RetireJapan

I finally applied for the SMBC Gold NL card. It is only 5000 yen a year, and seems highly recommended. Between spouses, a family can hit the 0 fee/Free Point threshold very quickly.

I have the OLD Amazon Gold* SMBC card, so I could apply through V-Pass making things super smooth.

There are 3 application types.

A. 10 Minute approval with Vpass/phone call (I feared my poor Japanese would mark me a reject, so I did not go for this
B. Quick application with V-Pass
C. Long form paper/online.

Fingers crossed everyone!

.................

Today My wife and I received 2 separate "Invitations"

Wife -> View Gold Plus
Me -> Rakuten Premium

These did NOT seem worth it. 11,000 a year each.

Rakuten -> Unless you have sold your soul to their ecosystem, this card seems a poor value.
View Card Plus Gold Extreme etc -> Maybe with our daily Suica use, and occasional Ekinet usage this may be worthwhile, time to break our the calculators.

.................

Anyone have any more thoughts? (Note: We are not looking at travel mile cards).

*This was nerfed, and now is a free card

I've only ever found Gold and up cards useful for travel. I have the platinum Rakuten and its great for point earning but, as you said, if you don't care about point churning there's not much for you there. If you care about Suica, the EPOS card is better to get more points.

SMBC I like because of the synergy with SBI but also they have 5x points for McDonald's and FamilyMart and some other vendors. I ran into problems with them because of (I think) an existing corporate card that has a different name (can't change it) so I got refused when I tried the instant application one. Haven't tried it since because I'm afraid I'll get rejected again.