Three legacy cards, three very different stories. All remain in our portfolio despite receiving far less spending than they once did.
Several of the most valuable cards in our household receive very little spending. Their certificates, rebates and travel benefits justify keeping them, but other cards usually offer better returns on purchases.
A One Mile at a Time article about inactivity closures prompted me to check those accounts. With discontinued cards, an unwanted closure can mean losing benefits that cannot be recovered through a new application. Our IHG Select, Ritz-Carlton and Arrival Plus illustrate three different ways of managing that risk.
Card | Annual Fee | Why We Keep It | Natural Spend? |
|---|---|---|---|
IHG Select | $49* | 40K FNC and 10% award rebate | Almost none |
Ritz-Carlton | $450 | $300 travel credit, 85K FNC, and travel benefits | Some |
Arrival Plus | $99 | Wife’s historical default card (2%+ on everything) | Yes |
*October 2026 update: Chase has reportedly increased the legacy IHG Select fee to $99 at 2027 renewal. We still intend to keep both cards. What IHG’s Card Changes Mean for Our Five-Card Portfolio explains the revised costs and benefits; the figures below describe the position when this article was first published.
The IHG Select Card
The easiest annual fee decision in my wallet. The card continues generating value despite going years between purchases.
The IHG Select card is probably the easiest annual fee decision I make all year. For a $49 annual fee, the card provides a Free Night Certificate (FNC) worth up to 40,000 points and a 10% rebate on all IHG award redemptions. Between my wife and me, we hold two of these cards. The certificates get used every year and the 10% rebate gets triggered multiple times annually as well. The economics are not remotely close. The card pays for itself many times over. That said, I don’t actually use the card itself.
While researching this article, I logged into my Chase account expecting to find a forgotten Amazon charge or some other token purchase. Instead, I discovered that the last non-fee transaction on my IHG Select card was a $500 charge in April 2023. Since then, the account history has consisted entirely of annual fees. The annual fee posted in September 2023. The same thing happened in September 2024 and September 2025.
Meanwhile, the card continued producing FNCs and award rebates.
My wife’s card tells a different story. We happen to have a monthly Nespresso top-up charged to it, so it receives regular activity without any deliberate effort. Her card has accidentally solved the maintenance problem. Mine, however, appears to have been running a three-year experiment in extreme inactivity.
My account shows that Chase allowed this particular annual-fee card to remain open for more than three years without a purchase. It does not establish a safe inactivity period or prove that annual fees protect an account from closure. A small purchase every six to twelve months is an inexpensive precaution for a card whose benefits I want to preserve.
This was an accidental experiment, not a strategy I intend to continue. A small purchase is enough to end it.
The Ritz-Carlton Card
A legacy card we never held when it was publicly available, yet continue acquiring through product changes years after it disappeared.
The Ritz-Carlton card presents a different situation. Unlike the IHG Select card, this is not a product I am merely preserving because of its legacy status. I am actually still trying to acquire more of them.
I was a little late to this party. My first Ritz card didn’t arrive until January 2023 via product change from the Chase Marriott Boundless card. My wife’s followed in 2024. Another Boundless signup happened later that same year and was converted into a further Ritz in 2025. Earlier this year we opened another Marriott Boundless card that is intended to become yet another Ritz card in due course.
We never held a Ritz card when you could simply apply for one. Every card in our portfolio arrived through a product change years after the product itself had effectively disappeared. That probably tells you everything you need to know about how we view it.
The $300 annual airline-incidental credit gives these cards regular purchase activity. Chase’s published terms cover specified incidentals rather than ordinary airfare, but in my experience reimbursement has been fairly lenient where charges are incidental-adjacent.
When I have a suitable charge and credit available, using the credit takes priority over earning a few more points on another card. That keeps the Ritz cards in our normal spending pattern without needing a token purchase solely to maintain activity.
The Arrival Plus Card
The card that became my wife’s default choice more than a decade ago and never really left her wallet.
The Arrival Plus is a different story again. I first had an Arrival card in 2013. I eventually canceled it when the annual fee came due in 2015. My wife’s account, however, has remained open since at least 2014 and continues to see regular use today.
Many legacy-card discussions assume that old cards survive because of hidden benefits or grandfathered perks. That may sometimes be true, but it isn’t really what happened here.
The Arrival Plus became my wife’s safe card. She knew it earned a respectable return everywhere. More importantly, she knew she wasn’t likely to hear from her points-obsessed husband that she had used the wrong card. Over time, that became habit.
More than a decade later, the card still sees multiple transactions every month. Ironically, while the IHG Select card may suffer from too little activity, the Arrival Plus probably receives more spending than a strict optimization exercise would recommend.
That is an important reminder that household behavior can often matter more than theoretical valuations. The best card on paper isn’t always the card that gets used.
Another reason I am reluctant to close long-held accounts is that not every benefit appears on a comparison chart.
Nick Reyes at Frequent Miler has written about a grandfathered Capital One account that retained access to unusually favorable hotel gift card redemptions unavailable to most other cardholders. The broader lesson is that sometimes old accounts retain features that newer accounts never received. Sometimes they receive targeted promotions that aren’t widely available. Sometimes they simply develop a long, reliable pattern of successful use that becomes difficult to replicate.
You don’t know what value an old account might provide in the future. Once it is closed, however, the decision is likely irreversible.
Keeping Cards That Pay Their Way
I keep cards when the benefits we expect to use justify their annual fees. Legacy status alone is not enough, and possible future perks are not a reason to pay indefinitely.
These three cards pass that test for different reasons. Select supplies FNCs and rebates, Ritz supplies FNCs and travel benefits, and Arrival remains useful within our household’s spending habits. Their maintenance needs differ too: Select requires a deliberate purchase, Ritz gets activity through benefit use, and Arrival gets it through routine spending.
Once a card earns its place, keeping it active becomes part of managing it. A small recurring charge or occasional purchase is easier than trying to recover a discontinued product after an unwanted closure.