Credit Karma is now offering users a ‘best offer guarantee‘ for credit card applications. If you apply for a credit card through Credit Karma and then find a higher welcome bonus on the same card within 30 days of being approved then you may be eligible to receive an Amazon e-giftcard for the dollar value difference. Seems interesting so let’s take a look at the fine print.
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Fine Print
- Point/mile valuations. Points/miles will be valued at 1¢ each. This seems generous for hotel cards such as IHG, but not so much for flexible points such as Chase Ultimate Rewards.
- What cards are eligible? Cards must have a ‘best offer guarantee’ badge at the time of your application to be eligible. The offer also needs to either be publicly accessible, or a targeted offer that clearly displays your name. It isn’t clear if it matters if the minimum spend requirement is different or not.
- Filing a claim. You must snail mail in your claim (details here).
Our Verdict
Having to file a claim via snail mail sucks and is almost designed to make sure the offer is never actually used. Sometimes offers can be live for a few hours and then disappear, I suspect Credit Karma knows this and that’s why the make the claim process so slow. I wasn’t able to actually find any cards that offer the best offer guarantee badge (update, shows up on cards in the ‘My Recommendations’ bit). It’ll also be interesting to see how this works in conjunction with issuers matching bonuses as well. For example recently there was a 80,000 + $50 IHG offer, that then went up to 100,000 + $50. If you receive the match from Credit Karma you’d receive an additional $200 Amazon gift card and readers have also successfully matched to that bigger offer. This has the potential to be absolutely massive, but will depend on what cards/offers this is available for and how hard it is to get claims approved/denied.
