Short answer: it depends.
Before you proceed, consider these two important factors:
- What’s the impact to my credit score of opening up one or more cards?
- How will I manage to keep track of spending and budgets between multiple cards?
Consider also whether you’re looking for free travel vs. cashback, vs. a unique circumstance.
Strategy 1: Simplicity
Team Travel: Choose your points ecosystem, and put all spending on the universal 2X everywhere card. (Womp womp Chase fans, 1.5X for you). Importantly, you should make sure you’re in a transferable points ecosystem. Other banks have “Travel” credit cards that amount to effectively 1 cent per point (1cpp) redemptions on travel purchases, and you’d be better served with a higher cashback earning card.
Another type of travel card to avoid is the travel portal cards (Expedia, One Key, etc.). Returns from these aren’t any better than a standard cashback card.
Finally unless you live near a hub for the “budget” airline carriers or are for some reason loyal to a budget carrier, there’s no reason to have any of their cards. Upgrades are cheap and worth paying for if you have to fly e.g. Spirit.
Team cashback: find the highest cashback card you can with high annual spend limits (Paypal/Apple/RobinHood Gold, BofA Unlimited cash with Platinum/Platinum Honors Rewards, Citi Double Cash or Synchrony Premiere, Amex Blue Biz Cash, US Bank XYZ), and go forth and spend.
Team special circumstances: You may be looking at a card to reduce or eliminate the cost in one area of your life. Plenty of companies offer a “use anywhere” credit card with rewards that are usable only at their locations. Airline cards may be valuable for status chasers. Verizon or Best Buy have credit cards with rewards that can be redeemed for phones or personal tech. MGM’s card rewards can be used for casino experiences. If you’re a degenerate, there are crypto rewards cards out there for you.
One more callout: I generally don’t love most co-branded cards, and I’d rarely suggest opening a store card. Both Target and Amazon offer credit cards that can be an awesome play if your household 1) is a loyal shopper at either respective store and 2) has a new baby and/or young children. They’re not quite cashback cards, but each retailer is such a mainstay of family life in America that they might as well be. Personally, using an Amazon card for several years’ of formula and diaper subscription orders, grocery deliveries, plus everyday spend, racked up thousands of dollars in “Amazon points” which are as good as cash in my household. That stack of store cash is nice to have when the family budget needs a pressure release valve after your kid has yet again outgrown the new shoes you bought three weeks ago.
Strategy 2: 2-4 card wallet
Whether you’re team cashback or team points, this is pretty simple: Pick your highest 2-3 spending categories in your yearly budget, and find a card or two with high earning multipliers.
P1 might carry the 2-3 card combo and just give P2 the 2x catch-all card. It’s a little easier to do this for team cashback because you don’t need to worry about matching your points currencies. Travel hackers will need to do a bit more coordination ahead of time.
Example: P1 carries the Chase Sapphire Preferred or Reserve for 3X on dining, grocery deliveries, and travel (note, travel is only 2X on the CSP 🙁 ). They additionally carry a Chase Freedom Flex for the rotating categories. P2 has the Freedom unlimited to catch their other spending (bills, gas) at 1.5X.
Strategy 3: To everything, churn, churn, churn…
Once you have more than 4 credit cards in your wallet, you might as well jump in… Ideally in this scenario, P1 and P2 are generally on the same page regarding finances and who has responsibility for managing all of the family’s silly optimization schemes. They take turns signing up for new credit cards with high sign-up bonuses and putting as much household spend on each card as possible until the minimum spending requirement is met. Rinse and repeat. For most 2-player households with average spending habits, this will keep both players under the Chase 5/24 eligibility rule while collecting a pretty nice stack of travel points.
Note that there are relatively few cashback cards that offer significant (>$300) sign-up bonuses, so team cashback is going to have to decide whether swapping out cards and updating saved payment methods is worth an additional $100-250 per new card. The heavy cashback game is more useful for households and small businesses with high ongoing category spend that can be paid via credit card, or for hobbyist optimizers looking to get creative.