When Welcome Offers are Hottest
One of the most important things when building your credit card portfolio—whether that’s one card or twenty—is optimizing sign-up bonuses. To me, that generally means waiting for a sign-up bonus that is better than the year-round offer, preferably a lot better. But I’ve found it can be hard to find the best bonuses at any given moment. For that reason, I highlight elevated bonuses each week in our newsletter (sign up here).
But while I’ve been providing some commentary on these bonuses, I’ve noticed it can still be hard to tell at a glance if an offer on a given card is average or excellent. So I’ve added a new element: the welcome offer heat scale.
The Heat Scale 🔥
| The Rest | For the Right Person | Keeper | Elite | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Special | 🔥 | 🔥🔥 | 🔥🔥🔥 | 🔥🔥🔥🔥 |
| Elevated | 🔥 | 🔥🔥 | 🔥🔥🔥 | |
| Good | 🔥 | 🔥 | 🔥🔥 |
The heat scale is there to indicate at a glance how good a new offer is on a given card. It’s a 1-3 scale, but with a little bonus heat when the best-of-the-best cards have best-of-the-best offers. The scale is to try to keep my ratings consistent and predictable, but I may adjust slightly in rare cases.
How does it work?
The heat scale is made up of two parts: card quality and bonus quality.
Card quality
I break this down into four categories: elite cards, keeper cards, cards that make sense for the right person, and the rest. Everyone has different circumstances, so it’s impossible to create a universal ranking of cards. But for the purposes of the newsletter, I’d break it down like so:
Elite cards: top-tier options with incredible value and relatively simple perks
Keeper cards: enduring value with minimal cost
For the right person: difficult to recoup the annual fee without loyalty to a brand or careful tracking of credits
The rest: obscure, low recurring value (foreign airlines, niche programs)
Bonus quality
This measures how a bonus stacks up against the card’s offer history. For this, I use both my personal knowledge and memory, but I also try to research and check Awardwallet’s excellent trackers (Amex, Chase, and Citi).
I divide these into three categories.
Good: A solid offer, worth considering.
Elevated: Well above typical, a strong time to apply.
Special: Best-ever or market-setting, rare opportunities.
How should you use the heat scale?
The heat scale is an at-a-glance indicator of how good an offer is. But you’ll still want to do your own research to see if the card makes sense for you, and if the bonus is right for you.
Remember that these ratings are just my best estimates. Things can always change. I thought the recent 100k + $500 bonus on the Chase Sapphire Reserve might have been the best credit card bonus I’d ever seen… until they dropped a 125k-point offer a few weeks later. I also personally jumped on a great 100k offer on the Sapphire Preferred, only to see a few weeks later that I could have had an extra $500 on the Reserve. Whoops.
Lazy Take 🦥
So next time you see 🔥 next to a welcome offer in the newsletter, you’ll know it’s not just one of my hot takes. With the heat scale, you’ll always know when an offer is just fine… and when it’s blazing hot.