With a wallet full of credit cards, it's best practice to commonly assess your credit card portfolio to ensure that the benefits you receive from the cards outweigh the annual fees that you pay. If not, it's time to close that card or cards in most cases.

One of the often overlooked benefits of hotels’ co-branded credit cards are the free night certificates that many come with. In exchange for an often nominal annual fee, you're able to redeem these for a significantly subsidized (read: not truly free!) redemption if you're able strategize these well.

With many hotel programs extending the expiration dates on these free night certificates, many of us find ourselves with a number of certificates and looming expiration dates.

If I had to choose just one card to use for all of my points earnings, I am fairly confident that I would choose the American Express® Gold Card. There’s a lot of compelling reasons why I’d choose the Amex Gold over others.

This workhorse has some of the best earning rates on common spending categories, along with good usable credits.

My last trip was February 2020. My wife and I returned home from an awesome week-long stay at Scrub Island Resort in the British Virgin Islands not knowing that it would be our last trip for a long time. We had tons of trips all over the world planned for 2020 that we would slowly begin cancelling one-by-one: 3 weeks in South Africa, a trip to Chile and Argentina, a few trips to Europe, and tons of domestic trips as well.

Like many of you, we’ve been pretty cooped up for the last year or so.

The Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card gets a lot of love in the world of points and miles, as it should: it’s the best card for beginners to get 99.95% of the time.

With its valuable sign-up bonus, combined with a very reasonable annual fee of $95, whether you’re new to the game or a seasoned professional who’s had it before and want to get it again, the Sapphire Preferred continues to be a terrific card for practically every cardholder.

So hat can you do with all of these points?

Well, the options are literally endless.

If we were to start handing out awards here at MileValue, we can officially declare Chase the winner of some of the most exciting updates in the credit card marketplace for September 2020. Between updating the welcome bonus on the Chase Sapphire Preferred, and improving the Chase Freedom Unlimited® and the introduction of the Chase Freedom Flex℠, Chase has been all over the news in the points and miles world as of late.

And guess what: they’re back in the news again.

As we settle in here at MileValue, we want to take a minute to ask you a few questions in order to better serve you - our readers.

In case you missed it, you can learn more about the MileValue transition.

As we mentioned in the announcement, we have some exciting ideas for serving up new and refreshed content and your feedback can help us make this happen.

10xTravel has acquired MileValue and we are absolutely thrilled about it.

That’s it. That’s both the headline and the story.

We are thrilled to have the opportunity to continue to build upon an amazing and well-respected brand. We are thrilled to engage with a new audience of points & miles enthusiasts.