Today is Wednesday, which means it’s time for another Weird Wednesday post. In this series we’re looking at unknown or little known credit cards. You can see other posts in this series here.
Contents
What Is SavingStar?
SavingStar has two key businesses, the first one allows you to select offers from participating grocery stores, you then save these offers to your account. When you purchase participating items you’ll receive cash back on SavingStar (much like you would with an American Express offer). The amount you receive varies from offer to offer, in some cases you can register your store card with the grocery chain. If you do this it will automatically track the purchase as long as you remember to swipe your store loyalty cards. Other grocery chains require you to upload the receipt.
The other business they have is an online shopping portal that lets you earn cash back. This is similar to sites such as TopCashBack or eBates (who also have a co-branded credit card). Basically you’re given a list of merchants they have partnerships with, you click through to their online site and you are rewarded with cash back for any purchases you make.
SavingStar Credit Card
Now that we know a little bit about SavingStar themselves, we can have a look at the credit card they offer. This is called the SavingStar American Express Card and it’s issued by first bankcard (division of First National Bank of Omaha). Here are the key points of the card:
- Earns at the following rates:
- 10% cash back on eligible SavingStar grocery purchases in addition to your SavingStar Cash back reward
- 5% cash back on eligible SavingStar Cash Back Mall Purchases in addition to your portal earnings
- 1% cash back on all other purchases
- No annual fee
- American Express card, can be used for American Express offers & Small Business Saturday
- No limit on the amount of cash back you can earn
- Free FICO Score [Experian Bankcard Enhanced FICO score 2008 (EX-08 bankcard enhanced, range of 250-900)]
They also offer the same benefits for the secured version of their credit card. Obviously the most interesting card benefits are the 10% cash back and 5% cash back earning rates. Let’s have a look at them a bit further.
10% Cash back On SavingStar Grocery Purchases
The easiest way to look at this benefit is by using a few real world examples. I found two offers that are currently valid that we will use to illustrate:
- Save $5 when you spend $25 or more on Clorox and Glad Products. In this case you’d earn $5 from making the initial $25 or more in purchases, and you’d then earn an additional $2.5 by using the SavingStar credit card.
- Save 20% on any single purchase of loose Broccoli at participating retailers. Assuming the Broccoli cost $10 (to make things more convenient) you’d earn $2 from enrolling in SavingStar and an additional $1 from using the SavingStar credit card.
Every Thursday they have a new healthy offer (this seems to be for generic products like vegetables or fruit) and every Friday-Sunday they have a mystery freebie which is one item that is completely free. The rest of the offers are for branded products when I checked there were 34 different products available. Most of these were small savings (e.g under $1) for purchasing two or more branded products.
Personally I don’t see a lot of value in these, there are very few offers I’d actually complete and the fact that the discounts are quite low (under $1) means the potential for earning a good amount of cash back is relatively low.
One thing I found interesting, is that when I signed up for a SavingStar account (not the credit card) I was actually offered a 20% cash back bonus for the first three months and then 10% cash back after that.
5% Cash Back On SavingStar Mall Purchases
As mentioned previously, SavingStar has a cash back shopping mall. When you use your SavingStar credit card you get 5% cash back in addition to whatever the mall is currently paying. Not all merchants are eligible, but you can view a full list of those that are here. To save some of you some time, they don’t sell American Express gift cards. Let’s have a look at how this works with an actual offer.
- Their shopping mall is currently offering 4% cash back at Kohl’s. Let’s assume you purchased $100 from Kohl’s and used the SavingStar shopping mall and credit card. You’d earn $4 in cash back from the mall and another $5 from the credit card.
This benefit is much more appealing than the grocery purchase benefit. SavingStar does not offer a highest cash back portal guarantee, so it’s important to see how they stack up against other portals. Below I’ve listed a few different merchants, along with highest rate that cashbackmonitor is showing and the rate SavingStar is showing.
| Cash Back Monitor | SavingsStar | |
|---|---|---|
| KohlÂ’s | 5.00% | 4.00% |
| Nike | 6.00% | 6.00% |
| Newegg | 2.00% | 2.00% |
| Radisson | 5.00% | 5.00% |
| 1-800 flowers | 15.00% | 20.00% |
As you can see they had the same rate apart from one instance in which case they were 1% lower. They were also the highest cash back rate for one merchant (by 5%). I checked a few more and they all seemed to be the same. This means you should be able to get a 3% cash back bonus by using this card for portal purchases instead of a card that earns 2% cash back on all purchases.
Redeeming Your Rewards
Redemption is pretty easy, you can redeem either to your paypal account or to a bank account. There is a minimum payout of $5.
Final Thoughts
The main problem I have with this card is that it doesn’t have a sign up bonus (although you can get an additional 10% on all SavingStar grocery purchases for the first 90 days, but that is pretty minimal at best). If we assume you could get another credit card with at least a $200 cash sign up bonus you’d need to spend $6,667 through the SavingStar shopping portal to break even (assuming the cash back rates are as high as the highest alternative).
Considering that American Expres gift cards are not listed and neither are big online sites like eBay or Amazon I imagine that most people wouldn’t be spending that much through shopping portals. If you do spend a lot on shopping portals, this card might be worth considering.
What are your thoughts on this card? Let us know in the comments below.
Have not used the card yet. Waited 10 days the card never came. Then got a phone call at work, not a good thing, from the bank that is issuing the card telling me my has been compromised. I said I’m no longer interested but they sent me the card anyway.
What does your minimum credit score need to be to get qualified for the American Express Saving Star Credit card ? Also, would you know what the minimum credit score for the Ebates credit card as well? I found out a while ago that I was a victim of ID theft.I’ts finally cleared up , but don’t want to start off on the wrong foot . I also don’t need unnecessary credit inquiries on my credit either.thank you for your help
Kathy
Awesome post, I’ve been trying to increase the average age of my accounts, but don’t want to sacrifice big bonuses. It’s great to find out about unique no annual fee cards that aren’t issued by the major banks.
Glad to see you found it useful! I like talking about these lesser known cards.
I like SavingStar mall. The money post from pending just needs 30 days.
Does it post that quickly with all merchants?
Not for travel. My other purchases are all available for withdraw in 30 days. The website also states I can contact customer care after the 30 day period.