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Capital One Spark Cash Plus $1200 Cash Back ⓘ Affiliate Earn a one-time cash bonus of $1,200 after $30K spend in the first 3 months. (Rates & Fees)$150 Annual Fee Click Here to Apply This is an affiliate offer. Frequent Miler may earn a commission if you are approved for this offer Recent better offer: Expired 3/14/22: $3K after $50K spend in 6 months FM Mini Review: This may be a good option for business owners who prefer simple cash back rewards. Note that this is a pay-in-full card, so your balance is due in full every month. Earning rate: 2% everywhere ✦ 5% on hotels and rental cars booked via Capital One Travel Base: 2% Card Info: Mastercard issued by CapOne. This card has no foreign currency conversion fees. Big spend bonus: Get $150 annual fee refunded every year you spend at least $150,000 Noteworthy perks: No foreign transaction fees ✦ No preset spending limit |
For Capital One products listed on this page, some of the above benefits are provided by Visa(R) or Mastercard(R) and may vary by product. See the respective Guide to Benefits for details, as terms and exclusions apply.
able to convert cashback to points?
I think that your value calculation is treating the opportunity cost of spending as too high if $50k * (opportunity cost -2x) + 300k points -$150 = $2350.
If the points are valued at 1 cent each (on the low side if one has another Capital one card to transfer to partners), then the opportunity cost of spending comes to 3 cents per dollar.
Most of us can’t get 3 cents per dollar on unbounded spend, and most MS opportunities cost less than that (e.g. taxes are under 2 cents per dollar).
I just found your discussion of how these bonuses are calculated at https://frequentmiler.com/credit-card-signup-bonus-estimation-details/
While I’m not sold on the combination of 3 cpp opportunity cost and 1 cpp redemption value, I can see the argument for each individually. Still, if one is willing to get a first year 3% card for the opportunity cost, it seems reasonable to also be willing to get a venture card for the 1.45 cent redemption value.
We use 1 cent per point valuation for Capital One’s cash back cards because that’s the most common use of rewards on those cards.
We use a 3% opportunity cost for spend with the idea that an alternative is to sign up for the Discover It Miles card to get 3% for a year. When we first rolled out this calculation we used 2%, but that caused weird stuff to happen: some cards earn more than 2% equivalent and so by using 2% as the comparison, offers with higher spend requirements looked more valuable. We switched to 3% to correct for that problem.