Frequent Miler on the Air - Citi's quintessential credit card quartet | Ep202 | 5-13-22

Episode Date: May 13, 2023

Do Citi's unsung heroes make up the quintessential credit card quartet? Greg and Nick discuss the Citi card combo you might want to consider. 00:00 Intro 00:49 Giant Mailbag: Citi updates application rules 04:18 What crazy thing . . . did Hilton do this week? 08:52 Mattress running the numbers: IHG Timeshare offer for 3 nights + 50K points for $199 / $249 https://frequentmiler.com/ihg-timeshare-offer-get-3-night-stay-50000-points-for-199-249/ 13:20 Award Talk: Booking Aer Lingus with Alaska Mileage Plan 20:42 Greg books British Airways via Asia Miles 24:25 Party of 5 Team Challenge https://frequentmiler.com/party-of-5-frequent-milers-2023-team-challenge/ 27:57 Main Event: Citi's quintessential credit card quartet 30:30 Card Talk: Citi Premier card https://frequentmiler.com/typremier/ 38:35 Card Talk: Citi Double Cash card https://frequentmiler.com/dc/ 44:00 Card Talk: Citi Custom Cash https://frequentmiler.com/customcash/ 49:50 Card Talk: Citi Rewards+ https://frequentmiler.com/TYRewardsPlus/ 57:00 Downsides of the Citi quartet 1:00:53 Curve card to rule them all https://frequentmiler.com/curve-card-review-awesome-but-limited/ 1:10:26 Are people missing the boat on the Citi Quintessential Quartet? 1:15:36 Question of the Week: Is it OK to buy store gift cards with an Amex card? Music credit: Annie Yoder

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did City do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event. Frequent Liler on the air starts now. Today's main event, City's Quintessential Credit Card Quartet. The Quintessential Credit Card Quartet. Say that. Exactly. Yeah, I'll try, but I don't think I'll waste the time. Citi has four credit cards that work really well together. And so they make an interesting quartet. Yeah, not duo, not trio, but a quartet. And so we're going to be

getting into why it's a very interesting combination and it's worth your consideration. First, of course, giant mailbag time. Today's giant mail is quite small. Comes from Josh. Josh says, just wanted to mention that it looks like Citi simplified the policy slash language on most, if not all of their applications. Now it's just 48 months since you last received a

bonus on a specific card. No more card family cancellation or product change to worry about. What the heck is Josh talking about? Well, that's a nice change. I can say that much. But yeah, so let's go back. So for a long time, Citi had application rules that were not quite to the level of Marriott application rules, but were still completely unintuitive. And so basically, if I remember correctly, now correct me if I'm wrong, because I've ignored Citi for so long that I've probably kind of forgotten. But as I understood, the rules used to be that you had to wait two years after opening or closing a card within the card family. So if you closed a card that was a thank you points earning card,

essentially, then you couldn't get any more bonuses for two years from the date you closed it. So the secret was never closing it. Right? Right, right, right. So it became very confusing, right? Because if you had like a certain card like the premiere and you didn't want it anymore and you closed it and then you sign up for a um you know city double cash or city rewards plus or something you're not eligible for you weren't before eligible for the welcome bonus and why would any like regular consumer know that yeah no normal person would would ever have like even considered that you know i think um and if you called the product change for a while if each product changed from a premiere to a double cash then that messed

you up because it like closed out your premiere card right for a long time yeah it used to work that way because double cash didn't used to be like really in the thank you family and that messed things up anyway uh so the good news is that josh is right they they've abandoned the family stuff meaning like you know the rules are no longer contingent on what other cards you've opened or closed um which which is great but the rule for getting the same card again has moved from 24 months to 48. So that side has gotten harder. If you want to, for example, get the welcome bonus on the city premier card over and over,

you're going to only be able to do that once every 48 months. It's actually more than that because it's 48 months from when you got the last welcome bonus. So if you, so it's, you know, more like add another three months onto it, depending on how long it took you to get the welcome bonus from when you signed up. So that's, that's not really a realistic option for earning lots of points anymore to keep signing up for the same card. But you know, I, I think that C city has has uh at least with their thank you cards which we're going to talk about today it's kind of left the the market of of people signing up just for the points you know that's pretty hard to do with with their program right now

but they have very powerful cards for earning rewards from spend and from regular spend we'll get into that right right so if you're a spender, they might have the quartet for you. That's right. All right. So all right. We'll talk more about that when we get to the main event in a little bit. But right now, let's talk about what crazy thing did Hilton do this week? So what's up with Hilton? So if you remember back, Hilton used to offer complimentary breakfast to gold and diamond members like everywhere, basically. And then

at some point, pandemic times ish, they changed that around. And so now gold and diamond members get a food and beverage credit that can be used for breakfast or something else. And at the time when they did this, they claimed that this was to give people more choice because then you could choose to use it for breakfast or if you'd rather use it for a drink in the evening or dinner or whatever, it's up to you. You get more choice. So it's all about you, Greg, the end user. They were being so nice. So we all love that change anyway right uh some of some people did i mean legit some people some people don't want to get up for breakfast or they already have breakfast is included in their per diem for work or whatever else they like they were fine with

getting free breakfast and something else but but i was not fine with that i didn't like that at the time and i don't like it even more now because i ran into a property that now I don't know if this is a rogue property, a mistaken employee or what, but I can't say I'm shocked to have seen this. So I booked a fine hotels and resorts property when I was in Las Vegas, Crockford's, which is at Resorts World. It's a Hilton property. It's in that LXR luxury chain. Very, very nice. Conrad and Crockford's were both very nice properties. I would gladly go back again. But I booked through FHR for Crockford's and the benefits through FHR are free breakfast for two. Of course, that's always the case at all of the various fine hotels and resorts properties. Of course, for work or checkout, upgrade, so on and so forth.

You'll get a $125 property credit, not $100 credit, but $125 property credit when booking through FHR. That's the case with quite a few Hilton properties through FHR, by the way, in general, I've noticed. So $125 property credit and breakfast for two. And I figured, well, great. And probably we'll also get the $50 diamond credit. So, I mean, that seemed awesome to me, $175 worth of credit, basically, on a rate that was like, I don't know, $225 or something like that. So totally seemed worthwhile. But at check-in, the employee told me that, no, you don't get the diamond benefit.

And he didn't say it's because we booked through FHR. What he said was, no, they don't allow that because that was really meant for breakfast, and people were abusing it and eating breakfast, and then also using the credit for another time of day. And that was specifically how he said they were abusing it like that. So they don't do that anymore. Right. So they're abusing it by by using the flexibility, the flexibility that tried to sell us. Yeah. Right. Right. So I don't know. I mean, it could have been a mistake. it by by using the flexibility the flexibility that hilton tried to sell us yeah right right so

i don't know i mean it could have been a mistake and i did i did check with so we have a an affiliate arrangement with travels work and they do uh among other things hilton impresario bookings and hilton impresario is their version of like hyatt purvey or marriott stars it's the preferred partner booking platform and benefits through those programs are very similar to find hotels and resorts so i asked michael trager what's up with that at Crockford's and he said, well, as of at least a few days ago, he knows that Hilton Impresario booking was still getting the $50 food and beverage credit. Now it's for a specific place there. That property is a little weird. That was the case with breakfast for diamond members when we were at the Conrad also,

the food and beverage credit is very restrictive for breakfast. But at any rate, he said that that was intact for impresario bookings as of a few days before this, before we recorded this. And he was surprised to hear what I had said about FHR. So I don't, again, could have been a mistaken employee, could have been just a change that this property is trying to get away with. I don't know. But either way, I didn't like it because it was like it flew in the face of what hilton said this credit was yeah no exactly i mean we want to get the the benefits that were promised as elite members and even more so you know when when they reduce the benefit like they did with this where they have it like this lower fixed amount than you know unlimited breakfast what they

had before uh sort of um then you know it it kind of hurts even more so yeah that's that's a little bit crazy um too bad too bad too bad i mean it was a great stay a great place but just you know a little bit of uh bad taste that it leaves because yeah oh come on hilton what are you doing to me here i mean that's right you right. You promised me flexibility, Hilton. Right. All right. All right. Enough complaining about hotels.

