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It's, per the article, not really no annual fee, you can't get the card without paying them at least $50 a year for an account with them, where the cash ends up
by BobaFloutist 3y ago
It's, per the article, not really no annual fee, you can't get the card without paying them at least $50 a year for an account with them, where the cash ends up (and then you have to figure out how to extract).
On top of that the article makes the classic mistake of saying it pays for itself if you spend $166 a month, but it only really pays for itself if the marginal value of using the card over a generic 1.5% cashback card on the things you can't get 3% for already is more than $5 a month. Things like high cashback percentages for the first $X a month in specific categories make this intentionally hard to calculate, and are part of why I never really got into optimizing my credit card benefits. It's obnoxiously hard to compare.
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y agoThere are plenty of 2% cards (eg SoFi) and 3% cards for groceries (Capital One Savor). I spend the most on the latter. If you use Amazon a lot you can get 5% back on that (Chase Amazon). There are also 5% back for certain categories such as eating out, some time limited (Discover, Chase Freedom).
- dangus 3y agoI wouldn’t count the Amazon card because unless you subscribe to Amazon Prime at $140 a year you can’t get that rate. I canceled my Prime membership and instantly the reward rate dropped to 3%, which is a pretty crummy store card. Compare to Target as an example - 5% without the pricey subscription. You have to buy an insane amount of stuff from Amazon/Whole Foods/Fresh to make that product make sense above and beyond other rewards offerings.
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y agoI don't disagree, but it's really the other way around, if you have Prime it's worth getting that card and the same for these other special cases, all depending where most of your spending goes. In general cashback on cards isn't going to save you much money, but it's still nice picking up several hundred dollars worth of cashback over the course of a year.
- dangus 3y agoTrue, if you have Prime anyway it’s a no-brainer.
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y agoThere's also Paypal MAstercard which gives you 3% on all purchases using the card through Paypal.
- testval123 3y agoThere are no annual fee 2% cards without any hoops. If you don't care about the other perks for Robinhood Gold, the break even would be $50/.01 = $5000 of spend.
- coolspot 3y agoCiti DoubleCash is 2% on everything, no hoops, no annual fee.
- ahahahahah 3y agoYes, that is an example of what parent said exists.
- BobaFloutist 3y agoYou're right, but man does that take a couple of reads to parse!
- coolspot 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence
- Z_I_F_F 3y agoThe fidelity credit card is exactly this if you use Fidelity for your checking account. 2% cashback on everything, goes directly into your bank account. But the website and app UX for their credit card is awful. Everything is a hassle.
- BobaFloutist 3y agoAnd again, that's $5000 of spend outside of categories you can get better in.