Don’t ask financial questions on a non-finance forum and expect to receive good or complete answers. Go straight to the experts. FragileDeal is a refuge for former FatWallet Finance members (FatWallet was acquired by eBates, then Rakuten, and eventually killed off). Please note that it is mostly USA-centric. Here’s a thread about all the best credit cards for every purpose, and the wiki is more-or-less current: Best Reward / Cash Back Credit Cards
Ask all your personal finance questions on that forum (by either creating a new thread or posting here). Other reasonable places for personal finance questions like credit cards include Bogleheads and reddit/r/personalfinance. DoctorOfCredit metioned earlier by @lotrbfme is a great resource for banking promotions, rules, and benefits, but it’s a blog without a discussion forum, so don’t expect personalized answers.
But to answer Yourrid’s question “what are your preferred cards and why”, I use Citi Costco for gas (4% cash back), Chase Sapphire Reserve (a.k.a. CSR) for travel and dining (3x UR with a 1.5x multiplier = 4.5% cash back, minus the annual fee), Chase Amazon at all Amazon properties (5% cash back with Prime or 3% without Prime), Chase Ink Cash at office supply stores (5x UR, or ~7.5% cash back with CSR), and Alliant CU Visa Signature for everything else (2.5% cash back minus the annual fee). I use Citi Costco if buying appliances and electronics at Costco, because all Citi cards give 2 years of Extended Warranty. Otherwise I use Alliant at Costco (it’s a Visa). I also have Discover It and Chase Freedom for the quarterly 5%/5xUR categories, a few Amex cards for Amex Offers, and a few other random aged cards to keep my credit scores high. And if you’re wondering about credit scores, the answer is no — the number of credit cards does not negatively impact your score in the long term. It’s the opposite — the more cards you have and the older they are, the less of an impact each new card makes on the score. This is a topic for a separate discussion in an appropriate forum.
I used to be very much against annual fees, but with the cards I’m using the difference in rewards (between what I’m getting and what I could be getting from the next best card without the annual fee) exceeds the fee. For one example, I can justify the fee for CSR because I also have Ink and Freedom, I can combine points, and CSR has the 1.5x redemption multiplier. For another example, the breakeven between Citi Double Cash (2% cash back, no fee) and Alliant (2.5% cash back, $99 fee) is $99/0.005 = $19800 in annual spend. I don’t normally spend that much, but there are other tricks I can use to offset the fee. For example, I can pay property and federal and state income taxes with it. The fee for paying those with a credit card are about 2-2.3%, so I’m getting more cash back than I pay in fees. Of course this is not for everyone.