Frequent Miler on the Air - Citi cancels 5X earnings | Coffee Break Ep108 | 6-2-26

Episode Date: June 2, 2026

There have been some negative changes coming out of Citi that we'll be talking about in today's podcast episode.(00:43) - Citi Custom Cash® Card discontinued for new applications, but it may still be possible to product-change to itYou can read more about this discontinuation here.(01:16) - Citi Custom Cash® Card details(04:23) - Citi had been on a roll...(04:42) - Citi points have been declining in valueYou can read about some of the negative Citi changes here(05:16) - But still has excellent options(06:33) - Is it worth going out of one's way to get Citi Citi Custom Cash® Card while it's available for product changing?Subscribe and FollowVisit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media.Music Credit – “Ocean Deep” by Annie YoderMentioned in this episode:Visit FrequentMiler.com Did you know that Frequent Miller is also a website? At frequentMiller.com, you'll find all the latest deals, news about points, miles, and rewarding credit cards, the single best, Best Credit Cards page on the web, guides to all popular rewards programs, and many other terrific resources. If you'd like to get our posts sent to your email, go to frequentMiller.com/subscribe and sign up for free. https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/Check out all of our other travel podcasts from around the worldThis podcast is part of Voyascape, a podcast network that brings together the world's best travel podcasts. You can find all of our podcasts from around the world at Voyascape.com. If you are interested in advertising or sponsored content on any of our shows you can find out more at the link below.Voyascape Podcast Network

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world atvoyescape.com. Today's coffee break. City cancels 5X earnings. Welcome to Frequent Milers Coffee Break, where we focus on a single topic related to miles and points. Each coffee break is limited to 20 minutes or less or your money back. I've been on vacation for a few weeks, and while I've been sort of, sort of, sort of, of missing from the points in miles world, the rest of the points in miles world did not go on vacation. And so stuff happened and some negative stuff. What's going on with city? Yeah, I mean, we wish that some of city's rewards team had taken a vacation too because, well, they were busy working and they were working on some negative changes. So the city custom

cash card has now been discontinued for new applications. You can no longer get it as a new card, though it may still be possible to product change to it. We don't know if or when that will end. So it's possible it'll end even before this publishes. But at least as of the time of recording, which is after they discontinued the card for new applicants, it has still been possible to product change to it. So what was the custom cash and why do we care about it?

Let's go over the quick. So the custom cash was a card that earns, city thank you rewards points and it was a way to earn five points per dollar for some compelling categories of spend so basically it's it's a no annual fee card it earns 5x on purchases in your top spend category each billing cycle up to $500 of spend but only in like select categories so those are restaurants, gas stations, grocery stores, drugstores, and then several other ones. And I highlighted the ones that are kind of like, the ones I think most people would probably have not much trouble spending $500 per billing cycle in those areas, especially since

places like grocery stores and drugstores also sell gift cards where you could go in and buy those. Anyway, the idea is that the best way to use this card is to just use it for one category of purchase because you're only going to earn 5x on whichever category you spend the most in. And so as long as you spend all $500 in that one category, you'll earn 5X on the full 500. So that's the way to use the card if you can get it. And then the way to use the points is you pool that card with, other city thank you rewards cards that have better ability to transfer to airline and hotel

partners. So like the strata premiere or the strata elite, for example. And then, you know, if you play your cards right, play this card right, you would you would get earned 5x on $500 of spend every month. So in 12 months, that's 30,000 points from your spend. And, and, you just it may sound like complicated to to like have this card and always remember to use it for certain types of spend but if you think about it if you frequent a grocery store um you could just buy that own that grocery store's own gift card for five hundred dollars each month and just use that for your for your grocery store spend and to make sure you're maxing out this um custom cash card and so 30 000 points a year that's that's good i mean it's not

like an amazing amount of points, but compared to a 2x card, that would earn 12k on the same amount of spend, it's pretty good. But it gets better because it's possible to have multiple of these cards. So if you product change other card, other city cards to the custom cash, you get a multiple of them and do more than $500 a month. And so then it can get pretty exciting. So that's, what the card is or was. It's, as we said at the outset, it's no longer available new. And we'll be right back after this

with some more analysis. We hope you're enjoying the Frequent Miler on the air podcast. Did you know that Frequent Miler is also a website? At frequentmiler.com, you'll find all the latest deals, news about points, miles, and rewarding credit cards,

the single best, best credit cards page on the web, guides to all popular rewards programs and many other terrific resources. If you'd like to get our posts sent to your email, go to frequentmiler.com forward slash subscribe and sign up for free. And we're back. All right. Let's talk about this situation. City had been on a role where the thank you point system had been getting more and more valuable as they added exciting new partners.

And they had, you know, great cards for earning anywhere from 2x, 3x to 5x spend. And now in the past month or two, they've been chopping away at that value. So not only is the custom cash no longer available new, but they took away the very favorable transfer ratio to preferred hotels and to choice. And probably worse than any of those, they ended point sharing, so you can't move your points to another person anymore. So all those things are pretty new. negative. So should we even care at all about the discontinuation of this card? Well, yeah, I mean,

this is easy points. And City still has a number of very good transfer partners for their unique or unique-ish partners. They've got American Airlines. Nobody else has American. They've got EVA or Eva, which others have, but City has it one to one. They've got leading hotels of the world. And they offer frequent transfer bonuses. So there's often opportunities to kind of charge up your points and earn even more. And they also offer a number of very popular programs that are available to other transferable currencies. So it's very easy to kind of combine forces between your city points and points from some other program. I mean, if you were earning 30,000 points a year from using your custom cash, then, you know, potentially another 30,000 points

from some other ecosystem. And you got yourself maybe a business class Air France, KLM Flying Blue Award to Europe or something of that sort. So for relatively low effort, you can still get some outsized rewards. Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, even though while it's definitely on a downward trajectory, the city program, it's still like it was really high up there and now it's lower. It's not like so far down that it's not worth, you know, earning points. And it's definitely worth earning points in the city ecosystem, I think.

