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Adios to the 2% Priceline Visa, a 50,000-point offer from PNC, and a heavenly eBay auction

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NO MORE 2% PRICELINE VISA :  Bad news on the credit card front as one of the two remaining 2%-on-everything cards is no more. Thanks to commenter Wedding Spend for the reminder, and we’ll point out he runs a very nice blog for any you who happen to have a wedding coming soon and want to do it without breaking the bank.

With the demise of the Priceline Visa, there is only one remaining no-fee 2% card, the Fidelity Amex, and you might want to think about getting one if you don’t already have it, because who knows how long that deal will stick around. Very often when these deals go away existing cardholders will be grandfathered in for a long time afterwards.

If you’re a big spender and a prepare-for-the-worst type, you could also think about opening a NASA Federal Credit Union Platinum Cash Rewards Credit Card. It’s got no annual fee, and you get 2% back on monthly purchases beyond $2,000. You’ll need to join the American Consumer Council in order to join the NASA FCU.

PNC IS TESTING A SLIGHTLY LESS TERRIBLE OFFER: Mrs. PFD and I both received offers for a PNC credit card today. My wife got the better offer:

PNC marketing
I should probably get a nicer cellphone camera

PNC’s 50,000-point offer sounds good until you realize that their points are worth approximately a quarter-cent each. If you assume an average credit card point is worth a penny, then my wife and I are essentially looking at offers for 6,250 points and 12,500 points. I covered PNC’s weird and intentionally confusing program a while back if you’re curious.

EBAY CANCELS AUCTION FOR SLOT IN HEAVEN: eBay continues to make it difficult for people to make a living from its website:

Hundreds flocked to eBay when a Jewish man named Ari Mandel, from Teaneck, N.J., put a spot in Habaah, or heaven, up for auction.

The price flew from 99 cents to $100,000 before eBay could take the posting down, citing rules that require items to be tangible.

According to Mandel, the winning bidder would have received a signed contract guaranteeing Mandel’s spot in Habaah, and another contract guaranteeing that Mandel would live free of sin in order to secure that spot. He also promised never to return to religious life and steal the spot back for himself.

Apparently you’re not allowed to sell your soul on eBay either:

eBay does not allow the auctioning of human souls for the following reasons: If the soul does not exist, eBay could not allow the auctioning of the soul because there would be nothing to sell. However, if the soul does exist then, in accordance with eBay’s policy on human parts and remains, we would not allow the auctioning of human souls.

So you can’t sell souls or brains on eBay. Of course, if you’re a Citibank credit card executive, the issue is purely theoretical.

What are the worst credit cards and the worst issuers?

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Commenter sjepps left the following comment:

I will strongly disagree with you and insist that Capital One is the worst. The fact that no one talks about or uses them confirms. They just don’t have anything at all to offer. At least Citi has the AA card and this (If you get to keep your points). I’ve been with Capital One for 10 years, I had to send a letter to the CEO to get my card upgraded from $500 to $5000.

I can’t disagree with badmouthing Capital One from a consumer standpoint–my wife and I have about 30 credit cards between us and only one is a Capital One card. We got it to take advantage of a balance transfer offer a while back and we haven’t used it in years. Capital One doesn’t have much to offer to those who seek the best deals in credit cards.

Whether that qualifies them as the “worst”, is, of course, highly subjective, as is any other definition of worst. You could mean worst deal for consumers, worst for people who frequent Flyertalk, Fatwallet, and Dansdeals, worst from a shareholder perspective, worst customer service, or something else.

By contrast, American Express’s Blue Cash Preferred offered unlimited 6% cash back on groceries, until Amex found out that too many people were getting too much unlimited cash back. And what did Amex do? They put a $6,000 cap on the 6% cash back.

What did Amex not do? They did not take money back from consumers, and they did not continue to offer the unlimited 6% cash back. This is one example of why I (and probably a lot of others) respect Amex’s management.

But I’d definitely rate Capital One as the worst from a standpoint of a credit card aficionado like myself. They have absolutely nothing remarkable about either their sign-up bonuses, their spending bonuses, or their partners (aside from the Best Buy card, which they’re selling to Citibank). I think their management is certainly better than Citi’s, and I would guess that the fact that they don’t have any great deals is a deliberate strategy on their part.

Of course, if you want to wade into the subprime world, things can get much worse. Consider, for example, the Continental Finance MasterCard:

This might be the worst credit card, ever. First, the $200 account processing fee, which is classified as a finance fee, should immediately scare you off. However, if you’re OK with that atrocity, note that you will be paying a 19.9% interest rate, which starts to immediately accrue on your finance charges. You do have a 25-day grace period on purchases, as long as the balance was paid in full the previous month. However, that’s about where the positives end with this horrible credit card. You’ll see a $12-per-month account maintenance fee, a $50 annual fee and a $25 credit increase fee each time your limit is raised; even if you didn’t ask for the increase.

A $25 credit increase fee! Talk about chutapah…

A $100,000 bank bonus, and the Citi 5% card returns! Plus some free movies.

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A  $100,000 BANK SIGN-UP BONUS: It’s about time somebody dangled a six-figure account opening bonus before the public! Courtesy of Maximizing Money, here’s an intriguing offer from Houston Federal Credit Union:

Earn a 1% bonus when you invest with HFCU Investment & Retirement Services!

The 1% bonus is cash paid directly to you 31 days after any HFCU Investment & Retirement Services account is funded. HFCU will even waive any penalty if you redeem your certificate account before its planned maturity in order to take advantage of this offer. In today’s low interest environment, savers need all the yield they can get. If they aren’t finding it in traditional savings, checking, IRA, or certificate accounts, it may be time to look elsewhere.

