Best CREDIT CARD for chronic Slickdealers

Quote from LittleAsh : I tend to spend (ehem, flush down the drain) lots of money on stuff I see on here...well, mainly because I 'need' (cough) all these things. Anyways, was hoping all you awesome people could give me your two cents on my situation. I tend to buy lots of stuff on slickdeals....and currently use the Costco Amex card for the extra 1 yewar warranty and for the crappy $50 cashback it earns me each year. I just moved into a new complex which allows me to pay rent with my credit card at a $25 fee per month. Rent is ~$900/month. Is there any credit card (aside from the new Chase deal that earns you $250 cashback for use in the first 3 months).....is there any other card that earns you MILES or POINTS or something like that? What do you guys use? Is it worth the $25 fee per month to accumilate points through one of these cards? HELP! Rent is due and I want to make this as slick as possible! You guys are awesome!

I'm going to first assume that you are NOT planning on paying interest to your CC, correct? If you are, please cut up and cancel your CC.

With that out of the way, if it will cost you $25/month to pay your rent, you need to get $25+ back in value (points that can be exchanged for whatever, miles, etc.). And, this is forgetting about time-value of money. (It's costing you $25 today, but depending on when you can 'redeem' what you earn, the effective cost could be higher.)

The Costco AMEX gives 1% cb. 1% cb of $900 = $900 * 0.01 = $9. This means that if you charge your rent to your Costco AMEX, you'd be *spending* $25 to earn $9 (and earn that $9 at the end of the year). I'd gladly be willing to give you $10 if you give me $25, and I'd do it upon receiving your $25, so you'll get a better deal from me.

Simply inferring from that would therefore indicate you'd need to get 3% (or more) back from your CC to make it (possibly) worth your while. (Actual math would yield the % to be 2.78%).

I'm not aware of any card that gives cash back > 2% for all categories. And, I'm not aware of any CC that has a category for "rent" to give >2%.

I know some Citi cards used to give 5pts/dollar... back when you could get a $25 gift card for 2500 points, you were effectively getting 5% back. (Of course assuming that you could get a gift card that you actually *wanted* to get.) The problem, is that (a) I don't believe they do 5 pts/dollar, and (b) you would have to go into the $250+ gc category to have it be a 1:1 relationship. Even at 5pts/dollar (not realistic -- I think it's probably more like 3 pts/dollar), that's still 5.56 rent payments to yield enough to get a gift-card. (You could of course opt for a lower-denomination gift card, but it really wouldn't be 5%, it would be less...)

I currently use Costco AMEX, Fidelity AMEX, PenFed Visa, Discover, Target Red Card, Amazon Visa, and Schwab Visa (soon to be RIP -- damn BofA!)
While they each have their place, none would help you in this particular situation. I would recommend looking at Citi and Chase to see what they have.