The Fidelity Rewards Visa Signature card is popular as it offers 2% cash back on all purchases and has done so for a long time. Previously you needed a balance of $50+ to receive your cash back. This has now been reduced to $25. It’s a small but positive improvement. Not exactly sure when this change was first made.
Hat tip to reader CT
Does anyone know which credit report Fidelity pulls for this card? thanks
I was approved for the card, and using it now. It wasn’t added to the list of accounts at the Credit Bureaus. Does anyone else have this experience?
About time. Also a handy card for when you don’t care to tax your brain about optimizing to hit 2.13% back or whatever marginal increase available.
Finally, my gosh!
Never could get Elan bank to work with quicken
I actually have two of these 2% cards, one personal and one for business. Have used them for years with no complaints, the points post quickly and 2% straight CB offers convenience.
The 1% foreign transaction fee isn’t horrible, as some cards have 3% fee. Basically this card gets you 1% CB overseas on the Visa network, not bad!
Now, the question is: if you contribute the cash to a retirement account like an IRA, does that count as part of annual contribution or “interest”?
Part of annual contribution.
I called and verified it counts as a contribution. Withdraw it any time tax free
It’s worth mentioning that the PenFed Power Cash Rewards Visa pays 2% cash back with no FTF if you’re an Honors Advantage member. I think I heard that there’s no, or a very low, minimum amount for redemption, too.
To expand on that. There’s no minimum that I know of, and you can request your cash back at any time (takes about a week to go through). I have mine set up to auto-deposit to my checking account every month.
Normally the card is a 1.5% cash back card. You can get an additional 0.5% by being active duty military, honorably discharged, or by having an Access America checking account. You need to maintain a $500 balance to keep the account fee free (which is what I do).
I just looked at my account and I redeemed for $30 on May 27, so it looks like it’s been available for a least a month.
There was an indirect reference to it in my April 8 statement, so at least that far back.
“Enroll in Automatic Redemption and once you reach 2,500 Points, at the end of each month your Points will be automatically redeemed as cash back into your eligible Fidelity accounts.”
As soon as I saw that I checked the Rewards section on the website and saw that the redemption threshold was now $25. (I redeem manually, so needed to be sure it applied to that as well.)
Now that giftcardmall is dead, I don’t know what to use this card for.
Estimated tax payments / tax payments! It’s a fraction of a percent (1.89% fee, 2% cash back) but hey, it adds up, especially if you make a lot of 1040-ES payments.
Could use a 2% mileage card like the BBP for better expected value, but at that point you’re essentially buying points at the 1.89% fee.
I use BBP for most expenses that don’t earn bonus categories like taxes. I don’t max out the 50k annual limit anyway.
I’ve considered using my BBP for tax payments but it’s never made sense. My rough math was that it would take 45k USD in payments to generate 90k points, which is a round-trip business class trip to Asia. However the cost of that is ~$850 in CC usage fees, which when combined with fuel surcharges + other taxes doesn’t really work out.
The one exception I’d make is for meeting minimum spend requirements, where the expected value can vastly exceed the 1.89% additional cost.
Still too high for a 2% card.
This is my every other spend card when I don’t use Amex BCP for grocery(6%), Costco Citi for gas(4%), restaurant(3%) or Costco(2%). My CF usage varies depending on category each quarter.
Been very happy with this card, it’s seemlessly linked to a Fidelity acct that I had opened for another bonus, I think it was a $100 Amazon card. You can set auto redemption so that once you hit the threshold(which is now 2500 points as mentioned) it just automatically moves the points into your Fidelity cash account where I can ACH it over to a savings or checking account. It’s an extra step to cash out but not really a big deal, just go in there every few months and move it out. Fidelity VISA web interface isn’t quite as slick as Chase or Amex but it’s manageable.
You can set up automatic withdrawals too.