Looking through my wallet recently, I realized that several of the most valuable credit cards I own are also among the least used.

They aren’t cards I actively spend on. They aren’t cards I would recommend to most readers. In some cases, they barely see a transaction all year.

Yet losing them would be genuinely irritating.

That apparent contradiction sent me down an interesting rabbit hole. A recent One Mile at a Time article discussing credit card closures due to inactivity provided the initial spark, but the more I looked at my own portfolio, the more I realized the issue had very little to do with inactivity and everything to do with legacy cards.

The points and miles world spends a great deal of time focused on acquisition and optimization. Which card should you apply for next? Which welcome bonus is worth pursuing? Which card should you use for airfare, dining, groceries, or hotel stays?

Legacy cards create a different problem entirely.

These are products that still exist, still collect annual fees, and still provide benefits, but can no longer be obtained through a normal application. The common thread is that many continue delivering value even if they don’t make sense for ongoing spending.

That raises an interesting question.

What do you do with a card that is worth keeping but not worth actually using?

These cards are all examples of the same phenomenon, but they arrived there in different ways. The IHG Select survives because of a low annual fee and outsized benefits. The Ritz-Carlton card survives because its benefits remain competitive years after the product disappeared. The Arrival Plus survives largely because it became embedded in our household spending habits. Together they illustrate why legacy cards can be surprisingly difficult to evaluate.

The IHG Select card is probably the easiest annual fee decision I make all year.

For a $49 annual fee, the card provides an 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.

The obvious question is whether Chase cares.

Research across FlyerTalk, Reddit, MyFICO, and Doctor of Credit suggests Chase is relatively tolerant of low activity on annual-fee cards, particularly co-branded hotel products. Many cardholders report accounts surviving 12 to 24 months or longer with little more than annual fee postings. At the same time, there is little evidence that annual fees themselves count as meaningful account activity. Issuers generally appear to care about purchase transactions rather than fee payments.

That doesn’t mean I expect Chase to close the card tomorrow. After all, it has already survived more than three years with almost no spending. Still, I suspect luck has played some role, and a small purchase every six to twelve months feels like sensible insurance.

The opportunity cost of a $5 purchase is effectively zero. The opportunity cost of losing a card that continues generating recurring value every year could be much higher.

Note to readers: while I appear to have inadvertently conducted a three-year experiment in credit card inactivity, this card is simply too valuable for me to continue the experiment indefinitely. By the time you read this, a small charge will have posted to the account and the experiment will be over.

I apologize to the scientific community.

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.

This particular card forces annual activity via the annual airline credit. When I have a few hundred dollars of airfare to purchase and a travel credit available, I generally stop worrying about whether another card might earn a few more points.

Could I earn 5x Amex Membership Rewards points by putting the airfare on an Amex Platinum instead? Yes.

Would the difference be meaningful? If the fare is in the hundreds rather than the thousands, probably not.

At some point, collecting a guaranteed $300 credit becomes more important than solving every transaction to the nearest half-cent.

The result is that inactivity never really becomes a concern. The card naturally remains part of our normal spending pattern.

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.

My approach to annual fees is not especially complicated.

I keep cards that pay their way.

If the expected value I will receive over the next year exceeds the annual fee, the card stays. If it does not, the card becomes a candidate for closure. Retention offers occasionally tip the balance one way or the other, but the underlying principle remains the same.

That framework explains why these legacy cards continue to survive.

The IHG Select card pays for itself easily.

The Ritz-Carlton card pays for itself easily.

The Arrival Plus remains useful enough within our household that it continues earning its place.

None of those decisions have anything to do with nostalgia.

One thing that becomes clear after enough years in this hobby is that priorities change.

New players worry about approvals.

A little later they worry about optimization.

Eventually, many of us encounter a different challenge: preserving the things we have already built.

The irony is that none of the cards discussed here would make my own list of the best cards for everyday spending. Yet all three occupy an important place within our household portfolio.

Legacy cards create a different kind of optimization problem. The question is no longer how to maximize value from them. In many cases, the value is already there. The challenge is preserving access to benefits that can no longer be replicated through a new application.

That’s a very different problem from the one most points enthusiasts spend their time solving, but after enough years in the hobby, it may become the more important one.

IHG & Me

Barclays Arrival Plus

Marriott & Me