Let's talk mattress running the numbers. Which hotels are we going to this week? Well, this week we're talking timeshare offers. You know how much I love a good timeshare offer. So not really that much. But this week IHG has one out where you get a three night stay and 50,000 IHG points for either $199 or $249. I don't know if it varies by person, probably location is my assumption there. So you have to buy it by June 4th and you have up to 12 months to travel after you purchase

it. So again, either 200 or 250. I assume that's based on where you're going to stay for three nights and 50,000 points. Is this worth a mattress run to you, Greg? Yeah, 50,000 points. That sounds like a lot. So, well, let me clarify a little bit. It looks like from my looking at it that the 199 is to stay in a hotel, whereas the $249 is like a resort. Right. And so that's kind of the difference, I think. Okay, wait, wait, wait. Before you answer this, let me mention my wife got an offer in the mail from Marriott this week. That was a three-night stay in San Francisco for $199.

No points. No points. No points. From Marriott. She's offering 50,000 points. offering 50 000 points is this worth a mattress points sounds like a lot well so all right so if you would think about buying ihg points anyway um ihg points often go on sale for half cent each so 50 000 points that's like 250 bucks in your pocket you can think of it that way. Instead of buying 50,000 points, you're saving $250 by getting it by doing it this way, but you're still spending the 250

if you do the resort option. So a better way to think about it, you're buying points for the usual rate and you're getting a three-night stay, but you have to sit through a timeshare presentation. And there's a risk of falling to their evil persuasion and not being able to walk away without buying one. So I think there's some, yeah, I don't like it. I don't like it either. I don't like either. Yeah. And that's exactly the 90 minutes or two hours or three hours, whatever. And it ends up actually being that you have to sit there is the part that then throws me off here because yeah, I mean, the points are worth the price, but you could buy

the, I mean, keep in mind, you could buy the 50,000 points for $250, basically like almost any month of the year. And so like you're getting the regular rate on buying points. So you're trading away basically the timeshare sales presentation for the three nights stay. So if you want the three nights stay and it's worth a couple hours of your life of saying no, then, you know, maybe. Yeah. It's not probably worth it to me for three nights. I mean, it'd be a pretty nice IHG for me. That's the thing.

I'd want to get something better for for that price and and for the and when i say for that price i mean for having to sit through the timeshare presentation plus the price um and uh yeah it's just not i i picked one of the resorts to look at and and i compared like i picked a random date that seemed like reasonable to want to stay. And that particular one, this was a resort property. So $249, it was less than $200 a night. So, you know, I mean, yes, you're saving money, but it's just not a smoking deal.

I think the way sometimes you can get. Yeah. I mean, we've so for a comparison point, we've seen Hilton offer as many as 150,000 points at a similar price point in terms of the cost of the stay. So that's like $750 worth of Hilton points. You can think of that as in the three nights stay for about the same cost. So that's a 50% more generous offer there where I did the choice privileges one a few months ago. And that was, gosh, gosh i got 80 000 points and a three night stay and i ended up getting marriott elite credit and points because i picked a marriott i

mean that shouldn't have happened but it worked and yeah 50 mx gift card or something or 25 yeah i mean that's a that's a great example and and that one you know they put you up in other hotels and you know ahead of time that you're going to be in these other hotels. In this case, it looks like you're actually being put up at IHG properties. So I don't think you can get away with in this one double dipping like that. So yeah. Yeah.

So it's like if you find a place that you really want to stay at, maybe, but it's not a mattress run to me. All right. So that's mattress running the numbers. Let's talk about award talk. Let's do it. What's up this week in your award booking life?

Yeah, so I had to rebook a flight to Europe. So I have had a longstanding reservation on a Delta flight, and they keep making it earlier and earlier. And I have a scheduled conflict that day now. The flight's gotten so early, it wasn't going to work. But of course, I'm looking midsummer for four business class seats. So I've been thinking that I was going to have to cancel the schedule conflict, which wasn't a very good option.

But then I stumbled upon Aer Lingus business class availability, and I had totally forgotten that you could book Aer Lingus with Alaska Airlines miles. I don't even know why I was searching on the Alaska site, to tell you the truth. I just looked for some reason. And I was checking the British Airways taxes or I don't know what it was, but I saw four seats on Aer Lingus on a summertime date, 60,000 miles for each ticket. And I thought, that's perfect. It was actually a couple of days later,

it was a no schedule conflict, got me where I needed to be and a better schedule. So I was excited about that, but I found this interesting for a number of reasons. Number one, I had totally forgotten that Alaska partners with Aer Lingus. So that was the first reason it was interesting to me. Number two, yeah, I found it interesting because I found four seats. Number three, I found it interesting because if not for that one day with four seats, all the other days around my dates were 280,000 points per person. And that's what the price went up to after I booked the four seats. So I might have thought that Alaska just has a ridiculous

award rate for Aer Lingus if I had looked like day by day by day for that week. And I just thought, oh, they never, it's not, it's not appealing. It's not a good way to book Aer Lingus, but apparently sometimes it can be. So that was takeaway number one, right? Takeaway number two was that, so what I actually booked was to Dublin and then on to Milan. And that particular route from, I think from Washington to Dulles is what it was, Dulles to Milan, or rather Dulles to Dublin to Milan. And if I looked via avios.com, now Avios.com is sort of like a middleman in the Avios ecosystem. You can book using your Aer Lingus Avios at Avios.com. And so I was searching there because my understanding based on what Point.me was showing was that British Airways would have charged like $750 in taxes. And I didn't double check that, but I believe it.

But it showed that Aer Lingus would only charge $130 worth of taxes. And I didn't double check that, but I believe it. But it showed that Aer Lingus would only charge $130 worth of taxes. So I thought, okay, well, let's just check and take a look. So I pulled up obvious.com and I searched that route. And first of all, I couldn't through obvious.com book Dulles to Dublin to Milan that just came up with no results. So that was not even an option through them. And it was through Alaska. Interesting. That was kind of weird. Yeah.

But then the second weird piece is that the Dulles to Dublin route only showed three seats in business class. If I booked the award directly through obvious.com using my Erlang as obvious, there were only three seats in business class. But Alaska had access to four seats. To four. To four. Yeah, this should have been our crazy thing segment um yeah that's that's pretty nuts i mean because obvious should have better like you would think you should have at least as good at least because that's the program that that sort of belongs to air lingus is weird in so many ways but but one of those ways is that they don't really have their their own dedicated

like um award booking page thing or anything that you have to go to this obvious.com as you're saying to to book um using your aerolingus avios um yeah yeah interesting it was weird yeah go ahead did i oh i'm curious if you looked at United because United is also a partner with. I did. I did. You know what, though? I didn't check to see if they had access to four seats. And in hindsight, that was a mistake.

I guess I should have checked and seen if they had access to the same number of seats. So so Alaska charged 60,000 miles one way. And that was true whether I flew just to Dublin or on to Milan. United would have charged 82,400 miles for some reason. I don't know why it was more than other partner awards to Europe, but that's what it came out to be through United. And through Avios.com, it was 60,001 Avios, not 60,000 even. It was 60,001 Avio per passenger, but again, only for three passengers.

So I was able to book all four through Alaska. Now I should mention, or at least I will mention anyway, that the Dublin to Milan segment is an economy class. So maybe that has something to do with it. It's mixed cabin business class Europe and economy from there. Possibly there, I guess there weren't any business class seats on the connecting flight and that was fine because European business classes.

I've definitely seen that on some search engines where there's mixed availability, but they can't see it at all because you picked as a search that you want to look for business class, for example. And it just does not show the others. And so maybe that makes sense for the connecting part. But again, I looked just dullest to Dublin also.

And like I said, it was four seats through Alaska, three through them. And it's not like I didn't even book all four in one booking because my wife and I, neither of us had enough points with Alaska to book all four seats. So I booked two seats with my wife's account and two seats with mine and it went through. It's fine. Do you know whether Alaska saw that many seats on just the Dublin, just to Dublin as the... Yes, yes, I searched that also. It did see all, okay, all right. Yep, I searched that also.

