More new credit card offers! Plus some awful advice from Slate

WELCOME BACK, HUNTINGTON BANK: It’s been 14 years, but Huntington Bank is once again issuing credit cards. It’s called Voice from Huntington, and according to the WSJ, only existing retail customers are eligible to receive one.

So is the card worth pursuing? For most of you reading this, probably not. The card’s selling point is that you can get 3% back on the category of your choice in any given quarter. The categories you have to choose from are actually pretty good:

The catch is that the 3% is only for purchases up to $2,000 in any given quarter. So the card may have some appeal for casual credit card users who don’t spend too much time thinking about rewards, but as a lot of you know there are better rewards available for most of these categories with other credit cards.

CITI THANKYOU PREFERRED 30,000: As reported on My Money Blog, the Citi ThankYou Preferred credit card now has a 30,000-point sign-up bonus. This is an improvement over the default 20,000 points currently offered, but is it worth signing up for?

It’s essentially a $300 bonus, so you could certainly do worse. Keep in mind, though, that Citi offered 50,000 points near the end of 2011 and 2012 for the Preferred and the Premier. Personally, if I were in the market for some Citi ThankYou Points, I’d wait until the end of the year.

A CATCHY HEADLINE: Why You Should Die With A Lot Of Credit Card Debt. It’s a little complicated, but the author makes a good case, as it turns out credit card debt is hard to collect once you die.

A MUCH LESS CATCHY HEADLINE: Ditch Your Loyalty Cards. From the Slate article:

According to a 2002 article in the Harvard Business Review, many retailers now offer such extensive rewards for loyalty that they’re no longer making money on their top customers—the very people the programs are supposed to entice. In addition, most customers engage in what researchers call “polygamous loyalty,” which is a creative way of saying disloyalty. The overwhelming majority of fliers, for example, belong to multiple rewards programs. It’s a race to the bottom, as companies are so afraid of losing customers to their competitors that they destroy their own profitability and forsake strategies to attract customers in novel ways.

The author’s solution?

I invite you to join me in a vacation from customer loyalty. For six months, stow your plastic cards, your key fobs, and your punch cards in a drawer. Even if you buy from a retailer with loyalty cards, don’t flash your membership to the cashier.

Let me get this straight: companies are “destroying their own profitability” by offering “extensive rewards” to consumers–and you want us to boycott this practice?

I’m not sure what to do here other than trot out a classic meme…