topic Re: Any recent experience with Fidelity Rewards Visa Signature? in Credit Cards

Any recent experience with Fidelity Rewards Visa Signature?

Creditsen — Thu, 22 Aug 2019 16:27:00 GMT

Does anyone have recent experience with this card? I don't see much, especially recent, detailing this card on the forums. As someone a bit behind in retirement savings I'm wondering if this would be a good card for my next application or not.

Re: Any recent experience with Fidelity Rewards Visa Signature?

Anonymous — Thu, 22 Aug 2019 17:02:53 GMT

It's a good 2% card with 1% FTF. It has a minimun redemption of 25 I think.

There is nothing wrong with getting it.

Re: Any recent experience with Fidelity Rewards Visa Signature?

jaxstraw — Thu, 22 Aug 2019 17:11:54 GMT

Being a long time Fidelity brokerage account user I was always pleased with their outstanding customer service.
And the Fidelity Visa Signature was always one of those goal cards for me.
It is a decent card although the SCL's are kind of all over the place and Elan is not known for handing out Cali's with great frequency.
My SCL was very low (1500) compared to some of my other trade lines and I had done the research and based on my scores and CR others were pulling in 5-8X when opening an account.
The rewards do add up at 2X.
All that being said I am a fan.....just wish my line was larger.

Re: Any recent experience with Fidelity Rewards Visa Signature?

Sharingan — Thu, 22 Aug 2019 17:27:08 GMT

I’ve had mine for a few years now, and I’ve been considering closing it. I simply prefer the Citi Double Cash for the purposes I need a 2% cash back card for, and it also has a significantly higher credit limit than my Fidelity Visa Signature.

Lastly, the Fidelity card has the highest redemption threshold ($50) of any of my cash back cards, which isn’t a huge issue, but it’s still a factor when deciding whether or not to use it on a particular purchase. Oh, and I’m really not a fan of the company servicing the accounts (Elan).

Re: Any recent experience with Fidelity Rewards Visa Signature?

Anonymous — Thu, 22 Aug 2019 17:32:32 GMT

I have a Fidelity account, but avoid the credit card. I have another credit card with Elan Financial and they had several problems with credit card numbers getting leaked and had to reissue me a new number twice. You're better off getting a different 2% card.

Re: Any recent experience with Fidelity Rewards Visa Signature?

Anonymous — Thu, 22 Aug 2019 17:49:39 GMT

i don't have one, but i know people are very upset because they changed the fidelity phone-app and now its useless. plus theres the min redemptions and fidelity bank account requirements. this started out as an amex card too, before they changed it.

Re: Any recent experience with Fidelity Rewards Visa Signature?

jaxstraw — Thu, 22 Aug 2019 18:04:41 GMT

Fidelity has responded about the phone app and has stated it is temporarily not showing the data and will be corrected.

Re: Any recent experience with Fidelity Rewards Visa Signature?

Anonymous — Thu, 22 Aug 2019 19:13:49 GMT

It used to be my major 2% card, but i have stopped using it. For my needs, the PPMC is just better, no min redemption vs $50, and no FTF vs (a low, but still!) 1%.

I got it when it was an Amex, and at that time it really was the only 2% around. Now it's much more crowded!

Re retirement, I guess it makes it an automatic way to add some money to a retirement account (or other Fidelity account), but unless the spend is huge, the 2% is going to be pretty insignificant compared to making real regular contributions!

Re: Any recent experience with Fidelity Rewards Visa Signature?

frugal47374 — Fri, 23 Aug 2019 05:07:46 GMT

I have Fidelity as well as Double Cash and PayPal MC (all 2%). I haven't had trouble with any of them.

My current preference is PP > DC > Fidelity, just based on redemption thresholds.

Occasionally Fidelity makes offers like "Once you spend $550, in net purchases, additional net purchases will earn 1 Bonus Point per dollar spent (up to 2,000 Bonus Points)". I tend to accept these offers.

And if I have a very large purchase (where redemption thresholds become moot) I may spread the purchase among the cards to have the same utilization on each.

Re: Any recent experience with Fidelity Rewards Visa Signature?

Creditsen — Sat, 24 Aug 2019 00:11:32 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
Re retirement, I guess it makes it an automatic way to add some money to a retirement account (or other Fidelity account), but unless the spend is huge, the 2% is going to be pretty insignificant compared to making real regular contributions!

That is a valid point right there.

Re: Any recent experience with Fidelity Rewards Visa Signature?

Anonymous — Sat, 24 Aug 2019 01:23:09 GMT

I have it but don’t use it. The minimal redemption requirement of 50$ is steep considering the card would only be used for non cat spend.

Re: Any recent experience with Fidelity Rewards Visa Signature?

Anonymous — Sat, 24 Aug 2019 03:00:34 GMT

I have it and would heartily recommend it. Mainly b/c CC points etc are considered a rebate by the IRS and as such are non-taxable. Ergo, fund a Roth IRA with the points for a completely tax-free retirement acct granted, most ppl proly won't be able to max out the contribution w/ the points alone, but every little helps! And w/out the tax drag, it'll grow a little faster

Re: Any recent experience with Fidelity Rewards Visa Signature?

