USB Cash+ targeted offer

[GatorCowboyLion]

Got a 20% cashback offer between 500 and 600 spend in the next 55 days. Luckily, I can overpay my electric bill and pocket the free $20. Makes that whole $600 be average 8.3% cash back. Curious if people think I should meet the offer asap to get another one. 🤔 

[ptatohed]

Nice.  I wonder what it means by 'up to' 20%.  You either get it or you don't.    

Also, it doesn't say 20% cash back, it says 20% more cash back.  Does that perhaps mean the 5% becomes 6% and the 2% becomes 2.4%?  

[Rdbeetle]

I got an offer also, but mine was for after spending $750.

[Anonymous]

I got it on my two Elan cards (Max cash and Fidelity).   So on the Fidelity card after meeting the spend threshold ($550 in my case) I get 2.4 points per $ instead of 2.  So to max out the 2,000 extra points I would need to spend $5,550 in the two month period, just to get the $20 extra.  FREEEE MONEY but not exactly overly generous.

[GatorCowboyLion]

Hmm. My assumption is that this is a 20% cash back deal for the $100 after I've spent $500. That's only thing that makes sense to me. The "up to" in my understanding is if I fail to meet the $600. I see that my understanding doesn't make perfect sense of the verbiage, but I don't see that anything would.  20% of $500 is already $100 which is above their limit. I don't think I'm overthinking it, I don't know what else it could mean. 

[ptatohed]

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@GatorCowboyLion wrote:

Hmm. My assumption is that this is a 20% cash back deal for the $100 after I've spent $500. That's only thing that makes sense to me. The "up to" in my understanding is if I fail to meet the $600. I see that my understanding doesn't make perfect sense of the verbiage, but I don't see that anything would.  20% of $500 is already $100 which is above their limit. I don't think I'm overthinking it, I don't know what else it could mean. 

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I understand what "up to $20" means but I don't understand what "up to 20%" means.  Can you copy and paste the fine print? 

[user979797]

Thank you for sharing

[GatorCowboyLion]

Good idea @ptatohed on the fine print. Perhaps this is not as generous an offer as I had supposed. If I was only spending within the 1% category on this card, an extra 0.2% would be 20% extra. Up to 20% would only be as high as 20% if I was avoiding all 5% and 2% categories that I had preselected. It seems these are small potatoes. Laughably small.

Since I do pay my electric bill with this card, anyhow, it's worth figuring what the upside is. Say I spent $200 within the 5% in April on this card, so I have $1800 on the quarter left at 5%. So the first $500 will figure to 5%, the remaining $1300 will get 5.2%. This is $2.60 above 5%. $1300 if not spent on future electric bills would gain $2.60 at 5% interest in a fortnight. Aka this is not worth anything above what you would spend anyhow. Only redpat would think that this is a good deal. 

[DoppelgangerD]

20% more AFTER you spend $500.🙄

This is one of the suckiest promos I've seen for a credit card, lol.

(Though I am new to the card with P2 opening account just over a month ago, and it doesn't look like we were offered it either, probably due to still working on the SUB.)

Anyway, the only way to make this promo worth anything, is by somehow spending so much above the $500 threshold, while also staying within your two preferred categories, but at the same time not spending so much that you screw yourself over for the current quarterly cap.

So with my categories being utilities and cellphone, I could overpay enough that I wouldn't need to pay next month, but that's a lot of effort to get an extra 3 or 4 bucks, and even less considering those extra payments are basically shorting the HYSA.

So annoyingly complicated that it's not worth the effort IMHO.

[coldfusion]

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@DoppelgangerD wrote:

20% more AFTER you spend $500.🙄

This is one of the suckiest promos I've seen for a credit card, lol.

(Though I am new to the card with P2 opening account just over a month ago, and it doesn't look like we were offered it either, probably due to still working on the SUB.)

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When it comes to targeted promotions like this one they determine a couple of months in advance who they're going to target and the mininum spend requirement they're being assigned to qualify (this time the one on my Max Cash was only $150) - P2 didn't get the offer because the details regarding who would get an offer this go-around were already established before they got their card.    They've already recycled variants of this offer every several months recently on US Bank and Elan cards and your P2 may very well be targeted next go-around.