I see that Chase is offering the Southwest Airlines Rapid Rewards Premier Card, which awards you 50,000 bonus points after you spend $2,000 in the first 3 months, good for 2 roundtrip flights. And you get 6,000 bonus points after your one-year anniversary. While I haven’t traveled much lately and highly doubt I will anytime soon, I’m interested in the card because you can also redeem the points for $500 in gift cards from Wal-Mart, Lowes, Home Depot or Amazon. However, the card does have a $99 annual fee. Bummer.

However, Chase has a very similar card, the Southwest Airlines Rapid Rewards Plus Card, which offers the exact same benefits except you get 3,000 bonus points on your anniversary instead of 6,000. And this one has a $69 annual fee. Since I’m mainly interested in the rewards and wouldn’t plan on keeping the card for a year, I don’t much care about the anniversary points anyway.

So….while spending $2,000 in 3 months was a stretch for me last time I did it (there’s always more grocery store gift cards), it would be nice to get $430 in gift cards, which I could surely use at Home Depot for all my home maintenance/repair needs. (Amazon would never be my first choice for gift cards as their prices for anything besides books is much higher than you can find elsewhere. And now they charge sales tax in Connecticut, so that little cost savings is gone.)

I may wait until I think it’s October when both my homeowners and car insurance are due. That would be a quick $1,000 spend right there. (I’d been meaning to ask my agent if I could separate these two bills so they don’t both come due at the same time cus it’s one big bill, but for purposes of earning credit card rewards, it works well.)

In the meantime, I’m $50 shy of having earned a $100 reward from Bank Americard.