Because I thought maybe there was a married segment availability going on, something along those lines, but no. No, yeah. That's interesting. I mean, this isn't the first thing, like Alaska sometimes has better, not usually better, but sometimes better award availability for Singapore than even

Singapore does for certain flights, like certain situations, or at least they used to. And then more recently, it looks like Air Canada has better. But regardless, every now and then with these partnerships, we see these weird kind of things. So so yeah herlingus you said you you know you forgot that alaska is a partner i did i totally forgot um what what i always forget about with them is that they're not one world right um you know because with them like sharing being so close with british airways that they share the you know currency the avios as a reward system I think of them as being one world and then you realize that oh you could book uh you could book Aer Lingus with some one world airline miles but definitely not all of them right and you can book them with

United Mile you know plus like you said which that I knew that you could use United Mileage plus for Aer Lingus and also I mean for those that fly on a lot I knew that you could use United Mileage Plus for Aer Lingus. And also, I mean, for those that fly on a lot of paid flights, you could also credit United flights to Aer Lingus and end up with Avios. So that, you know, I think that's an interesting thing because we think of Avios being a one world program also. So if you're a one world person, it might not be bad to credit your United flights there too, I guess. I mean, if you want to have all your Avios together or whatever or whatever, but anyway, yeah. So I had totally forgotten about Alaska and Aer Lingus

because like you said, they're not a one world airline, even though I kind of think of them that way. And I guess if I even realized, I had long ago forgotten that there was a partnership. Yeah, yeah. All right. So moving into my award talk and speaking of partners and speaking of partners and speaking of Avios, I've been looking for booking a flight for my wife to go to London.

And one of the, you know, British Airways has often has fantastic award availability, especially between North America and London. The downside is that award fees are absurd. And so I pulled up a flight that was exactly when she wanted to go. And I think it cost something like 60,000 avios for business class class which didn't seem bad at all um but it also had something like 700 in taxes and fees which uh wasn't so good right but these days you can pay more avios right and pay less you can so you're gonna pay right i think it was 90 for this particular flight yeah um so you could pay pay a lot more miles and it's still not low. Like it was something like $300 in taxes and fees when you do that.

Then I remembered that Asia miles, Cathay Pacific Asia miles often has lower surcharges for flying British Airways than other carriers do. So just for example, I did check American Airlines and Alaska, both of which you could use to book British Airways. And they both had very high fees as well. In fact, they were a tiny bit higher than British Airways was, which was interesting. But yeah, Cathay was less

than $300 for the exact same flight and around the same mile, 60,000 or something like that. So that's just a really useful tip to keep in mind. And if you're thinking, well, wait a minute, I don't have any Cathay Pacification miles. How is that going to help me? You can transfer from pretty much everyone except for Chase. So you could transfer, if you have Amex points, if you have Citi points, if you have Capital One points, Bilt points, you could, well, yeah, I think Bilt. You can transfer to Cathay Pacific Asia miles one-to-one. So that's a good way of getting them. Preston Pysh. It certainly is. And the same is true in both directions, that you'll pay less in fees in both directions.

So I think it's 61,000 miles. So like you said, almost exactly the same thing, which can vary probably based on distance. So I probably should have said that. It probably varies a little bit based on where you're flying to and from. Right, right. Also, if you are using British Airways points to book, don't book round trip. Book two one-ways. It's actually cheaper in taxes and fees altogether as two one-ways.

It's still going to be expensive, but a little bit less that way. The other thing to keep in mind too, for anybody who's kind of new to that whole ecosystem is that if you book a business class award, I think you may be able to upgrade to first class if you find availability using Avios, right? Although I don't know how that works. If you've booked your ticket through Asia miles, you probably can't do that when you book through Asia miles. So maybe nevermind on that. I was for the difference I know between a business class award and a first class award, uh, you can usually upgrade, but I actually don't know that that's

true with Asian miles. So let me take that back. Um, all right. So good. Anyway, a great tip to keep in mind. Awesome. Cause it's very easy to, to accumulate Asian miles. If you've got British areas, obvious, you probably also somewhere have points that can trap transfer to Catholic Pacific. So very good. All right. Challenge update. Do you have a challenge update here, Greg? Yeah. So the team challenge, the 2023 team challenge is called Party of Five. And when we first announced it, what we said is that what we're doing is we're flying to

Tokyo, all five of us on the team, on the Frequent Miler team. And we're still going to do that. And then we said, and the first team, so Team Tokyo, which is Kerry and Steven, we're going to plan our trip for four days for all five of us to do spectacular things. And they're going to figure out how to get fantastic value from points and miles in order to have a fantastic trip for five people.

So that's the party of five angle. And then when we return to the US, to San Francisco, Team San Francisco, Nick and Tim, will take over and design four days of travel in the Americas. But first, Team Americas asked, hey, is it okay if we take another day or two? You know, make it a little more extra night. One extra night. And we were like, sure, sure, sure, why not?

And so now Team Tokyo has done the same and, and so, uh, we've got two, you know, more than four day trips, uh, gonna, gonna be happening here. Um, what this does mean though, is I, I also announced that in the middle, uh, I was going to do a little like game within a game where I gave challenges to the, to all the team members team members, like mini challenges. I don't know if we'll have time for that. I'll try to sneak it in if we can, but it might not be possible. We'll see. Well, we'll see what we can do. I trust that it'll be worth it, whatever it is that's coming. I'm getting excited. I was talking about this earlier today. I was in an event talking about it. It's an exciting thing because I think I mentioned last week, I had no idea what's going on those first few days. And we're inching closer and closer to this flight to Tokyo, where I have no idea where I'm going from there. And I've never done a trip that way

before. I mean, how many of us have ever done a trip where you take off, and you don't know where you're going? I mean, I've heard of people writing that off once in a while, by, you know, like, contacting the airline in advance and surprising somebody without time but not general it's not a normal thing to do and in this case it's not even like anybody needs to arrange that with the airline we're going to take off for tokyo and i have no idea what we're doing so i can't wait it's gonna be fun yeah yeah oh absolutely you'll want to be why if you're not following us on instagram yet by the way you should be following us on instagram because we're going to be, you know, live storying the whole thing.

The story format on Instagram just really lends itself well to, you know, kind of like reporting on a trip live while it's happening. It's, you know, I think it's a format that's perfect for that. So if you're on Instagram, you should be following the frequent miler account for that. Yeah. Yeah. Especially if you're interested in sort of like finding out what's happening in near real time to when we're finding out what's happening right you know that's that's where where you'll be sort of part of the whole experience in a way by following us on instagram so yeah do that very good frequent miler on instagram there you go okay all right next i think next is probably, well, I was following our outline, and I was going to say the main event, but are we doing card talk?

No, no. The card talks are going to be within the main event. Okay. So welcome to the main event. Today's main event, Citi's quintessential credit card quartet. Okay. Today's main event, Citi's quintessential credit card quartet. Okay, so Citi has their Thank You Rewards program, which are points that we love because they're transferable to airline and hotel programs. And they have four credit cards when used together,

offer some just awesome earning power for like everyday types of things like grocery and dining and gas and you name it. They've got it. And best of all, maybe I don't know if this is best, but a really good ad is that the combined annual fee, all four cards, 95 bucks a year, 95 bucks altogether. that's crazy that that is kind of crazy because if you try to put together a great combination with amex or chase it's going to involve at least one card that costs more than 95 probably right i mean maybe i guess you get away with it with chase chase get away with it yeah could do. So the way I think about it is like, Chase, yeah, you could put together a really good combo for 95 bucks,

but what you've got then, you've got like a gamer's combo. You don't have bonuses for like gas stations or good bonuses for gas station and grocery stores. You've got like at best, you've got 3X signing, but where it gets really interesting are things like 5x office supply, but

this is for us gamers that are going to office supply stores and buying gift cards. It's not for your everyday person. Right, right. No, cities definitely. In Amex, you'd need the gold card, right? In Amex, you need the $250 gold card. If you want a good multiple on all hotels

and travel, you need the $150 green card in addition. For a good gas on all like hotels and travel you need the 150 green card in addition for a good gas bonus i think you need like the what everyday preferred maybe i mean that's another 95 so yeah it would add up if if you uh you know really want to get all these categories even on the amex side so right and and then capital one side they don't have many cards they don't have as many category bonuses, right? I mean, you can get a category bonus on a couple of things, but not all of them. And it would be a little bit harder to get approved for all the cards, probably.