But here's a question for you, Nick. Is it worth going out of your way to product change? If you have some other city cards, Maybe you want those city cards, but this is, you know, this is probably the last chance. Product change to the custom cash. Should you do that? Like, what do you think? You know, this doesn't have an easy, clear cut answer because on the surface, you might say,

well, yeah, of course, it's a collectible. And we anticipate that maybe it won't be available for product changes forever. And so if it isn't, now's the time. And in fact, my wife, product changed a double cash card to the custom cash. She was long term hoping the product changed a different card to a double cash anyway. And so she went ahead and product changed the double cash to the custom cash while she could. So we'd have one easy card. And just as Greg said, I mean, we spent enough on groceries that just buying a $500 gift card on the first trip of the month and using that,

we'll use that up in less than two weeks probably with the way we go through groceries. So it would be very easy for us to max that out and pick up 30,000 points a year. And then the question for me became, well, do we product change any of our other cards to another custom cash to be able to do that again? The challenge here is that we don't know what's going to happen long term. And while historically there have been a number of city cards that have hung around long after they were discontinued for new applicants, for those who were existing card holders or who product change to them, there's quite a few different city cards that have remained available long after they were gone. and some that have remained available long after they were gone, not for product change, but have stayed in their form for a long, long time. However, we also saw when they discontinued the strata, what was it, the strata plus?

What was that card? The rewards plus. The rewards plus. Thank you. Thank you. The rewards plus card. They discontinued that. And they eventually, and I say eventually not long after, force converted everybody to the strata

card and discontinued the card's best benefits. Right, right. Now the, yeah, so aside from those like hesitations, probably if you go ahead and product change to this and it doesn't work out, you could probably product change back to what you started with. But I really have to stress the probably part because city doesn't tell you, like you don't know up front what your product change options are. You have to contact them, ask, say,

you're interested in product changing, they'll give you a list the computer generates for them. Here's what you can do. And it might not be one of the cards you want. In fact, even right now, like let's say you want a product change an American Airlines card to the custom cash, you probably will not be offered custom cash as an option. But you might be offered another thank you card, like the AT&T card or double cash or something, and you might be able to do two hops, like product changed, one and then the other, but there's just no guarantee. So I think despite the fact that there's

no guarantee that you could go back, I do think that for most people, it's probably, especially if you have a number of city cards, it's probably worth product changing one or two or trying to to to the custom cash. You could log onto your city account, open up a chat window and just ask to do it there. I think that's the easiest way. Yeah, that's how my wife did it, and the whole process took just a couple of minutes. It was a really simple, quick chat. So that's an easy way to find out if you're eligible to do it. Now, I want to mention something Greg just mentioned, that City does, oddly, this is not common among most issues, but they do allow changing from a co-branded card, like an American Airlines card, to a thank you

card in some instances. And like you said, you might not be able to get to the card you want, that's the custom cash in this case, in a single hop, but you might be able to first product change to a different thank you card. That's unique. You know, with Chase, you can't product change a co-branded card to an ultimate rewards card. And same thing with Amex. You can't product change a co-branded card to a membership rewards card.

City, however, has historically allowed that at least for some, maybe most folks. So that is an option that you may not be aware of. If you're just used to the way everybody else does it and you have an American Airlines card, you might not have even realized that you could potentially have that option and maybe be able to do it with a couple of stops. So then I don't know, Greg, what should I do? My wife has a strata premiere and a strata elite, and she's got a globe card that was converted over from Barclays. She had an aviator silver that became a globe card.

Now, I had hoped that we would downgrade that globe card to a double cash at some point. But City hasn't been offering product changes for folks who came over from Barclays yet. So I don't know whether they're ever going to offer that functionality on that card. Now she's without a double cash card. What do we do? Do we product change the Premier to a double cash and then the Strata Elite maybe down to a Premier down the road? Do we leave things alone the way they are? I'm not sure what to do. Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm not sure why you'd want both a Stratelite and Stratia Premier. So I think... We don't long term, yeah. I think product changing one of those, at least, to a custom cash would make a lot of sense. and because I think you could always,

I think there's a good chance that later you'd be able switch it to a double cash if that's what you really preferred. And then the globe, I think you also have a globe card. Is that right? I do. Because if you do and if you don't have like need for the companion ticket that that card has on your wife's account,

then maybe product changing that one makes sense too. I think I would try if I would try. were you to get two custom caches out of it for right now and then later worry about a double cash. Yeah, well, that probably is good advice. But like I said, the folks who've been converted from Barclays over to City, those Globe cards haven't been eligible for any product changes yet. So we'll see. That's the long-term hope and plan. Because actually, before Barclays moved their portfolio over to City. My wife requested a credit limit increase, just anticipating changing that card to a double cash with a better credit line in the long run

than the double cash that she originally had. So hopefully that works out, but that's a little bit of 3D chess with the rewards game. And so I was just curious what you would do, because I agree with you. We don't need both strata cards. So probably downgrading another one to a second custom cash makes sense. as long as this custom cash lasts with the 5x categories. And time will tell whether or not it will last in that form. But it's probably worth jumping on if you have an opportunity right now. This episode was produced and edited by Carrie Yoder, music by Annie Yoder. If you've enjoyed what you've heard today and you'd like to get more of this in your email inbox each day or each week,

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