Chase Freedom is an exceptional card. I’ve recommended it many times as the best major-issuer, general-purpose card for most light-to-moderate spenders who pay off their balances in full each month.

No quibbles with your analysis. I’d just add a couple of other points. First, a simple phone call to chase at any time will convert the Freedom card into the Freedom Plus card. So a moderate spender like Laura can start with it, and “upgrade” whenever it would make sense for her, without having to open another card. That’s a nice advantage.

Second, Chase helps keep things simple by offering what is easily the best automated payment functionality of any major issuer. With just a few clicks at Chase.com, Laura can instruct Chase to deduct the full balance from her bank account on the Freedom card’s due date (and it actually starts to “pull” the funds on the due date, so your funds aren’t taken for another business day or two). If she decides to pay the card from another account, gets a credit, or does something else that reduces the amount due, the “autopay” function is smart enough to correspondingly reduce the amount of its “auto-pull”, right up until the due date. Editing the auto-pay, turning it on and off, etc. is snap too. Other card issuers need to do this. (Are you listening Citibank, American Express, Bank of America, and Capital One?)

Finally, Chase also recently ended some of their less customer-friendly policies. No doubt this was prompted by the increased scrutiny that the card industry is experiencing from Congress and others. The details are a subject for a different conversation, but suffice to say they are somewhat ahead of the curve on this. That might give people like Laura added piece of mind.

http://www.firstusa.com/cgi-bin/webcgi/webserve.cgi?partner_dir_name=cac_chase_freedom_plus&page=index

don’t think it’s readily available through the normal navigation on chase’s web site?