What is the best Visa card and best Mastercard in terms of CASH BACK rewards.
Things I do care about:
No annual fee
Electronic crediting of the reward (Take .5% off the reward for deciding which one's the best if it's not electronic, to compensate for the hassle)
Issued by a company that provides good cardholder service (Doesn't have a history of screwing people out of rewards, doesn't make it a hassle to contest unauthorized use, etc..)
Preferably timely and automatic crediting of the reward (Monthly is a plus, yearly is ok, if you manually have to redeem it, that's a minus, I don't like to have to think about things like this, it should just happen automatically)
Although this might sound stupid: No financing fees as long as you pay by the due date. I've heard of cards that start charging you fees as soon as you make the purchase!
If the card looks nice, that's always a plus
(preferably something transparent!)
Capability to manage your account online.
Things I DON'T care about:
APR
Late fees
Minimum payments
Cash advances (in fact, I'd prefer if my cards disallowed cash advances, just in case I get a card lost or stolen)
Introductory offers (I want a good card that I can keep forever, what happens in the first 6/12 months doesn't matter. This includes rewards!)
Rewards only given at certain intervals, as long as the intervals are $200 or under each time.
I currently have a Power Rewards Platinum Plus card from BofA, and their rewards program is garbage. You can get some waaaay overpriced merchandise w/ very limited selection for your points, or you can get cash.. (different ratios at different levels). I had enough to trade 10000 points for $80 (1$ spent = 1 point btw), which isn't that great, but I was OK with it. Then I found out the only way to get it is have it mailed to you as a check. This is when I decided I'm not using this garbage card anymore. For them to intentionally make it hard to redeem rewards is extremely unreasonable. When the entire financial industry is pushing for stuff like electronic statements, how ridiculous is it that they'll only issue reward checks by mail?
One good card I've heard of was the Merrill Lynch cash back card, but I'm sure there's tons of good visa and mastercards out there.