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Wait, if I move my IRAs/convert 401ks to robinhood, they will give me 3%? That's really drat tempting, even though the risk of robinhood loving something up is non-zero. Or is it just on new deposits?
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# ? Apr 2, 2024 05:50 |
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# ? Apr 30, 2024 01:20 |
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“IRA transfers and old 401(k) rollovers also earn 3% until April 30.” Just have to keep subscribed to Gold for one year. Edit: sorry, also: “Keep in mind, you must hold the funds in your IRA for at least 5 years to keep the match, and be a Robinhood Gold subscriber for 1 year after the first deposit that earns the 3% match.” https://robinhood.com/us/en/support/articles/ira-gold-match-2024/ smackfu fucked around with this message at 13:22 on Apr 2, 2024 |
# ? Apr 2, 2024 13:13 |
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Man, I have an old 401k with a sizable balance. I should probably think about permanently loving up my backdoor Roth and tolerating Robinhood in exchange for several fifty grand.
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# ? Apr 3, 2024 04:37 |
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Man it is so tempting. And then I think about all the ways they could gently caress it up. Is that really worth 3%? It has to settle by april 30th too, gotta make a decision pretty soon here.
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# ? Apr 3, 2024 04:48 |
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Sofi is increasing the cashback on their no annual fee card to 2.2%: https://www.sofi.com/blog/sofi-credit-card-reward-boost/ Requires direct deposit. Looks like this currently an indefinite promotion (no expiration date), and rewards aren't capped either.
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# ? Apr 3, 2024 04:54 |
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Hey thread! I was hoping for a recommendation for a credit card. We have a large emergency house expense (>$10k) that, while we can cover with cash, we’d rather use a card and pay over time. We have excellent credit, and have a BofA Travel, BofA category cash back, and Amazon card that we use regularly. I’m looking into a 0% APR card (12-18mo term) and want to see what my better options are. I’m fine with a modest annual fee but it looks like most of those don’t have intro APR deals. Any suggestions?
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# ? Apr 5, 2024 15:59 |
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BadSamaritan posted:Hey thread! I was hoping for a recommendation for a credit card. We have a large emergency house expense (>$10k) that, while we can cover with cash, we’d rather use a card and pay over time. We have excellent credit, and have a BofA Travel, BofA category cash back, and Amazon card that we use regularly. NerdWallet has an article about cards with 18-month 0% APR offers here. But you also might consider looking into any cards with a good cashback % on some common spend category that you don't already have covered or a decent sign-up bonus to see if they have a 0% APR offer as well. I've picked up five new cards that did one or both of those things within the past two years, and all of them also gave me 0% APR for the first 12-15 months. I mentioned most of them in a post a couple of pages back. For example, if you don't have one already then the Citi Custom Cash is always a solid option. 0% APR for 15 months, $200 sign-up bonus for spending $1500 within the first 6 months, and 5% back on up to $500 in your highest spend category each month (so a lot of people use it as, e.g., a dedicated gas card). Also it might be a minor consideration, but out of all the credit card sites I've used, Citi's is the best overall in terms of the overall UI and ease of use. Edit: wasn't taking into account the $10k+ factor. Out of my cards the Wells Fargo Active Cash gave by far the highest starting limit despite having a similar salary and credit score when I applied for it compared to others. I have no idea what gets factored into determining the limit though, so YMMV. Atahualpa fucked around with this message at 00:32 on Apr 6, 2024 |
# ? Apr 5, 2024 23:46 |
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BadSamaritan posted:Hey thread! I was hoping for a recommendation for a credit card. We have a large emergency house expense (>$10k) that, while we can cover with cash, we’d rather use a card and pay over time. We have excellent credit, and have a BofA Travel, BofA category cash back, and Amazon card that we use regularly. Can you split it up?
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# ? Apr 6, 2024 00:11 |
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BadSamaritan posted:Hey thread! I was hoping for a recommendation for a credit card. We have a large emergency house expense (>$10k) that, while we can cover with cash, we’d rather use a card and pay over time. We have excellent credit, and have a BofA Travel, BofA category cash back, and Amazon card that we use regularly.
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# ? Apr 6, 2024 01:29 |
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BadSamaritan posted:Hey thread! I was hoping for a recommendation for a credit card. We have a large emergency house expense (>$10k) that, while we can cover with cash, we’d rather use a card and pay over time. We have excellent credit, and have a BofA Travel, BofA category cash back, and Amazon card that we use regularly. Ink unlimited has 0% for 12 months. Even better if you can split the purchase and open one for each of you(with a referral on the second).
