Are you still using the first credit card you ever got?

Do you have like 5 in your wallet and you don't know which one to go with?

Capital One has some of the best credit cards out there, but which one is the best? If you go to a site like Nerd Wallet, they will give you ratings out of 5 stars on different credit cards.

The only problem is that they leave out a crucial detail. Different cards are better at different spending levels. If you blindly follow Nerd Wallet, you would foolishly pick the Savor One card. Spoiler alert, it's not the best at most spending levels.

I am a huge spreadsheet nerd. I spent 40+ hours going down the rabbit hole so now you don't have to. Get it here completely FREE.

In this article, we're going over my spreadsheet  comparing  seven of  Capital  One's primary  credit  cards at different spending levels.

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 Let's get into it.

I'm gonna start out by going over all the different credit cards.

Quicksilver VS Quicksilver One

The  Quicksilver One card has an annual fee, whereas the Quicksilver does not.

The main difference here is that you can have a slightly lower credit score to pick up the Quicksilver One. It'll be pretty easy to see because of the annual fee, this card is never going to beat the Quicksilver, but I did want to include it just so you can see how it stacks up.

For both Quicksilver and Quicksilver One, you get a sign up bonus of $200 after you hit the spending goal on all purchases. You get 5 points per dollar spent on the hotels and rental car, and then 1.5 points on other purchases.

Savor VS Savor One

We can see the main difference here is the Savor One has no annual fee, and thus a lower sign up bonus compared to the Savor.

You also get dinged on the streaming, dining, and entertainment points per dollar that you get. On the Savor One, you only get 3 points per dollar whereas with the Savor, you get 4 points per dollar.

Venture VS Venture One

Similar scenario to the Quicksilver One, the Venture One has $0 annual fee but as a result you get dinged on the points per dollar spent on all purchases.

You also get dinged on the signup bonus. The signup bonus is pretty huge with a Venture $750 worth of points whereas on the Venture One, you only get $200.

 So excluding year one, the Venture One will start out on top because it does not have an annual fee. With the Venture, it has an annual fee of $95 so it will be good for churning the $750 worth of points in year one but not necessarily for the following years.

You do get a $25 value with the lounge access and a $25 per year value on the Global Entry/Precheck, but you still end up down $45.

In order to make up that difference, you have to spend enough money naturally for your 2 points per dollar to overtake that $45 difference over the 1.25 points per dollar spent on the Venture One.

Venture X

Finally, we got the big dog of the Venture cards,  the Venture X, with a much bigger annual fee, $395.

But because it's the big dog, you get an annual travel credit of $300 and anniversary bonus of $100 worth of points. So right there you're already up $5 over the annual fee just on your annual bonuses.

You also get lounge access and airports, a $25 value, and then you also get the Global Entry/Precheck value, which is $25 on average per year. You get the free Global Entry or Precheck once every 4 years and you get $100 towards that, so on average it's $25 per year.

The other card that also gets access to the lounge is the Venture card, however you are limited to just 2 accesses per calendar year.

Let me back up a bit. You can see we've got two columns here when we're looking at each card, you got your annual totals and then you got your year one totals.

Most credit cards are going to have a big sign up bonus, so you'll be way ahead in year one, but it's not going to be like that going forward. I like to go ahead and include an annual. This'll be like every year after the first year.

It's also better than the other cards in that you get 2 points per dollar on all purchases, you get 5 points per dollar spent on flights through Capital One Rewards, and then you get 10 points per dollar on hotels and rentals that are bought through Capital One Rewards.

So this card is pretty solid right off the bat.

What Type of Spender Are You?

One of the big things that is going to help you to analyze which card is best for you is knowing which of these perks are you actually going to use.

Global Entry/Precheck

I'm going to put a “1” in the Global Entry/Precheck box if I'm the type of person that likes to use the Global Entry or Precheck. This is just like a quality of life upgrade to just get you through the lines faster at the airport.

If this is something that you don't care about spending the money on, you just pop a “0” in there and it'll automatically throw a “0” into all these rows below for the Global Entry and Precheck.

Number of Trips Per Year

If you're not going to take a trip every year that utilizes a flight or a hotel that you booked through Capital One, you're going to pop a “0” here as well. And you can see it automatically zeros out the lounge access. You're not going to have access to a lounge if you're not going to the airport and you're not going to be able to utilize your annual travel credit.

Number of Travelers

Here's another one right here, number of travelers. So if you are going to be with a significant other, you put a “2” in there. Then, you can go back to the Number of Trips per Year and put a “1” in there as well.

You can see the lounge access is increased from $25 to $50 because you can bring in a guest and you can take food out with you.

So if you have a family of four, you go in and come out with a bag of food for your family, you can put a “4” in there and then now you're up to $100 value if you're able to take advantage of the lounge access there.

The Student

For this first analysis, I'm going to assume that you are a student and you do want to use the Global Entry every holiday when you fly back home to visit your family once per year. We're going to have “1” on the One Trip Per Year, Number of Trips per Year, and Number of Travelers.

When you scroll to the right, you will see a table showing average spending. I pulled these numbers off the internet. Average credit card spending for an individual is about $19,000 per year. The common allocation for groceries will be $3,600 per year, streaming $660, and so on.

This $19,0200 column will correspond to the $19,200 row. This row will compare all of the points that you get for each card at this spending level. Also, it assumes the user profile that I mentioned earlier.

