Citi allows you to get the sign up bonus on a credit card more than once, but the requirement is that you cannot get the bonus again if you have or had that card open or closed within the past 18 months. If I do a product change to a different card, does Citi consider the original card closed?
For example, let’s say I product changed the Citi Hilton Reserve to the Citi Hilton Visa Signature in January of 2013. Would I be eligible to get the bonus on that card again? Or do I need to close the Citi Hilton Visa Signature and wait 18 months?
Great question, I always recommend doing a product change to a no annual fee card where possible. The reason I recommend this is when you do a product change on your credit report it’ll show the original opening date and the trade line (credit card) will continue to age. This increases your average age of accounts and helps to improve your FICO score over the long run.
While Citi will continue to report the original opening date to the credit bureaus, for their own internal systems they will consider the original card closed and the card you’re product changing to to be opened. In your case this means that you’ll be eligible for the Citi Hilton Reserve card again, but you won’t be able to get the bonus on the Visa signature card. If you wanted to get the bonus on that card, you’d need to cancel it (or product change it to something else) and wait 18 months.
This means that if you doing product changes with Citi you’ll really want to do them on cards that either: don’t have sign up bonuses or have sign up bonuses you don’t care about. In terms of cards with no sign up bonus, I’d recommend the Citi Double Cash (2% everywhere) and the Citi Dividend (5% rotating categories). Both have no annual fee and no sign up bonus (although it was possible to briefly get a bonus on the double cash).
