4 High Earn Credit Cards for Huge Expenses!

💳 This is part of the “The Best Cards to Use” series. Tap here for more great cards to use in other areas of spend!

Got big expenses to pay? Don’t use unlimited cards that give you only 1.5% cashback or 1.2 miles per dollar! Here are 4 cards that are worth your while.

Card 1: Citi SMRT Card – 5% cashback with $12,000 annual cap

The Citi SMRT Card, unlike many cashback and miles cards, come with no monthly cap. Instead, it has a S$12,000 annual cap which should be good enough for many big ticket items.

Only online transactions qualify, and you are required to have a monthly minimum spend of S$500 before you get the 5% cashback rate on your spend within that month. This is easy to get, although travel related transactions are unfortunately excluded.

Also, Citi SMRT card follows a peculiar redemption and expiry system, so do take note of that and redeem your cashback as soon as they are available to avoid losing your hard-earned rebates.

Card 2: UOB Absolute + GrabPay Mastercard

Update: GrabPay has been nerfed and no longer gives points for most types of spending

Update: UOB Absolute has been nerfed and now only gives 0.3% cashback for Grab top ups.

Our perennial solution to tricky transactions, UOB Absolute paired with GrabPay Mastercard can help you to settle up to $5,000 of transactions, and get you a pretty decent earn rate.

Topping up your Grab wallet gets you 1.7% cashback on your UOB Absolute card, and you can use your GrabPay Mastercard thereafter for up to 1.2% of rebate in the form of Grab points, assuming you are a Platinum member. That is pretty easily achieved with just a few hundred dollars of spending with GrabPay.

Coupled with Grab Power Up Challengers, your earn rate can also be further enhanced, and this combo should be good enough to deal with most large transactions you’d face, as long as they are under $5,000 each. There is also a monthly limit of $10,000 and an annual limit of $30,000 to observe, so do take note of that.

Card 3: OCBC Titanium Rewards – 4 mpd for electronics, furniture, fashion etc

OCBC Titanium Rewards has been my go to card for large electronics purchases, but it also works for things like fashion and furniture. It gives 10X OCBC$ per dollar spent for eligible categories, and that is good for 4 miles.

You could easily buy an iPhone, a MacBook, an Apple Watch, and an iPad and still fit comfortably within OCBC Titanium Rewards’ annual capacity of $13,335 for 10X points. If you find this insufficient, OCBC allows you to sign up for both blue and pink variants of this card, effectively doubling your capacity since both cards come with their own maximum limit.

Card 4: UOB KrisFlyer gives unlimited 3 mpd

The last but certainly not least of these cards is the UOB KrisFlyer card which gives a seemingly lousy rate of 1.2 miles per dollar on its spend, but gets boosted to 3 miles per dollar when you spend at least $500 on Singapore Airline Group transactions within the membership year. These include Singapore Airlines, SilkAir, Scoot and KrisShop.

Within the year where the $500 spend requirement is met, your dining, online shopping, online travel, and transport card transactions get an additional 1.8 miles per dollar, making a total earn rate of 3 miles per dollar. There is no specified limit to this, and the rather wide range of MCCs listed for the online shopping category means that most things you buy online would get you the 3 miles per dollar rate.

Do note that the additional 1.8 miles come in two months after the end of your membership year, although I’ve personally gotten it a month or two earlier. This means that you could miss out on earning enough for a trip you are going for soon, though on the flipside it means that your expiry on these points will be later if you have no immediate use for them.

Conclusion

With these cards around, there really isn’t a reason to resort to 1.2 miles per dollar or 1.5% cashback cards, but do check out the terms and conditions of each card before committing to your transaction. Do a bit of homework first, particularly since it’s going to be a big transaction.

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