Review: New and Improved Citi Cash Back Card Now Actually Gives 8%

I haven’t reviewed the Citi Cash Back Card, and for good reason – it simply wasn’t a compelling card before. This changes from 9th December 2020 onwards when Citi significantly buffs this card.

Features

Provider	Citibank
Type	Conditional cashback
Earn Rate	6% on dining 8% on groceries and petrol 0.25% on other stuff
Conditions	$800 monthly minimum spend
Limits	$80 monthly cashback

Citi has always marketed the Citi Cash Back card as an 8% cashback card on dining, groceries, and petrol, but sublimits made it a rather cumbersome affair. Want to get 8% cashback? You need to spend around $300 on dining, $300 on groceries, and $300 on petrol to get the maximum advertised cashback yield.

After the change, there would be no annoying sublimits to worry about. Instead, the combined cashback limit is $80 across all the categories. This means that you can spend $800 to 1,000 on a single category in a month and get 8% cashback without having to spend a cent on the other two categories. This makes the card far easier to use, not to mention the slight drop in minimum spending from $888 to $800.

Dining does take a hit, dropping from 8% to 6% cashback. To be fair, it’s not too bad a drop since it was difficult to get the full 8% cashback rate anyway. up until this change, $1,000 spent on solely dining on this card got you 2.75% cashback due to the sublimit. Post change, such a spend amount would generate a respectable 6% cashback.

Cashback blocks

Citi has a peculiar way of crediting cashback, and it is credited in blocks of $10 with a minimum of $50 each time. This means that if you spent S$800 within a single month on groceries, you would get S$64 of cashback, but only S$60 would offset your bill, leaving S$4 stuck.

It doesn’t quite matter if you are going to continually use the card, since the S$4 will add on to your future earned cashback to be credited towards future statements, but if you want it to be “neat”, spend S$875 or S$1,000 instead for a nice and round S$70 or S$80 to be credited towards your statement.

How does it compare against other cashback cards?

The Citi Cash Back’s closest competitors are now the Maybank Family and Friends card and OCBC FRANK. This attests to how good this improvement is; Citi Cash Back card is now comparable with top tier cashback cards.

Maybank FnF gives the same 8% on very similar categories. If you spend on groceries or petrol, Maybank FnF also gives 8% on $800 spend, with the added flexibility of giving 5% if your spend is only $500. On top of that, FnF adds a whole host of other categories including telco bills, public transportation, and food delivery.

Citi Cash Back is superior to FnF in perhaps only one but really major way – dining. FnF previously awarded high cashback for restaurants, but has since changed it to only fast food restaurants. Citi Cash Back gives 6% for dining, whether it’s at fast food outlets, restaurants, or even caterers.

OCBC FRANK has stepped up to take over dining for me, giving the same 6% cashback on everything contactless (which includes virtually everywhere that accepts credit cards now). That is capped at $417 a month, which may or may not be a good amount for you depending on your dining habits, and you will have to spend another $183 online in order to reach a 6% cashback yield.

Depending on your spending habits, dining may be a significant area of spend that will tilt you towards Citi’s offering over Maybank or OCBC’s cards. You could drop anywhere between $800 to $1,333 on dining alone in a month and get the full 6% cashback other cards cannot offer on that spend amount…

Conclusion

I’ve said this before and I’ll repeat it again: sublimits are annoying. The removal of them thus greatly boosts the Citi Cash Back card, even as Citi continues its strange way of crediting cashback.

People who spend substantially on dining each month may find this card much better than anything available right now, and for that it gets a decent score from me.

The good:

• High 8% cashback on groceries and petrol, 6% on dining
• Relatively high cap of $1,000 for a cashback card
• No more sublimits

The bad:

• Relatively high minimum spend of $800
• Cashback is credited in blocks of $10 with a minimum of $50 each time

The ugly:

• Being someone who consistently spends $300 on each category only for Citi to change this card… Although, does someone like this even exist? 🤔

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