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# ? Apr 6, 2024 01:34 |
So, I currently have a Discover One card. I've been using that for basically everything for a couple of decades now. I'm thinking about how I can better optimize my cashback and this is what I'm thinking. I wanted to bounce these off someone to make sure I wasn't crazy or missing obvious stuff. My FICO score is 800+ so I should qualify for basically anything. Currently have: - Discover One: for the rotating 5% Cashback - Costco Citi Visa: I don't really visit Costco anymore, so I might drop my costco membership and this woudl go with it if I did. - Amazon Prime Store Card: 5% Amazon purchases year round. I keep an ongoing prime account anyway, so there's no need to optimize about ways to get the 5% without holding prime. It also has rental car damage insurance, and I'm thinking about selling my car this year and going carless, so this is an appealing feature for the (hopefully) rare instances I'd need to rent a car. - Citi Custom Cash: For 5% groceries cashback - Citi Double Cash: For 2% cashback on everything else. I imagine I'd need to spread any new ones out to avoid frequent hard pulls on my credit, so only 2 (or 1, if I want to keep a spare hard pull in the hopper if I need it for 2 years). Double Cash would probably the best pick I'd think? Since that doubles my current cashback from Discover for "everything else". And Discover still usually does the whole "online sales fronts" 5% rate for the 4th quarter, which is when probably 50% of my Amazon purchases are anyway. Anything here that jumps out as really awful planning?
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# ? Apr 7, 2024 00:16 |
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Depending on your spending habits the custom cash might make more sense.
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# ? Apr 7, 2024 16:47 |
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Why not multiple? The Amazon card will sit in your drawer anyway, right? You'll want the Citi Rewards down the line for the 10% redemption rebate.
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# ? Apr 7, 2024 17:59 |
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Nitrousoxide posted:I imagine I'd need to spread any new ones out to avoid frequent hard pulls on my credit, so only 2 (or 1, if I want to keep a spare hard pull in the hopper if I need it for 2 years). Double Cash would probably the best pick I'd think? Since that doubles my current cashback from Discover for "everything else". And Discover still usually does the whole "online sales fronts" 5% rate for the 4th quarter, which is when probably 50% of my Amazon purchases are anyway. Hard pulls typically have a pretty minimal effect on your credit score, and if you're not planning to apply for a loan/mortgage/etc. in the near future, you probably don't need to worry about them at all since they get removed from your credit report after two years. As an example, I applied for three cards in the space of two months 1.5 years ago, and my score dropped about 30 points on average across the three credit bureaus. It's remained mostly in that range since then even though I've applied for two additional cards and have been maintaining balances on any cards with 0% APR offers, and it appears on track to recover fully by this summer when I pay off the most recent cards.
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# ? Apr 7, 2024 18:05 |
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Three new cards in one year shouldn't cause any issues, and the 3 you're considering are all useful cards. Maybe a 20-30 point temporary drop in your credit score due to the hard inquiries and lowering the average age of your accounts. After a year or two your score will probably drift back to where it is now.
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# ? Apr 7, 2024 20:50 |
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Another thing to keep in mind. If you're not applying for mortgages, insurance, or opening credit cards, your score literally doesn't matter. It's not something to obsess over, it's something to use.
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# ? Apr 7, 2024 21:39 |
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Girbot posted:Another thing to keep in mind. If you're not applying for mortgages, insurance, or opening credit cards, your score literally doesn't matter. Don’t forget certain jobs and other kinds of housing too!