So I think Citi really is nailing it here for somebody that is not looking to spend a lot on annual fees and has very normal spending patterns and just wants to be well rewarded for it. So I guess we've got to explain what those cards are. Yes. Yes. All right. Let's kick it off with the most interesting probably card in the, or at least- Oh, that's a loaded statement. Yeah, it's loaded. It's the one you need. I mean, this one's important. The Citi Premier card, it's the only one with an annual fee, $95 a year. But it's also the only one we're going to talk about that gives you the power to move your points, to transfer points from city to airline and hotel programs. And that's why this card is so important. But it's also pretty darn good with its category bonuses.

What does it have there? It really is. So this is a 3X dream here. 3X on dining. So got that covered. Big category for a lot of people. 3X on supermarket spend. Again, big category there.

And a noteworthy mention here that there's not a cap on it, like with the Amex Gold Card, which offers. There's not a cap. It's like with the Amex Gold card, which offers... There's not a cap. It's not limited to United States grocery stores. There's no foreign transaction fees. So you could get all these category bonuses outside of the US as well as in. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So for an expat, this card could be really good because it also offers 3X on gas stations. And again, that's another worldwide one, right? No foreign transaction fees. So 3X gas, 3x flights and hotels. So it's not 3x all travel, but flights and hotels are probably most of the travel most people spend on. So really, I mean, you get 3x on tons of stuff. It's 1x everywhere else, but 3x on, again, tons of good categories that are like the everyday categories that most people spend most of their money in. Right. So I think it's valuable for that. Now I should mention the downside. It offers three X flights and hotels, but no travel protections. So I'm a little hesitant to put travel purchases on the city premier. But if you, I mean, if, if you're not so worried about that,

then, then here you go. You get, especially if you're an expat or something and you have like an annual travel insurance policy, or you're just somebody who buys an annual travel insurance policy, you might already have coverage for a lot of that kind of stuff. It might not matter to you at all. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. So very good 3X stuff. And it's good because the points are transferable, as we said. But don't cities transfer partners kind of stink, Greg?

I don't think so. I mean, so they have some of the best ones that we love. We talk often about Flying Blue, for example, that they're solid, right? Like, you're not going to get like, oh, the best deal in the world, but you can get really decent deals with Air France KLMm's flying blue program you transfer to them uh and oh and by the way and they're great for booking almost any like sky team um flights if the awards are available so you could fly delta you could fly virgin atlantic you could fly um uh blanking on you know what else but k Korean air is what I was trying to go. Yeah. So, so it's really useful that way.

You know what, let me, before you go to the next one, let me just slide into a tip that we got this week that I haven't yet had a chance to verify, but, and that is that flying blue, apparently according to one tip. And again, I haven't had a chance to verify this. So if you have out there, then let us know in the comments. But I've heard anyway that if you use Expert Flyer and you find Z-class space on Air France and KLM flights, then cheaper prices than what you see online may be available if you call. So if you find that Z-class space, word on the street is that if you find the right agent, they're going to find cheaper prices than what the online search engine is going to show you. So I've heard that there could be some difficulty. We were told the reader that tipped us off said there could be some difficulty in getting someone who's able to price it properly.

But anyway, that's a tip I'm keeping in mind now, because already I would say that Air France Flying Blue is a decent program for someone who doesn't have the same flexibility that you read about, bloggers talking about. I was listening to a podcast today, a new podcast called Point Me to First Class. And there's a physician that hosts it, or a retired physician, I think. And the guest was a physician. And she was talking about that in their line of work, there's not the same flexibility because you have patients and this and that. And so you can't take advantage of the 30,000 miles business class to Europe all the time because they got to plan things out far in advance. And Flying Blue is a good program for somebody in that type of situation because you may not find the best, best deal, but you can often find a reasonable deal using Flying Blue miles. That's right. Exactly. And then for Star Alliance flights, which Star Alliance is the

biggest alliance of airlines, you have you have LifeMiles. You've got the Avianca LifeMiles, which Star Alliance is the biggest alliance of airlines, you have you have LifeMiles. You've got the Avianca LifeMiles, which Nick loves. A lot of people don't. And I understand why, but but I do love it. Yeah. I mean, it's great for domestic United flights when United decides they want to release availability to Avianca and very good for business class tune from Europe and no surcharges at high change fees. But anyway, Life Miles, I think good program. Asia Miles, Greg was just talking about Asia Miles a few minutes ago.

So if you're listening to that and you're like, ooh, that sounds kind of interesting to me. Well, Citi's got them as a transfer partner. Yep, yep. And also British Airways they've got. And so with Asia Miles and British Airways, you've got One World covered. And then they also have other ones like Emirates, JetBlue,

Turkish, which has some really spectacular specific deals that you can use them for. In addition, flying Turkish is actually often a really great use of Turkish miles. So yeah, so they've got a solid partner lineup for airlines. Then for hotels, they've got two transfer partners, one of which is Choice and one is Wyndham. What's interesting with Choice is that city points transfer one to two. So they double when you move them using your city premier, move your points to Choice. You get double the points at the at the end so while choice isn't necessarily like the sort of dream like hotel brand where you're picturing uh my ties on the beach somewhere um it there are nice hotels that can be booked with

choice points and uh getting to double your points makes it really attractive. And then if you transfer them on from there to Radisson, you double again, you double the double. And so you end up with quadruple if you want to transfer them to Radisson America's points. You're probably not that excited about that, but it's possible anyway. You can do it. And of course, the other hotel program that matters is Wyndham. They transfer to Wyndham rewards one to oneone and that can be appealing because of course we've talked lots of times how you can book the cost of vacation rentals with Wyndham points, 15,000 points per bedroom per night, up to maybe 500-ish dollars

per night per bedroom. So definitely some good reasons to want CityPoints. And by the way, those were not all of the transfer partners. I know there's somebody out there who's a big EVA fan who's like, oh, but EVA releases more space to their members and you can transfer them. And Singapore releases more space to Singapore's members and you can transfer. Yes, there are some other transfer partners, too. We're just highlighting some of the better ones. But Citi also does have some other transfer partners, too. That's right.

That's right. All right. So that is the Citi Premier card. Very solid card. But as Nick said before, you know it it at least used to be advertised as a travel card and it's kind of hard to talk about as a travel card now because it doesn't have any travel protections built in uh but it's pretty good it earns transferable points i think of it these days as a dining grocery gas card that offers good return in all those categories. 3X transferable points.

3X transferable points, yeah, it really is. 95 bucks is very, especially when you compare it to like the Amex Gold card that gets 4X sure on dining and at US supermarkets, but the US supermarkets on that card is limited to $25,000 per year. Not a problem with Citi, and it's $250 a year versus $95, so

this is a very reasonable alternative to that card. So Citi Premier is good, but that's not all. Because of course we said there's a quartet going on here. So let's make some more music, Greg. Let's pull up the next person in the lineup here. Our next card in the lineup in the quartet is the City Double Cash Card. This one has no annual fee.

