The
- 5% cash back (5X Thank You points) on your top eligible spending category up to $500 spent each monthly billing cycle. 1% cash back on all other purchases.
- New user bonus: $200 cash back (20,000 Thank You points) after $750 in purchases in the first 3 months of account opening.
- 0% Intro APR for 15 months on balance transfers and purchases with no annual fee. Balance transfer fee of $5 or 5% of the amount of each transfer, whichever is greater.
- No annual fee.
This is a new card, but note the following:
Citi will only issue one Citi Custom CashSM Card account per person. You will qualify for the bonus offer only if you have not received a bonus offer for opening a new Citi Custom CashSM Card in the past 48 months.
List of eligible categories. Taken from their fine print:
- Restaurants. Includes purchases at cafes, bars, lounges and fast food restaurants. Excludes purchases at bakeries, caterers, restaurants located inside another business (such as hotels, stores, stadiums, grocery stores, or warehouse clubs) and third party dining delivery services.
- Gas Stations. Excludes gasoline purchases at warehouse clubs, discount stores, convenience stores or other merchants that do not use the gas station merchant category code.
- Grocery Stores. Includes purchases at supermarkets, meat/seafood stores, dairy stores, bakeries, and miscellaneous food/convenience stores. Excludes purchases at general merchandise/discount superstores; wholesale/warehouse clubs; candy, nut and confectionery stores. Purchases made at online supermarkets or with grocery delivery services also do not qualify if the merchant does not classify itself as a supermarket by using the supermarket merchant category code.
- Select Travel. Includes airline, hotel, cruise line and travel agency purchases. Excludes timeshares, boat leases and rentals, campgrounds and trailer parks, and real estate agencies.
- Select Transit. Includes car rentals, ferries, commuter railways, subways, taxis/limousines/car services, passenger railways, bridge and road tolls, parking lots/garages, bus lines, and motor home and recreational vehicle rentals. Excludes bike/scooter rentals, auto clubs and insurance companies.
- Select Streaming Services. Includes the following cable, satellite, and streaming providers: Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Music, Apple Music, CBS All Access, Disney+, AT&T TV NOW, ESPN+, fuboTV, HBO Max, NBA League Pass, Netflix, Pandora, Showtime, Sling TV, Spotify, Starz, SiriusXM, Vudu, YouTube Red, YouTube TV, and Tidal.
- Drugstores
- Home Improvement Stores
- Fitness Clubs
- Live Entertainment
Thank You points. As with the Double Cash card, this card technically earns Thank You points, which you can then convert to a statement credit or direct deposit into your bank account. So you really earn “5 ThankYou Points for each $1 you spend in your highest spend category each billing cycle up to the first $500 spent in that category.” 2,500 Thank You points = $25 statement credit, and so on.
You can’t convert your points to airline miles with this card, but if you also have the
My take. This is a minor variation of the other cards that offer
As wit the other 5% cards, since you only earn 1% cash back on every other purchase, you can easily get better rewards elsewhere. For example, if you had the
As a rewards optimizer, the best use for this card would be to only use it for a specific category all year long (up to $500 a month). If you wished you could just pick a category and just stick with it all year, this card lets you do that. You could put only gas on the card. You could put only restaurants on the card, and so on. Use another card for your other purchases, even a 1.5% cash back card is better. Of course, Citi is hoping you won’t do that, making your overall cash back rate much lower, possibly even lower than 2%.
Bottom line. The
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