We had a small credit card win the other day!

Here’s the backstory – since we recently moved back to Canada from the US, we still have our Chase Sapphire Reserve card. We had about $1,300 worth of cash rewards or $1,900 in travel rewards. As you can see, the rewards are worth 1.5x more when you redeem them for travel as opposed to a credit on your statement. We’ve always redeemed them for travel and had planned on using the rewards this year towards our year of traveling.

Since we’re back in Canada, we eventually want to close this credit card account and get a Canadian card but if we close the account, we lose the points. With coronavirus ravaging the world, we’re pretty sure we won’t be traveling any time soon. We’d decided that if we can’t use the points by the renewal date (end of this year) that we’d just take the statement credit and close the account. The annual fee for this card is really high and even higher when you consider we have to pay for it with our weak Canadian dollar.

So a few days ago I was checking our rewards situation in our account and I see a new reward option called ‘Pay Yourself Back.’ Chase introduced this rewards feature in June of 2020 apparently as a response to coronavirus. I’ve read on other blogs that it will be in place until September of this year but I don’t see anything about that on the Chase app so I’m unsure about that.

How it works – Chase is letting you essentially reimburse yourself for any Grocery, Dining or Home Improvement purchases you’ve made in the last 90 days using your rewards at the 1.5x rate. The reimbursement will show as a credit on your statement.

We simply went to the rewards section of the app, selected ‘Pay Yourself Back,’ and all of our eligible purchases showed up with the number of rewards required to be reimbursed for them. We had more than enough purchases to use up all of our rewards and ended up with just over $1,900 USD in credits on our statement.

The great thing about this feature is that unlike when you redeem for travel, you’ve still earned points on the purchase you are being reimbursed for. When you redeem for a flight or hotel stay, you might be “spending” $1,000 worth of points to book, but no rewards are being earned on that booking.

Note – this probably isn’t the best way to redeem rewards in terms of value as Travel Hackers will tell you that you’ll get more value for your rewards if you transfer to an airline partner, but with no travel plans in our future anytime soon we didn’t want to have to decide where to transfer these points and risk them expiring. Our situation is a bit unique knowing we need to cancel this card eventually; but if you’re like us, and know you won’t be traveling any time soon and want to use the benefit, the Pay Yourself Back feature is a great alternative.

This was a huge win for us as this essentially alleviated approximately $2,600 CAD in expenses this month. It also means we’ll be using our Chase card for just about every purchase we can right up until the end of September so that we can use the reward feature again before it goes away.