5% Back with Suntrust Credit Card – New (Weak) 5x Option

Update: Our full in depth review of this card can be found here.

Suntrust Bank recently launched the Suntrust Cashback Mastercard which offers a 5% category bonus for the first 12 months.

Overview

Link

• No annual fee

Signup Bonus

• No typical signup bonus
• Earns 5% back on gas and grocery purchases for the first 12 months from account opening. After that, it reverts to the regular 2% gas/grocery rate.

Standard Rewards

• 2% back on gas and grocery purchases up to $6,000 per calendar year, after that 1%.
• 1% on all other purchases, unlimited.

Bonus Rewards

The card also offers a 10% bonus for all rewards redeemed into a Suntrust checking, savings, or money market account. For example, if you redeem $50 you’ll get $55 into your account.

Bear in mind that Suntrust often offers a bonus for opening a checking account. Currently, there’s an offer of $150 for opening an account.

Reward Redemption

There are four options for redeeming rewards:

• Statement credit
• Check
• Transfer to Suntrust checking, savings, or money market account
• Transfer to other financial institution

Only the transfer to a Suntrust account is eligible to receive the 10% bonus.

Minimum reward redemption is $25.

Redemptions made to a Suntrust account or an account at a different financial institution needs to be done over the phone by calling 800-477-9702. Check and statement credit redemptions can be done online.

Geographic Availability

Like all Suntrust products, this card is only available to those in the following states: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Florida, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington D.C., and West Virginia.

Credit Pull

Based on old data on Creditboards, it appears that they pull Equifax exclusively. This is a good thing since for many people this is the least-used credit bureau.

Credit Score

We don’t know what credit score is necessary for this card.

One thing to keep in mind is that in general Suntrust will often ask for pay stubs and/or tax returns to prove income. We’ve seen one report of this with this particular credit card as well.

Our Verdict

5% is good and 5.5% is even better, but they’ve limited the bonus to just $6,000 in spend during the first 12 months which will max out at $300/$330.

Aside from the initial 5-5.5% category rate, the card isn’t particularly interesting since you could earn 2% back on all of your purchases. This card does get you 2.2% on gas and groceries if you redeem into a Suntrust account – interesting little advantage – but you may have Barclay’s Arrival which does the same thing. In any case, it’s limited to $6,000 per year which maxes out at $12 per year. And it’s in the gas and grocery categories which are often bonus categories on many credit cards.

Is it worth it for the initial bonus?

I’m giving this one a miss. If this was a recurring bonus – similar to the Chase Freedom category bonus – I think it would be worth it. Since it’s only a one-time bonus it really isn’t great.

The Math

If you would have put the $6000 gas/grocery purchases on a standard 2% cashback credit card, you would have gotten $120 in rewards. This means that the Suntrust card is giving you an additional $180/$210 depending on whether you have a Suntrust account.

$210 isn’t bad in the cash signup bonus world, with the added advantage that it will probably be just an Equifax pull too. Bear in mind, however, that the $210 is for $6,000 in spend, which is quite a high threshold for such a bonus. Additionally, it’s eating up gas/grocery spend which is often a category bonus on other credit cards.

[Related: Thoughts On Calculating Manufactured Spending Costs]

As always, you can see our full list of 5% credit cards here.

HT: MaximizingMoney