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Chase Ink Business Preferred: Mini-Review / Overview
The Chase Ink Business Preferred credit card has long been the first business credit card recommended to anyone getting started in miles and points that qualifies for a business credit card.
It earns 3x Chase Ultimate Rewards points on all travel, advertising, and shipping, as well on Internet, cable and phone services, up to $150,000 a year. For my own business, these categories work very well, as I spend a fair bit on both travel and advertising. 3X Ultimate Rewards on these categories, for me, results in an ROI on my spend of north of 5%.
I value Chase Ultimate Rewards points at 1.75 cents each, because of the range of transfer partners available to maximize the return. The floor, when spent for travel, is 1.25 cents a point (1.5 cents if you also carry a Chase Sapphire Reserve card) and you can of course get returns of 2-4 cents per point fairly easily when you transfer points wisely to airline partners or to the World of Hyatt program. Hyatt is my favorite way to use URs.
Today, Chase changed the offer on the signup bonus for this card going forward, in a way that some people will like, but that I suspect will move the card out of reach for a majority.
The New Chase Ink Business Preferred Bonus Offer:
Get 100,000 Ultimate Rewards points as a bonus when you spend $15,000 in your first 3 months.
Wow, that’s a pretty high spend threshold! You’d need to comfortably average $5,000 a month in business spend to be able to hit the bonus. While the extra 20,000 points over the previous standard offer is nice, that only required $5,000 in spend in 3 months. I suspect that many who would have happily gotten this card under the old offer will find themselves looking instead to the no-annual-fee Chase Ink Unlimited or the Chase Ink Cash, both of which offer 50,000 Ultimate Rewards points after just $3,000 in spend in 3 months.
Why the Change?
I have to admit I’m a bit caught off guard by this offer. Not in the sense that I don’t get the motivation. Clearly Chase has run the numbers and found that too many people were getting the 80,000 point bonus and then not spending enough to be profitable. So they are thinking “If you have real business spend, we’ll give you a huge bonus. If you are a small fry, it’s not giving away so many points.”
But if I were Chase, I would have made this a two-tiered offer. Perhaps 50,000 Ultimate Rewards points when you spend $4,000 in your first 3 months and 50,000 more points when you spend an additional $11,000 within your first 6 months. That would have made it so this didn’t have the effect of knocking out anyone that spends $3,000 – $4,000 a month from even wanting to apply.
What do you think about this new bonus offer?
Let me know here, on Twitter, or in the private MilesTalk Facebook group.
You can find credit cards that best match your spending habits and bonus categories at Your Best Credit Cards.
New to all of this? The MilesTalk “introduction to miles and points” book, MilesTalk: Live Your Wildest Travel Dreams Using Miles and Points is available on Amazon and at major booksellers.
i got the same 100K pints for $15K spend offer as targeted mailing with an invite code but I already have and use this card.
If I use the invite code is application likely to go through ?
Does chase allow you to have more than one ink preferred?
All income from my business in declared on schedule E under my own SS#
@jonathon: The offer with the invite code is no different than using any public link. You can get one card for a business with an EIN and one with just your SSN, but not two for the same business (and I don’t even really recommend people getting two of the same Chase card at the same time anyway)