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.
Citi SMRT
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One of the only high-earn cashback cards with no monthly cap! Gives 5% cashback on online transactions. Read the review here.
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.
UOB Absolute
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- *S$350 cash credit: The first 200 new-to-UOB credit card customers in each month of November and December who successfully apply for an eligible UOB Credit Card between 1 November 2023 and 31 December 2023 (both dates inclusive) and spend a min. of S$1,000 per month for 2 consecutive months from their card approval date, will receive S$350 cash credit. Click here for full terms and conditions.
Get 1.7% cashback on nearly anything excluding Grab top-ups which get 0.3% instead.
Card 3: OCBC Titanium Rewards – 4 mpd for electronics, furniture, fashion etc
OCBC Titanium Rewards
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New OCBC Cardholders
Choose:
- Get an Apple Bundle [Apple AirPods (Generation 3) with Magsafe Charging Case + MagSafe Charger] (worth S$330.50)
- Travel Bundle [Samsonite Volant Spinner 68/25 EXP + 2x Apple AirTag] (worth S$570)
- S$300 eCapitaVoucher
- S$280 Cash via PayNow
Charge at least S$500 within 30 days from card approval
⚠️ Fill up SingSaver rewards form in email to choose your gift. No form completed = no reward given
Until 20th December 2023
Terms and conditions:
- Tap here (save a copy for your own reference)
Get 4 miles per dollar or 2.78% cash rebate on up to S$1,110 of spend on eligible categories per month.
Update: Note that card will not be suitable from 1st November 2023.
OCBC Titanium Rewards has been my go to card for large electronics purchases, but it also works for things like fashion and furniture. It gives 10X OCBC$ 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.
Extended until 7th December: sign up for Webull with this link, fund any amount for 30 days and get 10 free shares! That’s US$80 to US$5,000 worth of rewards! Further deposit US$100,000 and get bonus US$3,000!
Subscribe to the Telegram for more great deals and updates. Prefer email or WhatsApp? Tap here.
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.
KrisFlyer UOB Card
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| Gift for New-to-UOB Credit Card applicants who apply for KrisFlyer UOB Credit Card | 20,000 miles |
| Welcome Miles for first-time applicants | 5,000 miles |
| Miles earned with min S$2,000 spend in the first 60 days | 2,400 to 6,000 miles* |
For reference only. Refer to full terms and conditions.
Last day to apply: 31st December 2023
Get 1.2 mpd on normal expenditure, and bonus 1.8 mpd on dining,
food delivery, online shopping and travel, and transport spend when you spend S$800 in a year with Singapore Airlines Group.
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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