So if I change the values in the USER PROFILE table, it'll automatically change the spending categories in the AVE YEAR table on the right.

For one traveler taking one trip per year, the Venture X card will get you $522 worth of points, the Venture $366, the Savor $441, and the Savor $457 if you are spending average per year. So you can see, the Venture X is in first place here and the Savor One, which I kind of trashed on earlier, is actually in second place so it's not bad.

If we look at somebody who spends $58,000, all of the values for each credit card are increased accordingly. So in this case, the winner will actually be the Savor. The Savor gets $1,505 worth of points whereas the Venture X only gets $1,448.

The reason the Savor wins when you get to the higher spending levels is because it actually has better points per dollar spent. Whenever you're not spending very much, it's these annual bonus categories that come out on top. But eventually as you spend more and more, the Savor overtakes it and eventually the Savor One probably would as well.

 If you want to see a graphical view of this, we can keep scrolling down.

At the higher spending levels, we can see that at the beginning, the Venture X is on top straight away. And as we spend more and more, it slowly gets overtaken by the Savor.

At the lower spending levels, you can see the Venture X is on top followed by the Savor One.

The reason the Savor One is above the Savor at lower spending levels is because it starts off without an annual fee. Since the Savor One has no annual fee, It's going to take some spending for the Savor to close the gap. As you can see, the orange overtakes the green around $23,000 spent.

So depending on your spending, there's going to be different cards that are going to be on top. I want to showcase that now with a different scenario.

The Workaholic

We're going to look at somebody who does not travel.

We will change our user profile here to somebody that does not take advantage of the Global Entry, does not take one trip per year, and we'll just say number of traveler is zero because you're not traveling.

We still have the same spending, but they've got zeros in the flight, rental car and hotel category.

If you are somebody who spends $10,000 per year on your credit card, you're not taking advantage of the travel credit, you're not taking advantage of the annual points bonus, then you are losing money big time if you chose the Venture X.

At average spending, the winner is the Savor One if you are not traveling at all. Despite me trashing on it earlier, it actually does come out on top in this scenario.

Now if we go down to the very bottom category at the highest spending level spending $57,000 per year, the Savor comes out on top. Once again, that's because the points that you get per dollar are much higher with the Savor.

 The Capital One credit cards tend to get the most value if you at least travel a little bit. If there's another credit card company that you're interested in, let me know in the comments.

The Globe Trotter

The next user profile I wanna look at is somebody who travels a little bit more.

For a big traveler, we're gonna say they do use the Global Entry/Precheck. they are gonna do three trips per year, and they are traveling with a family of three.

You can see the lounge access is now a big benefit because every time you go into the lounge, it's about a $25 value per person ($25 × 3 = $75). If you're doing that three times a year, that's $225 value ($75 × 3 = $225) in just free food and drinks.

In addition to the Global Entry/Precheck value of $25, you're also getting to utilize an annual travel credit of $300 and an anniversary bonus of $100, and you are getting to utilize your Global Entry and Precheck.

We can see that at average spending levels, the Venture X card has pulled way ahead of the pack. The Savor is left in the dust, even beat by the Venture card. And this difference is only going to get bigger as we spend more and more money.

If we look at this highest spending category, the Venture X is getting a staggering $1,667 value, the Savor is now jumped up into second place with $1,487, and the Venture is getting $1,398 with the Savor One actually in fourth place with $1,387.

So in this scenario, you're getting big benefit with the yearly annual bonuses from the Venture X. Even with their superior points, it's going to take a lot of spending for the Savor to finally catch up to the Venture X card.

Another big benefit to the Venture X card is in the travel category since you're getting 10 points per dollar for flights and car rentals. So the more you spend on travel, hotel, and car rentals the more points you're going to get from that Venture X card.

The Churner

 The final user profile is going to be people who want to churn their credit card.

That being said, most of the credit cards with the really big signup bonuses do have some restrictions. They won't let you just continually churn the same credit card. Most of them will have a restriction saying, if you've received this signup bonus in the last two years, you will not be eligible for it.

We are going to assume that churners are going to do one trip per year and have just one traveler. We're also going to pop a “1” in this first year only.

 In the previous analysis, when we were looking at the amount of points you get as a function of spending, we were not considering the year one sign up bonus because I wanted to give you an idea of what you could expect if you hold the credit card long term.

Now with this analysis, we are going to solely look at year one because we're looking through the lens of churning credit cards: which one is going to give me the most value on that sign up bonus in year one so I can then move on to the next card as soon as possible?

So in the average spending category of $19,000, the Venture X and the Venture are just destroying these other Capital One cards.

These two are the clear favorites in terms of value for just taking advantage of that huge first year signup bonus of $750 worth of points, so that does a really good job of making up for these big annual fees.

 As you can see, it is crucial to compare different credit cards at the spending rate that most closely matches your own spending. Not only that, the type of spending that you have will also have a huge impact.

In this case, going on just one trip a year that includes a flight, hotel, and a rental car puts the Venture X way ahead of the pack.

If you like my Spreadsheet Tool and would like to use it, check it out HERE for free. No spam, I promise.

If you are into credit cards, check out my other articles in the series:

1. BEST American Express Credit Card Battle 2023 | American Express Platinum vs Gold vs Green

2. BEST Chase Credit Card Battle 2023 | Chase Reserve vs Chase Preferred

Until next time.