It does have a 3% foreign transaction fee, though, so don't use it internationally. But within the U.S., what you get is two points per dollar everywhere. Technically, the way they do that is they give you one point per dollar when you buy something and another point per dollar when you pay your statement so uh it's a little weird that way but uh it still adds up to two per dollar you're telling me one plus one equals two greg one plus one equals two i know you always trust you for the tough math all these city cards we're talking about um can also points can also be cashed out for a penny each so if you want to use this as a two percent cash back card you absolutely can and uh it i i actually love it for that like if someone isn't really into the game yet or is thinking about the game but you know just really wants just solid cash back right now um double cash i mean you're're getting just 2% everywhere for free, you know, no annual fee. And later, you know, when you're ready to jump in more,

you can do what's necessary to make the points transferable. And the thing that's necessary is getting a city premier card, the $95 city premier card, and doing something called, what is it called? Combining your pool. Well, pooling. Online, it's not called pooling but but anyway you you you go into your thank you account and you combine accounts i think it's called and and uh once you've done that your points that are earned on the city custom

uh city double cash and others um as long as the premier is one of those cards become transferable to uh airline and hotel programs so that's really cool um and can and are transferable at the good rates that the city premier allows and what do i mean by that well uh city double cash on its own does let you do some transferring. It's very, very limited. There are three programs you can transfer your points to. And this is if you don't have the Premier card. So you could transfer a choice, like 1,000 city points to 1,500 choice points. So it's still better than 1-to-1, but not as good as the premier card, which goes one to two.

Jet blue is a thousand city points to 800 jet blue points. Wyndham is also that way. Thousand city points to 800 window points. There you go. All right. The other reason I like the city double cash for a beginner or somebody relatively new to the game, Like Greg said, you get the ability to transfer partners later on. And I think it also makes it sink in a little bit why transferable points are so good, because you take $75 worth of cash back from the double cash card and you suddenly transfer that to Turkish miles and smiles, 7,500 miles and book a one way United flight to wherever it is, transcontinental,

somewhere you want to go in the United States, Hawaii, Alaska, whatever. And I feel like that's a pretty good introduction to, oh, wow, these points can be worth a lot more than the cash value. So I feel like it also helps put it in perspective a little bit. So I love the double cash for that, for somebody who's relatively new. So great 2X everywhere floor value card to have in this lineup. 2% cash back and no annual fee, if they earn their cash back this way and eventually have some reason to travel, maybe you're booking travel for them, maybe you're going together, for example, they could actually move their points to you, assuming you have a Premier card, and then you could transfer to the airliner hotel program book the travel including for them um and uh as long as you do that within i think it's 90 days

once once you move points for another person the points expire if they're not used right away but you know don't do it until you're ready to actually use the points. And that's that's kind of a really nice feature that not all programs have. It is. And again, another great way to introduce somebody who's new to the game or somebody who's recently out of college maybe and isn't ready to handle all the welcome bonus spending. But, you know, you have a kid maybe who just is out of college and you're like, OK, well, here, take this card and put everything on it for a while. And then I'll help you when you want to travel and you got the premier card and you can help them, you know, teach them how to

use the points. So I had a great teaching tool. So custom cash. All right. So I'm sorry, rather double cash rather, I should say definitely a big piece of the court. It was like the baseline, right? It was like the bass player in the quartet know right right now if you have the premier card and the double cash you've got a pretty good duo right you've got you've got basically two two to three x on all your spend right you know so so that's that's pretty fantastic right there uh but you could kick it up a notch and and that's with the city custom cash card which like double cash, no annual fee, does have a 3% foreign transaction fee. But here you're getting 5X on your top spend category, up to $500 spent each billing cycle. What the heck does that mean?

Well, it's not just any category. So there's a set number of categories. And it's so the one of the following categories that you spend the most amount of money in, you'll earn 5X. And so what people like us will tell you is only use this card for one of these categories and focus it on $500 worth of spend

in one of these categories. So your category options are restaurants. A lot of people eat gas stations. A lot of people use gas grocery stores, select travel, which I'm not exactly sure what is selected, but select travel, select transit, select streaming services. That doesn't excite me as a five X category, because you're not going to spend 500 bucks a month streaming.

Or if you do, you need to reevaluate some things. So it's probably not streaming. Drugstores, that could be a good one. 5X drugstores, home improvement stores, fitness clubs, live entertainment. So you got a whole bunch of different options there to earn 5X and up to $500 spend per billing cycle. So you pick one of those. You say, OK, this is my restaurant card and I'm going to earn 5x. And I forget about the 3x on the, you know, the city premiere,

I'm gonna earn 5x on that category. Or maybe you're a homeowner. And you're like, well, listen, I got plenty of home improvement projects I'm working on. So I'm going to use home improvement stores and get 5x on that I can buy gift cards at home improvement stores. So if I don't spend $500 this month, then I could probably max that out by buying an Amazon gift card or something like that. So that could be a good reasonable option if you say, well, I'm already earning 3x with the Premier at grocery stores, so let me pick something different with custom cash. You get the option. You could choose, right?

Right. Yeah, no, exactly. And Citi tries to, well, they sort of half-heartedly try to keep you to only having one of these custom cash cards. And I say that because like they have a rule that if you already have one, they're not going to let you sign up for a new one. But they will let you product change from any other city card to the custom cash. And even if you already have one or you already have two or you already have three of them,

so you can get more custom cash cards by signing signing up for you know for example an american airlines city card and then then a product changing later to the custom cash and and if you if you do anything like that um i i think the the best way to do it is just like each card you you just decide ahead of time like i'm only going to use this card for grocery, for example. So that's my 5X grocery card. And just I would find it like kind of mind boggling to try to figure out month to month, which what category am I going to use with these different cards? That sounds that sounds difficult to me. You pick one, you put a label on it and you track your $500 spend in that particular category.

Right. But but it's awesome because you could end up with a few of these. You pick one, you put a label on it, and you track your $500 spend in that particular category, right? But it's awesome because you could end up with a few of these. And so you could end up, and again, like Greg said, for instance, if you open an American Airlines credit card today, a Citi Consumer American Airlines credit card today, you'll probably have to wait a year before you can product change. But a year from now, you should be able to product change to a custom cash that he usually allows that. So unlike other issuers, which won't let you change from a co-branded card to like, for instance, you can't change a Chase co-branded card to an ultimate

rewards card. They don't let you do that. Same thing with Amex. But Citi does let you do that. So you can take an American Airlines card and turn it into a custom cash. Usually. I mean, I think that maybe there's there could be some variance from person to person, but I haven't heard of anybody getting denied that. So so there you go. You should be able to do that and potentially end up with more than one of these. So then then you could have a quintet or a sextet or a septum letter. I don't know where it goes from there. There are a couple of things that make this card not as good as the double cash. It doesn't have any transfer partners.

So if you don't have the premier card matched with it, you're not going to do anything with the points useful other than get cash for the points. The more difficult one is that it doesn't let you move your points to another person. So double cash, you could, as I was saying before, a friend or relative could send you their points and you could use them. Not so much with custom cash. And that's problematic because if they didn't have this rule, then in my family, I would easily have a lot more custom cash cards because I'd have everybody sign up for the custom cash card, even though they don't have a Premier card. Or just as an aside, a Prestige card also has the ability to let you move points to all the transfer partners

that the Premier has, but it's no longer available to new applicants. So I don't want to hear a lot of people writing in saying, hey, you didn't mention the Prestige card. There's a reason we didn't mention it because you can't get it anymore. applicants so i don't want to hear a lot of people uh writing and saying hey how do i get the prestige card well there's a reason we didn't mention it because you can't get it anymore so you can't product change to it either yeah you can't product change yeah yeah anyway um so so it's a little so you know whoever has the premier card or the prestige card that's the person that needs to get a bunch of custom cash cards if If you want more than one, rather than having other people get some, but okay.

For the purposes of the quartet, we were counting that as one. So we got a double cash, you know, playing the baseline. We got our lead singer. That's the, you know,

the, the premier card. And then the custom cash here is playing the high hat drum, right? Right. You can hear it. Can't you? So,

so, so we gotta, we gotta have somebody else in here right i gotta have our rhythm guitarist or something uh so so what's what's the final piece of the quartet what ties it all the final piece final piece is the rewards plus card and that plus is actually a important piece of this whole uh puzzle here so all right the rewards plus card was what is it it's a card with no annual fee, 3% foreign transaction fee. So this is just like the previous two in those ways.

