This no-annual fee card will pay you $700 or more a year, seemingly in perpetuity. <\/p>\n
Vitals<\/h4>\n
This card is issued by Citi and is part of a cobranded relationship with Sears. Yes, Sears<\/em>, the store that as of two days ago officially has no physical locations<\/a> and was ransacked for billions of dollars in real estate by Eddie Lampert<\/a> over the last decade.<\/p>\n I think it\u2019s obvious to about everyone in the known universe that if you could choose to earn ThankYou Points or Shop Your Way Rewards, you\u2019d choose ThankYou Points. Unfortunately, the only way to get the ThankYou Point version of the card is to call in and ask to convert your Shop Your Way Rewards earning to a ThankYou Point earning version, but I haven\u2019t heard of anyone having any success doing that since 2020. So, if you\u2019re like me, you\u2019re probably going to be stuck with the Shop Your Way Rewards version.<\/p>\n What do you do with Shop Your Way Rewards? You can redeem ten of them for a penny toward merchandise like toilet paper, iPads, or neoprene dumbbells at shopyourway.com<\/a>, or you can cash them out for a gift card <\/a>to resell. I definitely do the latter.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s why this card is really valuable: After you\u2019ve had the card for two to three months and it\u2019s been sock-drawered, you\u2019ll start getting spending offers in your email inbox and those offers stack. And unlike everything else about Citi and Sears IT, they post automatically every-time. For example, I have the following spend offers all running concurrently and all from within the last 30 days:<\/p>\n All of these offers obviously pair really well together. For simplicity, I\u2019ll buy 3x$500 BestBuy gift cards at BestBuy for resale and send a $500 \u201cutility payment\u201d. After those two transactions I\u2019ll earn $120 in statement credits plus another $125 worth of Shop Your Way Rewards points, all from a no-annual fee card.<\/p>\n And while not all months have offers stack as nicely as this month, it happens a lot. A lot.<\/p>\n MS Hint:<\/em> This card is like other Citi Mastercards in many ways, but it does a few things better than other Citi cards too so don\u2019t forget to probe.<\/p>\n Circling back to the introduction: this no-annual fee card will pay you $700 or more a year through targeted spend offers. Why? The rumor I\u2019ve heard is that the Sears Shop Your Way Rewards card is one of the most valuable cards in Citi\u2019s portfolio because it\u2019s typically held by older generations that grew up with Sears, and those cardholders typically carry a monthly balance which earns Citi plenty in interest and fees so they want to encourage more spending and bigger balances. The story sounds truthy<\/a>, but I have no independent confirmation so let\u2019s just call it a likely possibility.<\/p>\n How come you haven\u2019t heard of this card before? Well I\u2019m sure the main reason is Sears<\/em>, though I don\u2019t think it pays a commission to affiliates so there\u2019s not a financial incentive to write about it. Finally, the Shop Your Way Rewards program isn\u2019t exactly on-par with AAdvantage or Hyatt, so there\u2019s that.<\/p>\n (Special thanks to Garth for introducing the card to me.)<\/p>\n Introduction I finally got a kick in the pants to write this post after Rocky emailed and asked why I keep talking about the Citi<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_editorskit_title_hidden":false,"_editorskit_reading_time":3,"_editorskit_is_block_options_detached":false,"_editorskit_block_options_position":"{}","footnotes":""},"categories":[54,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-credit-cards","category-unsung-heroes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3080"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3080\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7160,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3080\/revisions\/7160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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Value<\/h4>\n
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ZOMG Wha??<\/h4>\n
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