New Ink Bold Card Benefits and 50,000 Point Sign-up Bonus
Update: Some offers mentioned below are no longer available. View the current offers here.
On Friday I initially wrote about Ink Bold's 50,000 offer going away and new card benefits being announced. Today they officially launched the new card, which also has a 50,000 point sign-up bonus as well as some interesting new benefits.
The major difference is that the old offer (which I also applied for), gave spend threshold spend bonuses: “Annually, once you exceed $25,000 in net purchases you will receive 7,500 bonus points, once you exceed $50,000 in net purchases you will receive an additional 15,000 bonus points, and once you exceed $100,000 in net purchases you will receive an additional 25,000 bonus points.”
The new offer has category bonuses:
Earn 5X points per $1 on the first $50,000 spent annually at office supply stores, on cable and wireless service, and landline communications
Earn 2X points per $1 on the first $50,000 spent annually on gas and hotels
Additionally, the new card will give Priority Pass membership and waive foreign transaction fees.
So which offer is better? It depends on how much you spend, what you spend it on and what other cards you currently have. For example, the Priority Pass and no foreign transaction fees doesn't particularly appeal to me since I get a higher version of Priority Pass (Select) with my Amex Platinum and that card and my Sapphire Preferred both don't have foreign transaction fees.
This new offer does make a lot of sense if you have a lot of office supply/cable/wireless/gas and hotel spend. If you spend a lot on other expenses, getting grandfathered into the older spend bonus categories might have made more sense, since you can earn an additional 47,500 points a year if you spend $100,000 a year or more.
The good thing is that Chase is pretty flexible. Even if you got the old offer last week, you should probably be able to switch to the new one if you want- just send them a secure message and add in a reason (like I really want the spend bonuses and no foreign transaction fees). I think I may keep my spend bonuses and then try to switch to the new product. Either way, it's interesting to see Chase getting very competitive with Amex' Business Rewards Gold card! I wouldn't be surprised to see Amex take the foreign transaction fees off that card as well.
New offer details.