It gives you two points per dollar at supermarkets and gas stations. I don't find that interesting. It gives you a 10 point roundup, which means that no matter how many points you would normally get for a particular purchase, they're going to round up to the nearest 10 points. So if you spend just a penny, you'll get 10 points. If you spend a dollar, where you normally just get one point or two points uh you'll get 10 points and so um that's that it sounds exciting if you say oh look if i spend a dollar and get 10 points that's 10x so i'm getting 10x on my small purchases until you realize like you know you could you could spend like all day for days purchasing things for a dollar and getting 10 points, and you're not going to be rich with points by the end of that time.

That's a lot of work for very little gain. Right. So that's not really what's exciting. What is exciting with this card is that it gives you a 10% point rebate when you redeem points up to a maximum 100,000 points redeemed each year. And what's so cool about that is when you combine your points with other cards, like your Premier, your Double Cash, your Custom Cash, and you redeem out of that pile of points,

that 10% applies across that whole pile. So it's still limited, 100,000 points redeemed each year, but whether you're cashing it out, like you could be cashing out your 100,000 points for a thousand bucks and then get 10,000 points back, or you could be transferring to transfer partners and get up to 10,000 points back. So indirectly indirectly it's sort of it you know it's sort of boosting the earning power of your other cards because of this right right it absolutely is giving you that little bit extra a little bit incentive a little bit back now let me ask you this greg if i have the rewards plus first of all if i only have the rewards plus can i transfer my points to you if you have the city premiere card you can yeah do it words plus you could do i get the 10 back when i

do that no no you don't because because you're not redeeming when you're moving the points that's why yeah yeah so the question though so so you're only going to get it when you redeem them and by redeem them we mean redeem for cash back or redeem for a transfer to a travel partner. But still, if you're going to use 100,000 points per year, then, you know, great, you just got 10,000 back. So, you know, or even less than that, obviously, 10% of whatever it might be is a nice little benefit. Nobody else offers a card like that. So that's why this card is like Greg said, it's an important piece, but you're not going to probably use it for anything. You're not going to put any purchases on this.

I mean, I guess if you just need to buy bananas or pack of gum or something, I guess this is the card I would pull out if it was in my wallet or more likely I'd have it in like Google Pay or Apple Pay or whatever and use it to touch to the terminal in those situations where I really do just need to spend a dollar because why not get a couple extra points. But like you said, you're not going to earn a consequential number of points that way so this is a card you're going to have really mostly for the 10 rebate benefit but it's a nice card to have because it doesn't cost you anything to have it is a fee-free card so you know no no downside to having this card and now the next question i know somebody's going to ask is well greg i know you just talked a minute ago about how i could have

like three or four or five or however many custom cash cards. So if I get like two rewards plus cards, do I get 20,000 points per year back? Of course, when this card first came out, that was the first thing I tried. And unfortunately, no, you do not. Having extra rewards plus cards doesn't do any good that I can tell. So there you go. There you go. So now no point having more than one that we that we know of.

So now if you have more than one, I would convert one of them to another custom cash card. Right, right. Because then you could at least earn five X on one of those categories that we mentioned. All right. So let's summarize what we got here in our quartet. So we may have gotten a little confusing by talking about having extra custom cash cards. So the four cards, again, are the City Premier card, $95 a year, the City Double Cash, no annual fee, 2X everywhere, the City Custom Cash, 5X and you're selected or not selected in the category you spend the most in out of the categories you're talking about and the Re plus for the 10 rebate so you're going to get between two and five x everywhere two x is your floor base level because your your double cash will get two x everywhere and your custom cash is going to get five x in your one category

or then three x on a number of categories on your city premier card so between two and five x everywhere with one 95 annual fee per year. And you're going to get a 10% rebate on your rewards. So it's kind of. Redemptions. It's kind of like earning, almost like earning 2.2 points per dollar on the custom cash or 5.5 points per dollar. Or rather, I'm sorry, it was 2.2 on the double cash or 5.5 on the custom cash if you redeem just 100,000 points anyway. Sort of. or 5.5 on the custom cash if you redeem you know just 100 000 points anyway sort of the the weird math of rebates makes it makes it more like uh one point like 1.11 per point so anyway it becomes a

little bit more than that but um that's right yeah uh that that's uh i think i think it's easier and and to do it the way you're saying just you know 10% to it. And you're sort of, in a way, earning that extra. So I think that's about as good as you can possibly get for just straight up earning power across all those widely used categories. And a 10% rebate for $95 a year. I mean, that really is a notable deal that doesn't get enough attention. So Greg brought this topic up as a topic of discussion for the podcast. And I was like, I really like that because nobody really talks much about these cards anymore

because you can't get a million welcome bonuses. And so I guess we should talk about why it doesn't get talked about more. Because we just talked about all the good reasons why this could be a great combo. And again, I think it's a great combo for somebody who is not going to go out there and chase a whole bunch of welcome bonuses

and just wants to earn really good rewards for spend. And I feel like I know a lot of people like that, that would for sure. I mean, there's so many people that aren't interested in doing, you know, one signup bonus after another.

On the other hand, there's people like me that like both. Like, I do the signup bonuses, but I also like to earn a lot for my everyday spend. And so I do have all these cards and I do use them in those ways. All right. So we talked about the good things. What about the bad things, though? Why wouldn't somebody be interested in this, Craig?

Yeah. So, you know the the cards don't have any purchase protections uh you know all the stuff that you're used to of uh some other cards will give you like 90 days of uh protection in case the new item you bought is damaged or lost um there's no travel protection so you're used to like, if you buy airfare that, that there would be, uh, you know, trip cancellation or delay insurance, but you're not going to get any of that. You're not going to get rental car insurance. Um, they're missing some key transfer partners that some of the other programs have.

Uh, so like aeroplan air Canada aeroplan, uh, you know, we love them. The star Alliance, plus they have a billion partners. They're like one of the most useful programs out there. They don't have them, but everyone else does. Right, right. Get with it, Setti. Like, get back on your game here. You're not going to have any purchase protections.

You got to at least throw me a bone here and give me Air Canada. That's right. They don't have American Airlines. Now, only Bilt has American Airlines as a transfer partner, but Citi should have American Airlines. Yeah, they should. Citi has a deal with American Airlines for their credit cards, but they don't have American Airlines as a transfer partner,

and that's sad. Hyatt, again, not many programs have Hyatt as a transfer partner. And that's, that's sad. Um, I, it again, you know, not many, not many programs have Hyatt as a transfer partner, but that's a fantastic one that you're not going to see with, uh, with city and we could go on and on with others as we go on, but those are some of the big ones that are like sort of painfully missing that if city had, uh, you know, if city had an airplane and American Airlines, I mean. Well, right. Right. Totally different story.

Conversation would be totally different, right? Everybody would be talking about these if they had both of those. If they only had American, if they just added American, it would still be pretty darn exciting. Right. Yeah. Right. Everybody would be talking about this quartet. I feel like if you you're just kind of lightly into this game, you've probably heard people talk about the chase trifecta a million times, uh, you know, or, and I don't

even necessarily know that I know what the trifecta is. Cause I feel like there's more than three good chase cards, but I see that thrown around all the time. People in the Facebook group will say, Oh, I have the chase trifecta, but blah, blah, blah. And you don't hear anybody ever say I've got the city, uh, quartet. Uh, you've never heard anybody ever say, I've got the city quartet. You've never heard anybody say that, but if they added American Airlines, I guarantee you a year from now, everybody would know the city quartet, right? I would think so. I would think so. It's yeah. But you know, even without them, totally solid. Probably one of the biggest negatives of all this is what a pain. I mean, so if you're talking about carrying four credit cards and trying to remember which

to use where or worse, we were talking about getting like multiple custom cash cards. And so now you're carrying like some number of custom cash cards. You've labeled them grocery and dining or whatever. So, you know, where to use them. And, you know, not many people like. And, you know, not many people like to do that. No, not many people do. And I think that's a somewhat solvable problem with the everyday solution of using mobile payments of some sort, whether it's Apple Pay or Google Pay, that's pretty common these days. And so something like a custom cash that you're going to dedicate

as your grocery card, for instance, you could make as your default payment method and one of those things. And I mean, everybody's got tap to pay these a few years before the pandemic. I feel like tap to pay was like hit or miss depending on where you might be. But nowadays, I feel like tap to pay is everywhere. So that could be a potential solution. But still, if you're going to have four custom cash cards, that's still kind of a pain. If you're not really comfortable with the tap to pay, that's still a problem. So it's not super easy and intuitive. And if you mess something up, then there's no way to fix that. Right, Greg? Normally, I'd say, yes, there's no way to fix it. But there is a solution to this last problem. And that is there's a card called Curve that it aims to be the one card to rule them all. What it is, it's a free credit card looking thing, which behind the scenes, like you use it like a regular credit card.

