As I’ve discussed several times on this blog before, the Chase Freedom is among my favorite credit cards available today. Still, with that being said, it’s not a card I actually use all that often. In fact, in a given year I’ll typically only put a total of $6,000 of spend on the card.
The reason I limit my spending on the Chase Freedom card is simply because it’s not that good in most situations. In fact, on everyday spending, the Chase Freedom card only offers 1% cash back on purchases. Compare that to the Citi Double Cash card, which offers 2% cash back on all purchases and it’s easy to see that there are better cards available. However, the Chase Freedom card has an ace up its sleeve.
Every quarter, Chase offers card holders an opportunity to earn 5% cash back on specific rotating points categories. The benefit is limited to just the first $1,500 of quarterly qualifying spend which means, you can earn up to $75 of cash back a quarter for a total of $300 a year! Now, that’s not bad for a card that doesn’t come with an annual fee.
Activate The Chase Freedom Q3’20 5% Cash Back Quarterly Bonus
To earn all that extra cash back there is just one, quite small, catch. The catch is that card holders have to manually “Activate” the 5% quarterly cash back benefit each quarter. Thankfully, Chase makes activation of this benefit incredibly easy.
The easiest way to activate the 5% cash back benefits is to click on a 1-click activation link found on a promotional email. These emails come about every 2 weeks from the first available activation date through the end of the quarter.
The emails typically begin with a title that reminds you that your activation is required. Then, below the text, Chase usually includes some card imagery hovering over a background that relates to that quarter’s categories. Below the inviting imagery is a 1-click activation button that you can click to activate the benefit.
Once clicked, Chase will redirect you to a webpage which confirm activation and highlights that quarter’s bonus categories.
As you’ll see above, for Q3’20, Chase is offering 5% Cash Back on the first $1,500 of quarterly purchases at Amazon.com and at Whole Foods Market.
Chase Freedom Q3’20 5% Cash Back Quarterly Bonus Categories
Overall, the Chase Freedom 5% Cash Back Quarterly Bones categories have been quite easy to maximize this year. For Q1’20, Chase offered 5% cash back on gas station and telecom/streaming purchases. In Q2’20, as COVID-19 kept most of us inside, Chas offered 5% cash back on grocery store, fitness clubs, and streaming service purchases. Now, for Q3’20, Chase is offering 5% cash back on Amazon.com and Whole Foods purchases.
Sometimes it can be easy to maximize the quarterly bonus as $1,500 is actually quite a lot of money. However, this year, Chase has made maximizing this benefit incredibly easy. What I especially like about this quarter is that you can essentially maximize this benefit by buying anything from Amazon. Amazon literally sells everything! Even better, if you aren’t ready to pick something, you could always just buy a $1,500 Amazon gift card and defer the purchase until later. No matter what, maximizing the 5% cash back bonus this quarter should be a breeze.
How To Get Maximum Value?
As noted above, if you max out this benefit each quarter you’ll earn about $75 of cash back a quarter or $300 for the year. However, you can actually do a lot better than that.
If you also maintain a Chase Sapphire card account, you can transfer your cash back ‘points’ into Ultimate Rewards points at a $.01:1 value. So, that $300 of cash back is actually worth 30,000 Ultimate Rewards points. Considering most of us assign a value of at least $0.015 per Ultimate Rewards points, that bonus ends up being worth about $450.
Next, if you transfer those Ultimate Rewards points to the United MileagePlus program at a 1:1 transfer rate, those points could be worth upwards of $0.07 each. In that case, you would be getting about $2,100 of value from $6,000 of total spend. That represents a 35% return!
Final Thoughts
If you don’t already carry a Chase Freedom card I’d highly recommend looking into it. The card isn’t a great everyday card and you really need to buy into the Chase ecosystem to fully enjoy its benefits, but it’s overall a great card nonetheless.
In years past I would have mentioned that sometimes Chase makes it difficult to maximize the quarterly bonus categories, but that just isn’t the case for 2020. So far, it’s been incredibly easy to maximize the 5% cash back benefit. Furthermore, I expect Chase to include department stores in Q4’20 which means that trend will continue though the end of the year.