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# ? Apr 8, 2024 13:34 |
Girbot posted:Why not multiple? I looked into Citi Rewards+ and it looks like objectively worse than a 1% cashback card unless you happened to have very specific dollar amounts to take advantage of the rounding, or it's one of the double point categories? Like say, you spend $22. That gets you 30 points (due to rounding). 30 points can be redeemed for half a cent per point as cashback. That gets you $.15 cashback on those $22. Or .7% cashback? And you have to go through all the obnoxious point claiming too. I guess If you take advantage of something with a better return rate than cash redemption it might be somewhat better. You can use the points for Amazon purchases at a rate of .8 of a cent per point. That comes out to $.24 in value for Amazon purchases that $22 purchase. Better than a 1% cashback, but only barely. But that's still worse than Citi Double Cash at 2% cashback for everything, and still requires you to (potentially) purchase things you otherwise wouldn't, making it potentially worse than nothing. Grocery/Gas get 2x point rates, so they beat a 1% card always, but they still don't beat a 2% cashback rate like Double Cash ever. Even that only gets a 1.8% effective rebate value for Amazon purchases. You could maybe squeeze out a slightly better than 2% value if you spend your points on something with a 1 point = 1 cent value like most of their gift cards, but if you weren't going to buy anything from those shops normally it's not a good deal, and requires, again, a lot of hoops compared to just cashback. This is also with a purchase that takes advantage of (almost) as much of that rounding as possible. The bigger the purchase and the closer to an even $10 amount the purchase price, the worse that is. Plus It's a pretty complicated analysis you need to do to determine if that card is better or worse than another card. Am I missing something about that card that makes it appealing? The 10% point rebate might get you pretty much spot on for a 2% effective cashback value when used on Amazon/Paypal purchases, which is as close as I can think to get being able to use it as "free money" without giftcard purchasing locking you into very specific storefronts.
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# ? Apr 8, 2024 16:19 |
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You can transfer Citi points you get from other cards to the Rewards+ and redeem them with the 10% bonus
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# ? Apr 8, 2024 16:29 |
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I believe the idea is that you can transfer points between the citi cards. So use the doublecash and custom cash to gain points, then transfer them to and use the rewards+ to redeem the points at a slightly higher rate. You're right that the rewards+ by itself is pretty unimpressive.
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# ? Apr 8, 2024 16:33 |
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You don't even need to transfer them, the "thank you points" for multiple citi cards can be linked into a single pool.
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# ? Apr 8, 2024 16:42 |
It is apparently possible to redeem your Citi "thank you" points toward your mortgage or student loans at the 1 point = 1 cent rate. Which, when combined with the interest savings by putting this toward your principal amount, probably nets you an effective 2-3x value for those points depending on your interest rate.
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# ? Apr 8, 2024 17:42 |
THF13 posted:You don't even need to transfer them, the "thank you points" for multiple citi cards can be linked into a single pool. Is this something you have to do manually, or are they all part of the same rewards dashboard in the app or whatever? Nitrousoxide posted:It is apparently possible to redeem your Citi "thank you" points toward your mortgage or student loans at the 1 point = 1 cent rate. Which, when combined with the interest savings by putting this toward your principal amount, probably nets you an effective 2-3x value for those points depending on your interest rate. This is interesting but it sounds like it's enough of a hassle (you have to call in to redeem points for this, and I couldn't find any evidence of it when I was searching around the site) that at that point I feel like it'd make more sense to redeem them as cash back and either pay it towards my mortgage directly, or more likely just stick the money in an investment account that's highly likely to gain a better return than my mortgage rate.
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# ? Apr 8, 2024 18:47 |
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MockingQuantum posted:Is this something you have to do manually, or are they all part of the same rewards dashboard in the app or whatever? There's a button in the webui to merge them, this didn't work for me and I had to call and have a support agent do it, which took about 5 minutes.
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# ? Apr 8, 2024 19:06 |
MockingQuantum posted:This is interesting but it sounds like it's enough of a hassle (you have to call in to redeem points for this, and I couldn't find any evidence of it when I was searching around the site) that at that point I feel like it'd make more sense to redeem them as cash back and either pay it towards my mortgage directly, or more likely just stick the money in an investment account that's highly likely to gain a better return than my mortgage rate. Yeah, Its the sort of thing that would be too much of a chore to do more than once a year I'd think. But the ROI on early principal payoff for a mortgage is certainly higher than a saving or checking account. And I'm doubtful that taking the 50% hit to the value of the points for a direct cash back would ever be made up with the higher returns for invested money compared to keeping it all plus mortgage rate returns. The absolute best return would probably be being able to forgo some expense you would otherwise had to endure at a 1:1 points to cent ratio and then investing that forgone expense. Buying extra stuff you don't need with the points, or even worse, buying part of something you don't need with the points and making up the remainer with real money is worse than getting nothing back at all.