This is a limited time offer, and will be discontinued without notice when $10,000,000 has moved from HFCU accounts to HFCU Investment and Retirement Services, so act now!

So–and this is purely theoretical–if you had $10,000,000 burning a hole in your pocket and you moved it to HFCU, you could theoretically be $100,000 richer after 31 days. But note the very clear “discontinued without notice” warning: if you’re the second such decamillionaire to go for the bonus, you’ll get a big bowl of nothing for your efforts.

Great job by HFCU’s marketing department for coming up with an offer which can generate some publicity, create some interest in their products, and–this is important, Citibank–limit their marketing expenses.

I’m looking at you too, Chase Credit Card department. This scrappy credit union wasn’t so dumb as to promise “unlimited” rewards that they couldn’t deliver on. They made very clear that when the promo money runs out, that’s it. Honest, ethical, straightforward, effective–what a novel concept for financial services marketing!

DID SOMEBODY SAY STUPID BANK MARKETING?: (via Frequent Miler) Even as they’re cracking down on people attempting to earn unlimited ThankYou Points, The Miles Professor points out that Citi is still offering the legendary unlimited 5% on gas, groceries and drugstores in its branches.  And if you’re paying attention to the picture, you’ll see that Citi is still saying very clearly, “NO POINTS CAP”:

Thanks Miles Professor!

AIRBNB IS ILLEGAL IN NEW YORK CITY: Airbnb came up not too long ago when I talked about renting your stuff out for fun and profit. A judge in New York has found a man guilty of violating a 2011 forbidding people from treating their apartments like hotels via airbnb and has fined him $2,400. As The Gate points out:

…but the question is this: if using the Airbnb is against the law in New York — unless the stay is 29 days or greater — in what other municipalities could Airbnb and similar lodging services be considered illegal? Is there a possibility that the stay could be interrupted as well as the owner being penalized with a fine? What if the condominium or housing association bylaws which may govern the rules of the community in which the home is located prevent the use of Airbnb?

A good point. It would be nice if Airbnb could help out prospective hoteliers, but if I were them, I’d be afraid of what I might find out.

WATCH THE HOBBIT FOR FREE: Redbox is offering free streaming of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Slickdeals has more details.

WATCH SOME OTHER MOVIE FOR FREE: Through August 2, Fandango is offering a buy one, get one free deal on Fridays for Visa Signature cardholders.

Citibank cracks down, Amex throws us a bone, and French healthcare is both awesome and broken

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CITI CRACKS DOWN: Yesterday we briefly recapped the story of Chase getting burned by offering unlimited 5% rewards. Now it’s Citi’s turn: there are many reports on Flyertalk of Citi closing down people who have been churning a lot of gift cards on the Citi Preferred 5% gas/grocery/drugstore offer.

It’s a cliche, but…

Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered
Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered

Question for discussion: is the pigs/hogs metaphor more applicable to Citi or its customers?

What makes this very amusing to us is this isn’t the first time Citi has shot themselves in the foot with unlimited 5% rewards. Does anybody remember the Citi CashReturns card which offered unlimited 5% cash back for the first 3 months? Citi apparently does not, but we do, and frankly it’s surprising Citi or another major issuer has not hired us to evaluate offers, because we’d be awesome. “Yes, you did something like this in 2007 and it ended badly for you, though it was frickin’ awesome for your customers” we’d say.

“Not only that, but you let people get the same ‘intro’ offer a half-dozen times consecutively until you finally caught on a year and a half later. And you’re darn right there’s a Fatwallet Thread on this debacle, too.”

“And you know what?” we’d add. “You’re probably going to do something like this again in a few years.” Then, as long as we’re dreaming, we’d collect the six-figure check Citi is paying us to dispense such great advice and be on our merry way.

Given the way high-level bank executives move around so much, it wouldn’t surprise us if nobody from L’affaire CashReturns is still around at Citi to impart their wisdom. And given all that Citi’s been through since the credit bubble burst, it wouldn’t surprise us if employee morale were in terrible shape and nobody even cared if anybody was collecting thousands of dollars per month in credit card rewards unless the problem got so big it was costing Citi millions per month and somebody very high up the food chain started squawking. Who knows…

HILTON SURPASS INCREASES REWARDS VERY SLIGHTLY: The Amex Hilton Surpass is now offering 6 HHonors points for restaurant spending. Our response is a shrug–the Citi Forward offers 5 ThankYou Points (which can be exchanged for 7.5 HHonors points) and the newly revamped AARP card offers 3% cash back. After the recent Hilton devaluation 3% probably represents the ceiling of the value of 6 HHonors points per dollar.

Still, it’s good to see there’s some concern from the card marketers at Amex about the competitiveness of this particular product. Hopefully there are more changes to come?

SOCIALIZED MEDICINE–AWESOME OR HORRIBLE?: Okay, enough about credit cards! You’ve no doubt heard about Obamacare, and have probably formed your own opinion on it, and we have no interest in trying to change it, or even in making any intelligent commentary on the situation because frankly the entire topic is simultaneously perplexing and boring.

Love it or hate it, we do seem to be moving more toward the European model, so Pauline at Reach Financial Independence–a native Frenchwoman who lives in Guatemala and therefore has one of the more interesting personal finance blogs out there– gives her account, both the good and the bad, of life with France’s healthcare system. She describes it as “so awesome and so broken at the same time.” Conclusion:

Good or bad, we manage to have one of the highest life expectancy in the world, well over 80 years. But that may be due to wine.

We can only hope she’s made her peace with rum or guaro or Casillero Del Diablo or whatever they drink in Guatemala. Our five words of advice for anybody who’s in Central America or planning to go: Flor de Caña Siete Años. 

Nicaragua’s finest

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