The Three Best Credit Cards

In their “100 Best” issue, Money Magazine recently rate the three best credit cards for various purposes.

First off, Discover More is the best card if you carry a balance. Not only do they have a 0% balance transfer offer, but they also cap the transfer fee at $75 (the cap has been removed). And if you don’t pay it off before the introductory period expires, their rates aren’t crazy. Moreover, you could also just transfer your balance to another card at that point if you need to.

Next up… Blue Cash from American Express is the best cash back reward card for big spenders. I’ve talked about this before, but Blue Cash pays up to 5% cash back on your purchases, thought the highest reward level don’t kick in until you’ve spend $6,500. Another nice thing about Blue Cash is that they automatically credit your rewards to your account, though they only do so once per year.

Finally, the Chase Freedom card is the #1 reward credit card for smaller spenders. As I’ve noted previously, this card pays 3% rewards on purchases in the three of 15 categories (including things like groceries, gas, and pet supplies) on which you spend the most each month. The only downside here is that the reward falls back to the base 1% once you’ve made $600 in eligible purchases in a month. A particularly nice feature of this card is that whenever you amass $200 in rewards, they throw in another $50. This effectively increases the reward rates to 1.25% and 3.75%.

All in all, this list is in close agreement with my own views. In fact, we have both an Amex Blue Cash and a Chase Freedom card. We use the Amex card whenever possible, with the Chase card serving as a backup.