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# ? Apr 8, 2024 19:17 |
Nitrousoxide posted:Yeah, Where are you seeing that it's half a cent per point for cash back? It's always been one point = 1 cent for me on the Citi Double Cash
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# ? Apr 8, 2024 19:43 |
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With the double cash card thank you points can be redeemed as cash 1:1, no 50% hit. I did a cash back redemption with my double cash, got $0.01 per point, and got 10% of the points back since I have a linked Rewards+ card.
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# ? Apr 8, 2024 19:49 |
MockingQuantum posted:Where are you seeing that it's half a cent per point for cash back? It's always been one point = 1 cent for me on the Citi Double Cash I thought they all used the same rewards site for your points? https://www.forbes.com/advisor/credit-cards/reviews/citi-rewards-card/ says that the Rewards+ card has a 50% penalty on cash back values. quote:Cash back: Get a check mailed to you and your points are worth half a cent. There is a $5 minimum when redeeming for a check, and checks are valid for one hundred eighty days. I'm happy to be wrong. That would certainly improve the value of the "Thank You" points.
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# ? Apr 8, 2024 19:54 |
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Not sure where Forbes is getting that (maybe it's only if you opt to receive the cashback by mailed check?), but I deposit the rewards from my Citi Custom Cash each month via direct deposit and can confirm that it's always been 1:1 points-to-cents for me.
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# ? Apr 8, 2024 20:01 |
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Atahualpa posted:Not sure where Forbes is getting that (maybe it's only if you opt to receive the cashback by mailed check?), but I deposit the rewards from my Citi Custom Cash each month via direct deposit and can confirm that it's always been 1:1 points-to-cents for me. Same here.
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# ? Apr 8, 2024 20:10 |
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Shear Modulus posted:You can transfer Citi points you get from other cards to the Rewards+ and redeem them with the 10% bonus You just need to have the Rewards+. I pair it with a Custom Cash card and get effectively 5.55% cash back on gas with no annual fee.
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# ? Apr 8, 2024 22:33 |
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# ? Apr 9, 2024 04:19 |
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Nitrousoxide posted:I thought they all used the same rewards site for your points? Why would you think Forbes would be good source of information about literally anything? That magazine exists to jerk off over how rich rich guys are. They don’t even do a good job of that, someone like Trump tells them he’s worth a billion dollars they just print it. You can link all Citi cards to one rewards pool. Then you can use the points with any of the cards rewards options. If you have a Citi rewards card linked you earn 10% points back when you cash out points. So double cash = 2.22% Custom cash = 5.55% You can actually do better than straight cash back sometimes with gift card deals.
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# ? Apr 9, 2024 09:21 |
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I've historically sent my cash back $ to a statement credit on the CC out of fear of getting a 1099 on the $ back. Is that logic flawed, does anyone know if BofA will 1099 you if I switch it to hit a bank account instead?
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# ? Apr 16, 2024 16:00 |
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CC cash back is not considered income
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# ? Apr 16, 2024 16:16 |
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The only thing I've ever gotten a 1099 for is a cash sign up bonus for opening a checking account somewhere.
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# ? Apr 18, 2024 18:24 |
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Yep. The difference is that a cash bonus for opening a checking account is just straight up "do X tasks, get paid, pay taxes on it". CC rewards, even if you're dealing with a purely cash-back card and not any form of intermediary points, are considered rebates on money spent - they're not income.
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# ? Apr 18, 2024 23:13 |
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I understand the logic and the tax rulings, but I'd rather not have to fight the IRS or the bank, hence my question if anyone had dealt with it. Sounds like the answer is no. Managed to work down my Amex fee again this year. Spreadsheet says it works out to ~2% once the "return my money to me" nonsense is netted out (I account no value to benefits I don't use).
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# ? Apr 18, 2024 23:20 |
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Credit cards are issued by banks who have no problem issuing 1099s for anything that might possibly be counted as income; I've never had a 1099 for credit card rewards in the past 20+ years of using them. There's even been years where I've had both credit card and checking bonuses from the same bank but the 1099 only covers the checking bonus.
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# ? Apr 18, 2024 23:38 |
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# ? Apr 30, 2024 01:20 |
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There are rare cases mentioned online where credit card bonuses have been counted as income (and thus taxable), however the common factor in those cases seems to be a bonus reward that wasn't linked with prerequisite spending. Most cc rewards are tied into spending requirements, thus are classified as rebates and are not taxable.
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# ? Apr 19, 2024 03:02 |