AlpedHuez — Sat, 24 Aug 2019 06:47:07 GMT

I have it, like others I dislike the $50 redemption threshold. Elan usually does HP for CLIs, but once in a blue moon they do give auto CLIs, I got one once, small bump though.

The one thing I like about this card though is it has always coded as a purchase instead of a cash advance when using it to fund initial deposits for checking/savings accounts. So can earn 2% free money. I mainly keep this card for this purpose.

Otherwise I am looking for a 2% replacment for it. The Paypal card is tempting but I'm generally wary of Paypal even if I personally haven't had a bad experience with them yet, and have read a lot of mixed reviews of the underwriting bank, Synchrony.

Re: Any recent experience with Fidelity Rewards Visa Signature?

Anonymous — Sat, 24 Aug 2019 12:19:54 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
I have it and would heartily recommend it. Mainly b/c CC points etc are considered a rebate by the IRS and as such are non-taxable. Ergo, fund a Roth IRA with the points for a completely tax-free retirement acct granted, most ppl proly won't be able to max out the contribution w/ the points alone, but every little helps! And w/out the tax drag, it'll grow a little faster

But similar logic applies to any other 2% card (with lower redemptions). You get the tax-free cash which you can use (if IRS eligible) to fund a Roth IRA. The advantage of Fidelity is that this is automatic, and the disadvantage is that is automatic! You have to keep track of how much is being deposited to the account to make sure that that and your other contributions don't exceed the limit.

(Plus, as a small point, you need earned income at least equal to your contributions, so if you retire and have no earned income, the points from the card cannot be put in an IRA.)

Re: Any recent experience with Fidelity Rewards Visa Signature?

Anonymous — Sat, 24 Aug 2019 18:06:26 GMT

True, true. Valid points that I missed (since I'm not that close to retirement yet and just concentrating on stashing it away right now) But I don't have it set to automatic, that way when I'm approaching the cap I just put the rest in DW's. Another option is using it to fund brokerage acct.

Re: Any recent experience with Fidelity Rewards Visa Signature?

AverageJoesCredit — Sat, 24 Aug 2019 19:01:08 GMT

None whatsoever

Re: Any recent experience with Fidelity Rewards Visa Signature?

Anonymous — Tue, 27 Aug 2019 06:56:08 GMT

Since Citi is removing benefits, the Fidelity Rewards Visa is my go to card for non-category spending.

Gotten a few bait offers, of the kind of spend $nnnn, and the next $mmmm will earn you an extra 1%.

Integrates well with Fidelity in terms of showing your balance, recent transactions, and landing the cash, although the site to get your statements is external to Fidelity but still is over green. The card works in Android Pay very well.

I was one of the previous 1.5% accounts, and after Fidelity changes the service partner they moved me to 2% over the phone. A nice move, so I owe them a little extra loyalty for that.

The cash gets flushed when a statement shows a reward >= $50.

Would be nice if the card was tappable.

Re: Any recent experience with Fidelity Rewards Visa Signature?

Anonymous — Tue, 27 Aug 2019 07:20:09 GMT

I recently got approved with $13,000 spending limit. Not sure how best to utilize it, but I already have several Fidelity accounts so would like to put rewards directly into them.

Re: Any recent experience with Fidelity Rewards Visa Signature?

Creditsen — Fri, 30 Aug 2019 15:31:52 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
I have it and would heartily recommend it. Mainly b/c CC points etc are considered a rebate by the IRS and as such are non-taxable. Ergo, fund a Roth IRA with the points for a completely tax-free retirement acct granted, most ppl proly won't be able to max out the contribution w/ the points alone, but every little helps! And w/out the tax drag, it'll grow a little faster

Now that is a cool feature I didn't know about! Tax free is always good. I am definitely behind in retirement savings but now that my student loans are paid off it seems like a good time to 'passively' grow things as well as aggressively dumping in money as well.

Re: Any recent experience with Fidelity Rewards Visa Signature?

Anonymous — Sat, 31 Aug 2019 02:38:27 GMT

Same as in an earlier post, I switched to use the fido visa for most non-category spending after Citi announced plan to turn double cash to a "debit card".

But I've recently stopped and am mainly using CFU now. As there was a charge that I wanted to dispute (in process of buying tickets online, website showed 'transaction failed, payment error', few days later found that the charge posted), but fido visa is making it very difficult to do so, in that while they seemingly support dispute online, but at the last step the website simply tells me to call a number, where there's such a long wait that I just gave up as the charge is an inconvenient amount of $50 which I don't want to simply gave up but also not gonna waste too much time fighting for.

On the other hand I have had disputes with Chase's cards previously and they took care of that after a simple SM. Chase also tend to pick up my calls right away and resolves the issues efficiently whenever I've needed to call them.

Thus, while whether 1.5 UR is worth $0.02 might be up to debate, Chase's customer service certainly makes up for any difference there for me.