You might want to check and see if you can downgrade it to the Dividend card. The opportunity to downgrade to the Dividend will likely end very soon if it hasn’t already, and it is a useful account for maintaining account age and a little bit of spending. $6000 per year to be precise.
The Dividend card was a 5% cashback card designed to compete with the Chase Freedom card and, while it doesn’t do a very good job of that, the Dividend card is good for an easy $300 each year and has no annual fee. However, the Dividend product is being replaced by the Double Cash card and all of the Dividend applications I could find no longer work. The double cash card only beats out the Dividend card if you will put more than $15,000 on it in a year. That’s $15,000 that could go toward meeting other signup bonuses worth far more than $300. I had no problem earlier this year with downgrading an AA Gold card (originally opened in 2013) to the Dividend.
Category bonuses on the Dividend card for the past few years have included drug stores during the first quarter and Amazon during the fourth quarter. There are other categories too if that matters. We just make a few drugstore purchases early in the year, pick up the $300 (the annual limit on cashback earned) and then leave the card alone for most of the rest of the year.
Ideally you could downgrade one old Hilton, American Airlines or ThankYou card to the Dividend card and another to the Double Cash card which could definitely come in handy if other opportunities dry up for you. Or just wait on the Double Cash – reports are trickling in of targeted $200 offers for the double cash card, which is half of what it would take to make the Double Cash offer competitive.
What do you think? Is there a Citi no-annual-fee card worth downgrading to instead of one of these? Can anyone report success or failure trying to downgrade to the Dividend since the Double Cash product was announced?
-Kenny
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