I never had the spend that made sense for this card. The opportunity cost was too high with no SUB's being offered, not only for the card, but worse, for the investments. Now, in it's soon to be nerfed state, V1, your making $1200 more than a 3% card per year at max cap (120k) 4% spend. And at what opportunity cost? Also you have a FTF, so out with travel, and US Bank is notorious with those category inclusions/exclusions, very narrow, or in the case of exclusion, very wide?
In the end, only each individual can anwer this question of worth to their needs and tolerance.
Obviously, V2, forget about it for everyone and still no SUB? What is US Bank thinking?
Aven:
RH:
@bs1234 wrote:
@ElvisCaprice wrote:I never had the spend that made sense for this card. The opportunity cost was too high with no SUB's being offered, not only for the card, but worse, for the investments. Now, in it's soon to be nerfed state, V1, your only making $100 more than a 3% card per year at max cap 4% spend. And at what opportunity cost? Also you have a FTF, so out with travel, and US Bank is notorious with those category inclusions/exclusions, very narrow, or in the case of exclusion, very wide?
In the end, only each individual can anwer this question of worth to their needs and tolerance.
Obviously not a fan of the nerf, but the cap is $10K per month, so it's a max of $1200 a year more than a flat 3% card (which most of us don't have anyway, so more like a max $2,400 over a flat 2% ) Also, if they keep allowing IRA ETFs to count, the opportunity cost for that is very nearly $0. The question remains is will you do better with another card with a SUB? And if for some reason you don't find yourself spending $10K each and every month, the answer may well be yes!
Whoops, your right, it's a 120k per year. So $4800 in rewards @4% vs $3600 (Robinhood Gold unlimited) @3%. So your making $1200 more if you can max out the spend. But your losing out on the opportunity cost of churning the investment. Like Merrill Lynch/BofA pay $600 SUB for $100k in new money about every 28 weeks if you play it right. And there are others.
When it was unlimited in spend, as is before the nerf, I could envision someone with a million dollars in annual spend making hay with this card.
My total non category spend not included for 5% or better, is around 1k to 2k per year. Not even close to making it worthwhile.
@ElvisCaprice wrote:
@bs1234 wrote:
@ElvisCaprice wrote:I never had the spend that made sense for this card. The opportunity cost was too high with no SUB's being offered, not only for the card, but worse, for the investments. Now, in it's soon to be nerfed state, V1, your only making $100 more than a 3% card per year at max cap 4% spend. And at what opportunity cost? Also you have a FTF, so out with travel, and US Bank is notorious with those category inclusions/exclusions, very narrow, or in the case of exclusion, very wide?
In the end, only each individual can anwer this question of worth to their needs and tolerance.
Obviously not a fan of the nerf, but the cap is $10K per month, so it's a max of $1200 a year more than a flat 3% card (which most of us don't have anyway, so more like a max $2,400 over a flat 2% ) Also, if they keep allowing IRA ETFs to count, the opportunity cost for that is very nearly $0. The question remains is will you do better with another card with a SUB? And if for some reason you don't find yourself spending $10K each and every month, the answer may well be yes!
Whoops, your right, it's a 120k per year. So $4800 in rewards @4% vs $3600 (Robinhood Gold unlimited) @3%. So your making $1200 more if you can max out the spend. But your losing out on the opportunity cost of churning the investment. Like Merrill Lynch/BofA pay $600 SUB for $100k in new money about every 28 weeks if you play it right. And there are others.
When it was unlimited in spend, as is before the nerf, I could envision someone with a million dollars in annual spend making hay with this card.
My total non category spend not included for 5% or better, is around 1k to 2k per year. Not even close to making it worthwhile.
Some users have multiples of 100k, so keeping 100k in US Bank doesn't exclude one from getting SUBs at other brokerages by moving stocks around. Moving assets from brokerages for SUBs can be a hassle anyway, not always worth the effort for the SUB value. i.e. Merrill wouldn't let me transfer some crypto ETFs, and even rejected my transfers of SGOV which is very common and basic. Their reps could never figure out why and I found them to be too annoying to deal with and just gave up.
Robinhood gold card isn't really a good comparison - they exclude a ton of things from the 3% - even larger costco transactions. And you have to pay for robinhood gold annualy to be able to use the card, which doesn't have utility for a lot of people. So you're really getting a 2% cashback difference with Smartly, for an extra max of $2400 a year that doesn't require anything that consumes time. The 5% rotator crowd will do anything for a few extra dollars a week but not all of us are into that.
@ElvisCaprice wrote:
In the end, only each individual can anwer this question of worth to their needs and tolerance.
I agree, it's a YMMV.
WIth how active USB has been with managing their cards, I completely expect USB to have a true 3% longer than Robinhood will. If anything, RH will follow suit with the paramaters like USB has.
@Tiggr wrote:WIth how active USB has been with managing their cards, I completely expect USB to have a true 3% longer than Robinhood will. If anything, RH will follow suit with the paramaters like USB has.
USB is implementing a cap on anything over 2% on Smartly, you know that, right? With limits on certain categories.
HOOD has far more positive momentum than USB, HOOD now has a 93 Billion dollar market cap and USB 72 Billion.
I think HOOD has it going now and far more technologically advanced than USB.
And I have no ties, yet, with HOOD. No horse in this race.
That being said, I do think Robinhood Gold Visa will one day see a cap placed upon the 3%.