And behind the scenes, it charges whichever of your other credit cards that you really want it to charge. As long as those other credit cards are mastercard or discover or diners club and can how many diners clubs do you cards do you have in your wallet uh none and you know i would have applied for they i when they had it available i was interested but you know they ran out of plastic or what they were telling people like you know years ago they were available for a hot minute and yeah i feel like about 10 years ago or so yeah they came out with like a new version of it and i was like oh maybe you'll get that yeah no nobody has a diner's club cards the moral of the story so so the conveniently

none of the city cards are diner's club cards but conveniently they are all master cards so they are they are so so curve works really well with the Citibank cards. And, um, here's some features that curve has. Oh, by the way, curve is free. So you can sign up for free for this thing. Um, it has smart rules. So you could tell it like, anytime I charge at a grocery store charge against this card, and that could be like your premier for three X, or it could be one of your custom cash cards to get five X. Um, and, uh, you could do that for dining and some other categories. Strangely, you can't do that for gas stations. I don't understand why that's missing from the smart rules, but that's weird. Um, and, uh, you can also, you also set a default card. So like I set the double cash as my default.

So if, you know, if I'm not in a special category, that's where I want it to go. Um, it what's, what's really amazing with curve is that when you mess up, like, so when you, when you have a charge, go to double cash and you realize like, oh darn, darn, I could have earned more because this was actually a gas station or whatever. Curve has this feature called go back in time where you could for 30 days from a purchase up to 30 days, you can actually tell it, I changed my mind, go back in time and change that purchase to go to a different card. And so, you know, when you realize you use the wrong card, just go back in time and fix it. And that's an amazing, amazing feature. It also, that feature makes having multiple custom cash cards manageable, right? So I've, here's how I've been using it. I have multiple custom cash cards manageable. Right. So here's how I've been using it. I have multiple custom cash cards. I want to use them all for grocery.

I spend enough on grocery to usually to do more than the 500 each billing cycle. And so what I could do with Curve is I could have curve go to one custom cash card, like point automatically send grocery charges to the one custom cash. And I could like wait until I've spent $500 within a billing cycle, and then change that smart rule to go to the other one. But I'm not disciplined enough to do that. Or to even notice when I've gone over $500. So instead, what I've been doing is I wait till I get an email saying the statement's closed on the custom cash card. I look and it says I spent $800 and it's all going to be grocery because I don't use it for anything else. So I go back in time on $300 worth of those purchases and move to another

custom cash card. And so it's super simple to manage that process with the curve card and it would be impossible to do that without it, uh, as far as I know. Right. So, yeah, so, so I'm really, really loving that. Um, another problem it sort of fixes is, uh, is it has no foreign transaction fees. So if you use it internationally, even if a charge goes against the double cash, which does have a foreign transaction fee, or a charge goes to the custom cash, which again has a foreign transaction fee, you won't be charged

a transaction fee because it'll look to those cards like the purchase was in the US. That's great. The bad thing is, at least as we're recording this, the latest news is that that feature is buggy. So some people are getting some of their purchase and not all, but some of their purchases declined when using internationally. So until that is resolved, we can't really recommend that part of it. But within the U.S. in the last few months I've been using it, it's been totally solid. Now, we need to mention you mentioned you can get a curve card for free. But I think that we need to clarify the curve card is a credit card. So you do have to it is a credit card application for the curve card.

And it does come with a little credit limit of its own. But you set up backing cards, essentially, that passes the charge through two, and then the credit line is sort of a backup sort of situation. So anyway, it's worth mentioning that, because this will count towards 524, right? Against your 524 count, because it's a credit card application, right? Yeah.

So readers have commented that they've only seen it on their Equifax credit report. Interesting. Not on the other ones, which is interesting because Chase, which is where we care about the 524 rule, because Chase won't approve applications if you've opened five or more cards in the past 24 months. And they determine that based on your credit reports chase depending on where you live looks at different credit reports and so i you know if you happen to live somewhere where they don't look at equifax and probably you're safe from the 524 rule from it hurting the 524 rule so there you go so i don't know how you figure that out but, but you know, there used to, it's a little complicated. It's possible, but yeah, there used to be a website. Well, there is a website called credit boards and they used to have a credit polls database where you could put in a state and see, they don't have that anymore.

They probably do, but I don't know how updated it is. I haven't looked at it. It used to be very consistent. There were a lot of people that were updating results and I don't know if that's true anymore or not, but, but anyway, if you go to creditboards.com, there is a link somewhere on the homepage, I think, where you can look at their credit polls database. And again, you can put in your state and the issuer and see what they've been pulling for other people anyway in your state. And usually that's a good indication of what you can expect they'll probably pull in your state. I know in many states, Chase mostly pulls Experian, but it does, again, very regionally. So yeah. So in Michigan, so the other way you could know, and this is how I would know, I'd have to go back and look at my notes. So if you monitor all three credit bureaus with different tools and you apply for a Chase card, you'll see which ones get credit inquiries. And for me, they always pull two yeah there you go two different ones there you go and and that's certainly something that can happen uh with any

issue or they could pull more than one i mean capital one is well known to pull all three but i've had city pull two on me before too so uh it can happen all right so so there's a number of great cards there's a solution to make it easy to manage the cards with the curve card. And you said the curve card has been good for you. You haven't had, because we had some weird issues with the curve card in the beginning and the beta. And we talked about how we didn't feel like it was ready to be out of beta when it went out of beta, but it's been solid for you for months now, right? It's, it's been solid for, for months. I, I sort of, I left it behind because i was so fed up

with it um during the beta time or actually shortly after they said they were coming out of beta um but recently within about three months ago i went back to it and i've been using it regularly and haven't had any trouble so that's that's been pretty stellar right the one problem i have is that i would love to get one for my wife's because i think it's a perfect player two card right because you can go back and fix whatever mistakes they make i mean you could go fix but also a lot of it's automated so it's going to do it right from the get-go you know and you say just use this one card the problem is my wife was around all those times the card was messing up during the beta. And so she's scared of the card.

She's like, she gets scared when I take it out. Like, she's like, oh, no, we're going to get embarrassed. That's going to happen. Declined. Yeah, yeah. No, this is a good card. This is a good card. Best in shelf.

That's a good card. Yeah. So that's a potential downside. But overall here, this seems like a pretty good quartet. So you do have this entire quartet, right? Sort of. I actually have the Prestige card instead of the Premier. So I'm not earning all those 3X categories, but I am earning unlimited 5X dining with Prestige and 3x hotels and airfare. And you can earn 5x in the other categories by having a couple of custom cash cards, right?

So you could replicate or do better even than a Premier with that if you still have an old Prestige card. I imagine there probably aren't a ton of readers that still have one of those, but if you do, then certainly this could could be a strategy so is this a strategy that more people should be following are people missing the boat on the city quartet like is it because i don't feel like this is something that's common commonly sought after i i don't feel like i've ever heard anybody on their quest to get the city right right well yeah mean, that's a that's a great question. What you don't have this quartet, right? No, I don't.

And so why not? Well, you know what? What stops you from going this this route? Number one, city slightly weaker partners, though. I think that all the points we made about how city has decent partners are good, but not quite as good as the Amex. I want Aeroplan and I want ANA and I can get Turkish through Capital One. So I'm not particularly intrigued by their transfer partners. The choice thing, OK, but I'm not super excited by their transfer partners. I'm not excited by the fact that either I have to sign up for a bunch of American

Airlines or whatever other kind of card Citi has and then convert them, or I have to sign up for subpar welcome bonuses on the custom cash and the double cash, no welcome bonus a lot of the time. So that's certainly a downside for me. And the no purchase protection thing is big to me because as somebody who does some manufactured spending, there, there are ways that I generate points. But then there are cards that I use when I want to buy something. For instance, you know, there's a holiday recognizing mothers coming up this weekend. And so I bought a gift for my wife today and I have no idea whether she's going to like it or not. I never really know.

