Why I Love Mint.com & Downgrading The Chase Sapphire Preferred

REMINDER: The British Airways 100,000 Avios Credit Card offer ends this Thursday, June 7th.

Link To Sign Up For The British Airways 100,000 Avios Point Offer

Why I Love Mint.com

I’ve talked about the many benefits of Mint.com, but it still continues to surprise me with its usefulness.

If I had not received this email from Mint.com informing me that Chase had charged me the annual fee on my Sapphire Preferred Card, I honestly probably wouldn’t have even noticed.

I thought the annual fee on my Card wasn’t due until July or August!

For those of you not familiar with Mint.com, it is a free online money manager aka an extremely powerful online checkbook for all your checking, savings, investment, loans, 401k, credit cards accounts, etc.

Mint.com tracks all of your money in 1 place.

Whenever you get charged ATM fees, Bank service fees, or Credit Card fees, they will email you.

Mint.com is also EXTREMELY useful for tracking spending requirements.

So if you recently got any Credit Cards and have to spend X amount of dollars in a certain time period, with Mint.com you can sort by Credit Card as well as time period to see just exactly how much you have spent.

Anyways I highly suggest you sign up for Mint.com because it is 100% free and I can guarantee it will save you money by informing you of useless fees that you are being charged by your Bank!

Link To Sign Up For Mint.com

Downgrading The Chase Sapphire Preferred

After I realized that Chase had already charged the annual fee on the Chase Sapphire Preferred, I decided it was time to downgrade to the free version of the Card and get a refund on the annual fee that I had been charged.

I simply called the number on the back of my Sapphire Preferred, and explained that I had been charged the annual fee and that although I liked the Card, I could not justify paying the annual fee, therefore I would like an annual fee waiver.

Now granted I really should have called in a few months ago and tried to cancel it, so as to get transferred to a retention specialist and negotiate some bonus miles or perhaps some kind of statement credit however when I called this evening I was told they could not offer me a fee waiver.

Since I already have a Chase Freedom, INK Bold, and United MileagePlus Explorer, I decided to downgrade to the Chase Sapphire which the fee-free version of the Chase Sapphire Preferred.

It still earns 2x Ultimate Rewards points on Dining, but it only earns 1x on Travel and does have a 3% foreign transaction fee.

If you have a Chase Sapphire Preferred and are thinking about downgrading, I suggest the following:

• Call Chase 3 months before your annual fee is due and ask to talk to a retention specialist. See if you can negotiate some bonus points or if they can give you a Statement Credit to keep the Card.
• If you are denied, then when the annual fee is due, downgrade to the Chase Freedom since that has the awesome 5% rotating quarterly categories and has no fee.

Anyways, they said they would downgrade my Sapphire Preferred to a regular Sapphire and refund the annual fee.

Although typically when I downgrade Cards, they just go into my drawer to collect dust, I will probably continue to use the Sapphire since it does earn 2x on Restaurants.

-Parag