Citi PayAll Deal: Fee Waiver + $100 GrabFood vouchers – How to Get Cheap Miles… Or Cashback
Citi PayAll is having a 48-hour deal that is ending tonight (19th March 2021 11.59PM): spend at least $2,000 via Citi Pay All during this time period and receive $100 in GrabFood voucher.
This is on top of their current offer of fee waivers for new PayAll customers and 1% cashback for existing PayAll Customers.
What is PayAll?
Like other services which allow you to use credit cards to pay for things that normally don’t accept credit cards, Citi PayAll is a service that Citibank offers, and is guaranteed to earn rewards with the cards the bank specifies, which include: Citi Rewards Card, Citi Lazada Card, Citi Cash Back Card, Citi Cash Back+ Card, Citi PremierMiles Card, Citi Prestige Card and Citi ULTIMA Card.
Note that only ULTIMA, Prestige, PremierMiles, and Cash Back+ cards are applicable for the GrabFood vouchers.
Only the base rewards are awarded, so Citi Rewards card gets 0.4 mpd (or 1 ThankYou point) rather than the 4 mpd we tend to use it for. You can pop over to their website for more details as well as terms and conditions.
Fee waiver promo
This $100 GrabFood voucher stacks with the existing fee waiver promo Citi is offering.
New PayAll Customers: service fee waiver on 2 transactions of the lowest amounts with a min. of 3 completed transactions (capped at S$400).
This means that you can schedule three payments of $10,000 each to fully optimise this promo:
| Amount | Fee (2%) | Cashback |
| $10,000 | $200 | $200 |
| $10,000 | $200 | $200 |
| $10,000 | $200 | – |
You hence incur a $200 fee for $30,000 of spend.
Existing PayAll Customers: Bonus 1% cash back on your Citi PayAll transactions within the campaign period when you set up a recurring payment with a min. of S$500 per month for at least 3 months (Cash back capped at S$200).
Your incur a nett fee of $200 for $20,000 of spend.
Miles earning opportunity?
Many miles chasers and blogs have framed this as a cheap way to procure miles. That’s pretty true: if you are a new PayAll customer and use the Citi PremierMiles which gets you 1.2 mpd, you get 36,000 miles for spending $30,000 at a cost of $200.
This means you are essentially buying each mile for 0.55 miles, which is a really good deal considering how each mile can be easily liquidated at 0.8 to 1 cent each. The extra $100 GrabFood vouchers doesn’t hurt, of course. The deal becomes even better if you have Citi Prestige or Ultima, if you have those higher end cards.
Cashback seems better
I may get stoned by miles enthusiasts, but Citi Cash Back+ gives a base rate of 1.6%, and should also work with PayAll for 1.6% cashback. Normally, it wouldn’t make too much sense: you are incurring a fee of 2% when you use PayAll, but with this promo it looks like “free” money.
With a $30,000 spend, you are getting $480 worth of cashback, and you have spent $200 for them. Once again, the $100 GrabFood vouchers sweeten the deal.
In both miles and cashback scenarios:
- Nett fee of $200 for 36,000 miles and $100 GrabFood voucher
- Nett fee of $200 for $480 cashback and $100 GrabFood voucher
This means you have to decide whether 36,000 miles is higher in value than $480. I have talked about the value of a mile KrisFlyer mile before, and I believe that most mile chasers overvalue miles, even before the pandemic scuttled travel plans. Forgoing $480 for 36,000 miles is an opportunity cost of 1.33 cents per mile which doesn’t seem great to me before Covid-19, and it seems like a worse deal now.
How to use this?
Anyway, whether you pick miles or cashback, it’s still a rather good deal. The issue now is how to clock at least three transactions of $10,000 to fully make use of the promo. Possibly not Citi’s intended use case, but it is technically possible to use this and pay a family member, although that would result in tax implications as the family member would have to declare this as income. Not sure what the bank thinks about this, so proceed at your own risk.
Nonetheless, if you just make a single $2,000 payment for the sake of the GrabFood vouchers, you’d pay $40 of fee for $100 of GrabFood vouchers, and gain miles/cashback in the $2,000 payment. It’s still not too shabby.
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