So I wanted to make sure that I bought it on a card that has return protection just in case. So I used a card that got a subpar return. I used the Amex Platinum card. It doesn't get a good return on spend, but I knew that if she didn't like it, I'd be able to return, even if the retailer didn't take the purchase back. Yeah. So I do that too. If I'm buying something where I think I might want to return it or have other protections, I usually use like platinum card or something like that, where I know there's, there's, I'm going to be taken care of by like Amex with a premium card. Right. Right. And, and the same is true, obviously for flights, you know, for gas and grocery,

I would consider this, but of course, grocery, I have the Amex gold and I like my Amex points. Now I could probably sacrifice that for 3x steady points. But when it comes to gas, you're going to have to pry a Wyndham business card out of my cold, dead hands right now at 8x on the Wyndham business card. I just couldn't justify earning only 5x thank you points. Yeah. So my physical wallet right now, the two cards that are go-to in my wallet are the Curve card and the Wyndham business earner card for gas stations to earn 8X. I mean, nothing can touch that.

No, no. So that's not going anywhere anytime soon. So that's why I'm not super intrigued by this. Now that said, I think something you said earlier, earlier bears repeating because we often hear from readers that are serial card signer uppers saying that basically you should always be working on a new welcome bonus. And there's some wisdom to that because most welcome bonuses offer anywhere from 10 to effectively 10 to 20 points per dollar on all spend, right? So those are your best cards to use. However, like Greg, I sign up for the cards that I want to sign up for, you know, apply for the cards I want to apply for, get those welcome offers. And I still spend money beyond that.

Now, something you didn't mention today, but I know you've mentioned before, and I have the same kind of philosophy as when I open a new card, I often want to find some kind of a purchase where I know I'm not going to have to return it. I focus the spending for a new welcome bonus more often than not on things that I know I'm not going to have to return, like a tax payment or something of that sort. And so the welcome bonus spend to me is usually not on my everyday purchases. I'm not usually worried about using it for gas and whatever else, because I'm going to knock that out in larger chunks of spend. So when I am going to the gas pump or the grocery store, I do want a card that earns a good return on that. So I think the strategy is a sound one that makes sense for a lot of people.

And I think this is a decent quartet. I imagine a lot of people in my personal life that I could be like, this would be a good option for you to get started with this. But it just doesn't feel like a great option to me because it doesn't have the right combo of stuff. Now I say that my wife has the premier card. So you know, we do have that in the household. I still have this old AT&T access more card that I don't even know why I have anymore, I should probably get rid of it and convert it to something else. Maybe a double cash so that we, we have that also in the household, but, but at any rate, I'm not, I'm not up for this quartet, but I think it's a good quartet for a lot of people.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. Great. So there we go. So there we have it. There's our main event today. So your city quartet, and I'm telling you if they ever had American Airlines, you heard it here first, folks, the City Quartet. All right. Next year, if they ever do something like that, you're going to come back here and thank us for the Quartet. All right.

Let's get to the question of the week. So this week's question of the week came in via the mailbag. And it's a relevant question based on some of the things I just said and that we talked about earlier in today's show. So we had a question that we've gotten a few times. I don't think correct me if I'm wrong. I don't think that we have addressed this directly on the show. So Christopher wrote in and said, just listen to the recent podcast episode about how to get insane value with your Amex points.

You mentioned purchasing gas gift cards. This was a for instance, using the gold card at grocery stores to get an effective 4x on gas. I thought I recall hearing you say previously that Amex doesn't like you buying gift cards and will claw back the points if you buy gift cards. Please clarify if it's okay to buy store gift cards with Amex cards. And this is a question that that came up at FTU. I spoke at FTU last weekend, and it came up in conversations with people there. And it is a question we get from time to time. So what's the deal, Greg?

Can you buy gift cards with an Amex Gold card? Well, you certainly could buy them. The question is whether anything bad will happen afterwards. Right, right. Well, you get the points, and will Amex slap you on the wrist and say no more anything for you. They take stuff away. is with welcome bonuses where they, you know, have like clawed back the welcome bonus points because the terms do say, you know, you can't earn the welcome bonus by buying gift cards or

other cash equivalents and so on. So, you know, I think there have been times where certain people who have like been hitting the gift cards heavily, Amex has turned their eye on them and has pulled back the points. But for most regular uses, I've never heard of anyone having any trouble. And I've heard of lots of people like regularly, you know, there's the Hilton card that gives you 6X at grocery stores with Hilton. There's lots of people that just buy lots of gift cards at grocery stores and have been fine. Yeah. I think there's a really overblown misperception. And like Greg said, it comes from a time when welcome bonuses got clawed back. And so here's the thing. Amex at one point that I'm aware of anyway, had clawed back welcome bonuses on a number of people. And when I say a number, I mean more than five or six. It was a significant number of people who had done most or all of the

minimum spending requirements, buying gift cards in very obvious ways like Simon Malls or giftcards.com or that kind of thing. And then they stopped awarding points or credit for spend at all at Simon Malls. So if you had like a Delta card and you were trying to spend towards the MQMs at Simon Malls, even if you were like, well, I don't care about the points. I just want the MQMs that you get with spend. They stopped counting that at all for the spend for that. Yeah. For a while you stopped earning the points, but still earned the MQMs and then eventually stopped earning anything. Stopped earning anything. So because of those things, I think there's a misconception about Amex and gift cards. And so when it comes to welcome bonuses, I haven't even heard

clawback stories over welcome bonuses apart from like a window in time a few years back. Agreed. Yeah. I haven't heard anything in recent years. Right. So I haven't even heard a single clawback story. That said, I don't make a habit of buying very obvious gift card purchases when I'm working on a welcome offer because they're so valuable. Right. So if I have the chance to earn 150,000 points, if I can do that in some way where there's no chance or very, very minuscule chance of me getting the points clawed back, I'd much rather do that than chance it with something where they might get clawed back. So I'm careful with the welcome bonus spend because that's such a valuable

chunk. But beyond the welcome bonus spend, I'm less careful. And especially the card like the Amex Gold card, you're talking about it's capped at $25,000 a year and spent at US supermarkets. And assuming you're using that as your regular grocery card and you probably should, then you're already doing some amount of that 25 that way. So how much are you really gonna be buying gift cards? Probably not enough to get on the radar.

Now, the advice I always give people is if you've never bought a gift card on your Amex Gold card and you go out tomorrow and you spend $25,000 at the grocery store, yeah, you're probably going to have a problem. Amex is probably going to shut you down and they're probably not going to give you any points. They might take away all your other cards too. So don't go hog wild and crazy out of nowhere. But if you're buying your groceries this week and you also get a $300 Amazon gift card card with it or something like that i don't think you're probably likely to have a problem at all i mean i say that and of course there's perhaps some amount of risk but it's such a low risk that i don't worry about it yeah i agree i wouldn't

worry about it and yeah i would readily buy i would even you know what i think of a little more risk acceptance uh than you and that like i would be willing to buy some gift cards even for earning a welcome bonus. I have. Let's be clear, I have. But I don't go to giftcards.com, you know? Yeah, yeah. I wouldn't do it obvious like that. But when you go to a retail store, it's a little less obvious.

And ideally, you're mixing in real spend as well. So it's not just like, you know, right, $500, $500. Exactly. Exactly. Mix it up a little bit. But I think there's a misconception about how sensitive Amex is in that regard. You know, they're not nearly as sensitive as some people seem to think. So, all right. So that's that. I wanted to address that because that was a good question. It's one we've had a few times before and it was timely. So there you have it. All right. That brings us to the end of today's episode. If you enjoyed today's show and you'd like to get more of this stuff in your email inbox each day or each week or whatever it may be, you want to go to frequentmiler.com

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