2016 Freedom Categories
- Q1 January 1 – March 31: Gas stations and local commuter transportation
- Q2 April 1 – June 30: Grocery stores (not including Walmart and Target purchases) and more
- Q3 July 1 – September 30: Restaurants and more
- Q4 October 1 – December 31: Holiday shopping
The Q2 grocery stores is awesome as we all shop for food and they have lots of gift cards which can be purchased as well. And the Q1 gas category is nice as well, both for gas and for gift cards, as we wrote previously.
You can activate Freedom Q1 2016 now in your online login (appears under the Freedom card, ‘Activate Now’), or wait until the email comes.
Citi Dividend
The categories of the Citi Dividend card were already publicized and include drugstores for Q2, more details here.
Importantly, you can now signup for the Q1 category for 5% cashback from Home Depot and Home furnishing stores from January 1st until March 31st. Many will prefer to max out the full $300 allowance in Q2, as we’ve explained in the previous post.
Discover IT
We’re still waiting to find out what the Discover 2016 categories will be. For now, we just know that Q1 will be gas and ground transportation. That’s good news since it’s possible to buy gift cards at gas stations and get 5%, or even 10% for those who are enrolled in the double cashback offer. More details on that here.
The Q1 2016 offer is now available for signup in your online Discover login.
Does Whole Foods count as a grocery merchant for the points?
I’ll guess it works – I know it works for Amex.
Glad to see grocery stores back.
Quicksilver’s 20% back on Uber is still going on for a few more months so I won’t be switching to freedom for that anytime soon, but I’m glad to see it’s included. Lyft still works too, so even though I use it less often, I’ll probably still switch my card info in for it if they they have a good promo anytime soon.
And YES, Uber/Lyft is counted as local commuter transportation (https://creditcards.chase.com/freedom/merchants)
Any ideas for people who live cities and don’t drive (and the gas stations don’t sell any good gift cards)? Paying bus fare on Freedom will earn something but far from maxing out the category.
Gift cards at 7-11 https://www.doctorofcredit.com/does-discover-count-7-eleven-as-a-gas-station/
I’ve tried many 7-11s in the Chicago metro area, and none of clerks seem willing to let me use a credit card to buy a gift card. That being said, I have not seen if the registers are hardcoded to deny credit cards.
3 of 4 7 Eleven’s in my area of metro Chicago tested DO allow the purchase of Vanilla Visa with a credit card. They are definitely not hard coded against, it is store by store.
I live in DC and use the Metro’s website to load my Metro card every month. That earns 2X travel bonus on Chase Sapphire Preferred. It is listed as “LOCAL SUBURBAN COMMUTER PASSENGER TRANSPORTATION,INCLUDINGFERRY”.
So you’ll have to load directly with the agency (not at a CVS or similar I would imagine). Maybe make a small test charge now to test it out if you’re not sure.
I live in NYC and I’m going to buy MetroCards with this.
Ok, better now that we know groceries are included. It still bothers me though that both Freedom and Discover have the same Q1 category, it’s better to have variety. At least I hope restaurants won’t coincide.
In a lot of the country gas is cheaper during the winter and people drive less than in the summer. This means less spend from regular users gets bonused by putting the category at that time.