Citi ThankYou Premier Card 30,000 Bonus Points and More

I wrote about the Citi ThankYou Premier Card last December shortly after it was launched. At that time, Citi was offering 20,000 bonus ThankYou Points for every new cardholder after he or she spends $1,000 in the first three months of membership. I got the card early this year, not from applying for the card myself, but as a replacement of my old PremierPass card. Since it wasn’t a new application, I didn’t get the sign up bonus but I don’t have to pay the annual membership fee either If I could choose, I would rather not pay the membership fee since the $125 per year fee is recurring while the bonus, though nice, is just a one-time incentive for new cardholder.

Anyway, if you are interested in getting this card, you could get a  better deal now than before. Citi is currently running a promotion for the Citi ThankYou Premier Card with 30,000 bonus ThankYou Points, redeemable for a $300 gift card. It’s a pretty good deal if you think about how expensive airline tickets have become lately. In order to qualify for the bonus points, you will need to spend $2,000 or more in the first three months. The spending limit for the bonus offer is twice as the original spending limit for the ThankYou Points bonus, but the signup points are more than doubled than the original offer. My favorite way of spending the money without actually spending it in order to qualify for the bonus is use the card to purchase $1 coins form US Mint As a travel rewards card, Citi ThankYou Premier Card lets you earn 1.2 points for every dollar spent at gas stations, supermarkets and drugstores. For everywhere else, you will earn 1 ThankYou Point per dollar. For more details about the card and its rewards program, check out my previous discussions.

In addition to the Premier Card, Citi is also offering $100 bonus for its popular Dividend Select Platinum Card. For a limited time, you can get $100 bonus when you become a new card member and spend at least $500 in the first three months. Unlike the above Premier Card, this card doesn’t have annul fee and it lets you earn 5% cash back in certain shopping categories every quarter. The additional rewards categories rotate every three months. For the current quarter, the bonus rewards categories are home improvement, home furnishings, and home & garden stores.

BTW, it looks like Ally Bank has just increased the yield of its online savings account to 1.04% APY from 1.00% APY. It’s quite rare these days for a bank to increase interest rate. I don’t know exactly what is the reason behind this increase, but I am not convinced that it is the start of a trend. We have seen in the past that banks briefly raised interest rates for deposit accounts, but only to lower them even more afterwards. Let’s what Ally will do next.