unlimited is for someone who already has another credit card that they use for non-bonus spending that matches or exceeds the 1.5 percent you would get with the freedom unlimited now i want to emphasize here right that if you do have a sapphire preferred or a sapphire reserve that can effectively turn the freedom unlimited 1.5 base cash back rate uh you know into 1.875 percent for the preferred or 2.25 percent for the reserve as discussed previously right uh so in that case you need a car with an even higher cash back rate than that in order to break even compared to the combination of freedom unlimited and one the sapphire cards keep in mind though right of the sapphire uh transfer you're only limited to redeeming those points for travel through chase number two the freedom flex is also gonna be better for people who don't have much spending and that comes out really clearly when you compare the rewards side by side remember the main advantage of the freedom flex is that you get five percent back in the quarterly bonus categories but that only applies to a maximum of fifteen hundred dollars in purchases per quarter okay five percent of fifteen hundred seventy five dollars so over an entire year uh you can only get up to 300 in rewards through uh getting five percent cash back on bonus categories right and that's if you max them out every single quarter so let's assume you're able to do that you will earn three hundred dollars on six thousand dollars of spending over the course of a year for those five percent bonus categories that same three hundred dollars would only get you ninety dollars right as non-bonus spending on the freedom unlimited and to make back that 210 difference you would need to have forty two thousand dollars in non-bonus spending in a year with the freedom unlimited card so the point is uh that if you're generally able to max out these rotating categories with your freedom flex or if you can at least come close that's going to offset a lot of the losses from the 0.5 percentage point difference in the non-bonus spending rate between the flex and the unlimited all right now let's talk about some scenarios with the freedom unlimited might be the better choice to you for you rather than freedom flex the first situation is you were just looking for a starter credit card or something like that if you're in that situation then you'll likely get more overall cash back with the freedom unlimited uh because of the benefits on non-bonus spending okay which you're probably going to have a lot of if you only have one credit card for all of your purchases remember uh non-bonus spending comes with a 0.5 percentage point difference more cash back if you have the freedom unlimited over the freedom flex and on the other hand bonus spending comes with a 3.5 percentage point advantage more to freedom flex up to the quarter limit quarterly limit of course the 3.5 percentage point advantage of the freedom flex on spending in the rotating categories is seven times higher than the freedom unlimited advantage on non-bonus spending at 0.5 percent so when it comes down to it if you will spend at least seven times more in non-bonus categories than you would spend in the rotating categories up to the quarterly limit then you're going to come out ahead with the freedom unlimited if this is your first credit card and you're planning to put most of your general spending on the freedom unlimited then that might be enough to make up for your losses in the rotating bonus categories for example if you're only going to spend an average of two thousand dollars in the bonus categories per year then the difference on those rewards between a freedom flex and a freedom unlimited is only seventy dollars right which you can make up with just fourteen thousand dollars in non-bonus spending on the freedom unlimited right which is only about two thousand dollars a month all right the second situation in which the freedom unlimited might make more sense than freedom flex is if you're a big spender due to the limit on quarterly bonus rewards the freedom unlimited is going to be more and more effective as your spending goes up compared to the freedom flex so if you're spending in the bonus categories is under fifteen hundred dollars per quarter your rewards on those purchases will be five percent but if you're planning to spend say six thousand dollars in the bonus categories in each quarter then you're gonna get seventy five dollars on the first fifteen hundred dollars on purchases and only forty five dollars on the remo or on the remaining forty five hundred that adds up to one hundred twenty dollars which means you're only getting an effective cash back rate of two percent which is barely better than what you would have had with the freedom unlimited and the more you spend in the bonus categories beyond the limit the less that initial five percent is going to matter since it only applies to your first fifteen hundred dollars per quarter and obviously if you're spending that much of the bonus categories then you're probably also putting a lot of money into the non-bonus categories which is going to make the freedom unlimited 0.5 percentage point advantage over the freedom flex on non-bonus spending even more important so if summary if you want to start a cart to put all your spending on right maybe you don't want to worry too much about bonus categories and tracking you know the categories per quarter then the freedom unlimited might make more sense for that situation the freedom flex on the other hand requires a little more attention to detail you'll need to activate your bonus categories every quarter and you have to keep track of those in order to remember where to use that card in each new quarter if you want to have a simple credit card set up you don't want to spend much time tracking categories or optimizing rewards the freedom unlimited is going to be an easier option in terms of passively generating cash back now at this point you're still considering getting one of these cards and possibly combining them with one of the sapphire cards i want to highlight that these cards are governed by the chase 524 rule which means that your application will automatically be denied if you've already opened five or more credit cards in the last 24 months this is a strict rule you won't get an exception for having good credit or something like that so if you're in that situation then you'll need to wait until some of those cards have been open for more than 24 months so hopefully this gives you an idea of the differences between these two cards from the chase freedom line they have a lot of similarities as you see in this video but that trade-off right between the bonus categories on the freedom flex and the higher general rewards rate on the freedom unlimited can make this a tough decision as always i want to thank you for watching to the end i really do appreciate your support and i'll see you next time bye

Channel: Logan Allec

Views: 5,692

Keywords: chase bank, chase freedom credit card, chase freedom unlimited credit card, credit card, cash back credit card, chase freedom unlimited, chase freedom unlimited review, credit card review, pros & cons, freedom unlimited credit card, chase sapphire preferred, chase sapphire reserve, chase credit card, chase credit cards, credit card chase, citi doublecash, citi doublecash credit card, credit card review 2021, unlimited vs flex, credit card comparison, comparing credit cards

Id: ihxHTBgRtxs

Length: 14min 46sec (886 seconds)

Published: Sun May 02 2021