If you’re looking for the best cash back credit cards, look no further. In this post, I’ll show you some straightforward recommendations with the credit cards I personally use to get 3-5x points back every purchase.

With 3-5% cash back on each purchase, you’ll get getting the most rebates out of your spending with any card. With that said though, I don’t recommend redeeming your points for cash; instead, consider maximizing your points’ value by utilizing it in travel programs instead.

Spending Categories

Here’s some of the most common spending categories for me (and likely for you as well). As such, the cash back credit cards below will give you 3-5% cash back on these categories:

• Groceries
• Restaurants
• Travel (flights and hotels)
• Internet and cable bills
• Miscellaneous shopping – mostly through Amazon

Two Of The Best Cash Back Credit Cards: Chase Freedom Flex + Amex Blue Cash Everyday

The Chase Freedom Flex is free, and offers quite a bit of perks. These include:

• 5% cash back on select categories. These categories rotate on a quarterly basis and includes things like streaming services or groceries.
• If there’s no 5% cash back for groceries this quarter, I’ll just use the American Express Blue Cash Everyday instead to get 3% back on groceries.
• 5X points (“5X points” and “5% cash back” will be used interchangeably for the rest of this post) on travel booked through the Chase portal. This could be good for some purchases, like economy class seating. But sometimes, purchases through Chase portal is much more expensive, negating the benefits of the 5X points bonus. Make sure to shop around to see if this is worth it though.
• 3% cash back on restaurants. This is huge and used to only be available on high annual fee cards.

The Chase Freedom Flex + American Express Blue Cash Everyday (both free) will take care of all your food needs by providing at least 3% cash back for dining in / eating out.

Chase Freedom Flex will also maximize some of your travel purchases, but you should shop around to see if the Chase portal gives you the best deal.

The Legendary Credit Card: Chase Sapphire Reserve

Here are some of the benefits that I use for the Chase Sapphire Reserve card:

• 3X points for restaurants.
• Travel booked anywhere (including Uber/transit expenses) are 3X points back.
• Lyft is 10X points back until March 2022 as of this writing.
• Chase Ultimate Rewards lets you transfer your points at least 1:1 to partner airlines and hotels. In general, these transfers mean that 1 point gives you a lot more than $0.01 in value. In contrast, redeeming points for cash back just gives you back $0.01 per point. Without a Chase card with Chase Ultimate Rewards, you’re stuck redeeming points for cash back.
  • Luxury example: If you transfer points to United, you can get a business class round trip from EWR to FCO for 200K points only.
    • This means spending, say, $60K on restaurants/hotels/travel, or $20K spend on Lyft. Or some combination of both.
  • Regular example: An EWR-FCO round trip on economy costs only 66K points round trip.
    • This is like $6.6K spent on Lyft, or $22K spent on restaurants/hotel/travel. Or some combination of the two.
• Covers expenses for Global Entry (expedited airport security for both domestic and international) and Priority Pass (lounges in airports).
• Annual fee is hefty, so you can alternatively use Chase Sapphire Preferred instead if you’d like to be able to transfer points to travel partners. Preferred won’t give you Global Entry / Priority Pass for free though.
  • Note: I would say Global Entry / Priority Pass isn’t a great deal now due to COVID = lack of travel. Also, most Priority Pass lounges are closed due to COVID.
• $300 rebate on all travel purchases per calendar year.

Chase Sapphire Reserve used to be hands down, the best cash back credit card of all time. Now, it’s just one of the best due to COVID and their increase in annual fees.

However, this card will definitely maximize your cash back whenever you’d like to eat out or travel. Learn more about this card here.

The Best Overall Credit Card For Cash Back

The Chase Ink Business Cash has the best cash back out of all the credit cards in my opinion.

Here are the reasons for this:

• 5X points on your cable / internet / phone bills.
• 5X points on all your Amazon purchases if you use this credit card hack.
• It’s free.

For me personally, I buy a lot of stuff on Amazon because I’m too lazy to drive. Even to the groceries. So I just use Amazon Fresh a lot of times.

Because a lot of my expenses are on Amazon, getting 5X points back for it is pretty great in my opinion. The 5X points back on expensive phone / cable bills is a nice touch as well.

Wrapping It Up

Above are the best cash back credit cards I use, and the most straightforward combination to cover the majority of my purchases.

Keep in mind what works for me might not work for you. Your purchase profile might be very different from mine (i.e. you never use Amazon, and a lot of your spending is on Hermes or other luxury goods).

However, if most of your spending is in these categories – groceries, restaurants, travel, Amazon, and telecommunication – then the above combination should always net you at least 3% cash back for the vast majority of your purchases.

For a much more in-depth dive of these cards, as well as other cards I use, check out my other blog post here where I talk about whether or not annual-fee cards are worth it.