Lafayette FederalCredit Union offers as Mastercard of interest, let’s take a look in this quick review.
Contents
Card Basics
- 50,000 point bonus after $5,000 in spend within the first 90 days
- No annual fee
- Card earns 1x point per $1 spent
- To join you must live in Maryland, Washington, D.C. or Virginia and are an existing member or become a member of American Consumer Council (ACC) (read this post on how to join for free). There are a few other ways to become a member, listed here.
Our Verdict
This card earns CURewards points, so 50,000 points is enough for a $600 gift card or $657.50+ in flights. Overall a very nice bonus and good to see something like this from a smaller issuer. I have no idea how they are with approvals, so please share your experiences in the comments below.
Hat tip to reader Sean B
I literally forgot I even applied for this card 5 years ago. Thankfully was looking for a new card + bonus and found this post again.. as my 56,168 points are set to expire end of the year (12/31/24). FYI these points will expire on the last day of the year, exactly 5 years after they have posted to your account. There is no way to extend them.
Happy to say that I was to purchase a $500 Southwest e-GiftCard for 51,625 points. Will spend a little more on the card so I can reach the 6,625 Point balance required to redeem for a $50 Southwest e-GC. It’s not the greatest redemption.. but not the worst either. The SW gift cards should come in handy for things like early bird check-in, in-flight entertainment or drinks. Things I would otherwise never pay for, but since I fly SW so often thanks to Chase UR points and BWI being close to home.. they will be some extra perks. And $550 of SW travel is much more useful than paying 30K points for some Airpods Pro (which I already have). I do want the Airpods Max.. but they were 85K points lol!!!
The only other decent redemptions were $500 Avis or Delta rentals.. and some of the hotel options. I could find 2-star hotels in DC &Puerto Rico for 10K/night.. 3-star for 20K/night.. but to be honest they are places you could probably book on hotels.com for really cheap, plus good luck changing that itinerary if your plans change. Since I dont have any current travel plans.. SW GC’s never expire.. and Costco regularly sells SW $500 GC’s for $449.. its always a good idea to stockpile them for travel. I also love that SW still does not charge bag, or flight change/cancellation fees.. so any time I have domestic travel planned I can buy a non-stop ticket way in advance and just change the flight if it gets any cheaper.. or my plans change.
Avis does have cheap rentals through Costco.. Im not sure if they accept gift cards for payment though. I find Delta to be the most expensive carrier out of the IAD/BWI/DCA area.. so I never use it for personal travel.
Use promo code “consumer” to join the ACC for free
This is nationwide.
“We extend eligibility to all members of the Home Ownership Financial Literacy Council (HOFLC). ” One time membership fee of $10.
LFCU now has more options to redeem gift cards:
AirBnb, Delta Airlines, American Airlines, Southwest, Uber, Avis
Redemption rate is about .8 cents per point
Applied in February 2021, joined ACC, MD resident. Paid the $8.00 fee, then deposited $100 into the savings account. All of this occurred same day. A few days later I applied for a Platinum Credit Card and received an email stating ” PENDING”. Then a request for last two years tax returns. I submitted almost immediately and a day later I had another message in my online message indicator box requesting copy of most recent mortgage statement. Then at this point my case status went from REVIEW to APPROVED same day. Yes, it’s a real pain in the %^& to submit all these documents but in the end it’s worth it. If you are transparent with them they are transparent with you. Service representative disclosed they only perform one hard pull good for 30 days and if you apply for other loans etc they still consider you under that initial pull if within the 30 days. Another important factor here is I have an almost 800 credit score, 200k a year income verifiable and still it’s rather easy to obtain credit cards around 25k however you must prove your ability to manage your finances and the credit line increases will come automatically. Good Luck!
This card is a joke. As others have mentioned they require an absurd amount of info and there is a lot of back-and-forth to get the account opened in the first place. The even bigger issue is that the rewards options are terrible and it looks like straight up false advertising on their part to claim 50K rewards is worth $600 in GC’s.
They only offer two Gift card options: Williams Sonoma and some sort of donate-money-to-a-charity GC. Here are the rates for a selection of their options:
$100 CharityChoice eGift Card = 12,000 points
$50 Williams-Sonoma® Gift Card = 7,700 points
Bang & Olufsen Beoplay M3 Compact Wireless Speaker = 42,000
JBL Flip 5 Portable Bluetooth® Speaker = 17,000
Samsung Galaxy Watch 46mm – Silver/Black = 65,000
Apple TV 4K 32GB = 37,000
Apple iPad mini WiFi 64GB = 70,000
I would recommend skipping this bonus.
If you are self employed, you need to submit your entire tax return.
I found the process to be far too intrusive for just a credit card. Sorry I ever applied for it. Canceled my application out of the frustration of dealing with their intricate and slow process and finding out the level of financial detail needed.
They don’t return phone calls so it takes a long time to get anything done.
I was successful and just received my mastercard! I actually do live/work in DC, so it’s possible I was approved because I looked more legit than others applying from across the country using the ACC as an “In.” I also wrote something in the notes section about wanting to be a part of a credit union, that I had been a member at one over a decade ago and wanted to be a member of one again. Not sure how much weight was given to both those things, but those are the two things that may have been different about my application, and gotten me approved.
Figured I would try again since maybe this bank may have been inundated last year and now had a cool down period of a year. Application under 2.0s name deposit account was ignored last year. I applied this month for a deposit account and for a card. Deposit account was denied based on the number of recent accounts -maybe 2/6 and 5/12. Card was denied due to many revolving accounts.
I also tried to call and recon and one of the representatives said to call in after applying to put notes on the account. Such as multiple accounts to handle multiple goals and businesses.
So far no one has mentioned successfully receiving the card (several mentions of initial approvals later revoke due to having lots of cards). Did anyone manage to get the card? If so, how many cards do you have/have you applied for recently?