I wrote about my Chase Sapphire Reserve application attempts and the ultimate card reconsideration approval. The 1.5 cents Pay Yourself Back feature convinced me to go for the Sapphire Reserve card, and I slowly met the minimum spend, mostly on grocery store purchases. Those purchases coupled to meet the spend requirement and to offset spend via the new Pay Yourself Back feature.
But I made one strategic error. While my grocery store spend in September is enough to cover all the points I intend to cashout thanks to a few gift cards, the $4,000 spend threshold for the signup bonus was only met after the September statement closed. So I’ll have 50,000 points (and then some) posting on my October statement. That’s after the 1.5 PYB feature has already ended on September 30.
Sure, the PYB feature will probably remain available into October and beyond, but we have no idea what the available categories will be, or even if the rate will remain at 1.5 cents.
Typically the method for expediting your points with Chase is by changing the statement due date to result in a quicker statement closing. You can change your account due date online (which then results in a statement close date change). I wanted to hear what the Chase reps would say about this. According to what two reps told me, it won’t be until the following statement that the statement close date actually changes. I went ahead and changed my statement anyway with the hopes that it works. I chose the 26th of the month as my due date with the hopes that it would result in a September 29th close date (that’s what my math says). We’ll see…
(Small update 9/27/20: It appears that my changing the statement date DID work as in my Ultimate Rewards account it’s showing that the signup bonus points will post on my next statement on October 1. Unfortunately, I timed it a bit wrong as I was aiming for September 29-30, but in any case, it seems general idea of changing the statement date could do the trick.)
There’s been some discussion in the comments about the fact that in the PYB interface it shows that you have many more weeks to continue redeeming points. For example, on a grocery purchase in mid-September, it might show that you still have 80 days left to redeem. That seems to imply that grocery purchases made before September 30 will be able to be redeemed into October and beyond. However, my guess is that it won’t work, in practice. I tried getting Chase to comment on Twitter this without much luck.
[Update 9/29/20: In the end, Chase extended the PYB redemptions which renders some of this discussion irrelevant.]
