The Offer
Capital One is sending out a snailmail targeted offer on the Spark Cash card:
- Signup for the Capital One Spark Cash card and get the following bonuses:
- $1,000 bonus after spending $10,000 within 3 months
- an additional $1,500 bonus after spending an additional $40,000 within 6 months ($50k spend total)
Card Details
- Card earns 2%/2x on all purchases
- Annual fee of $59 is waived first year
- No foreign transaction fees
Our Verdict
The cards always earn 2%/2x on all spend, and you’ll get that on all your spend, on top of the bonus. In the end, you’ll land up with $3,500 after spending $50,000 ($2,500 bonus + $1k from regular 2%/2x earn) which is a 7% return on spend.
My friend @utahshane got this offer via snailmail, not sure how widely this was sent out. The public offer is similar, but $500 less – we wrote about it here. Keep in mind that the using the public offers have the advantage of being able to get the Miles card instead of the Cash card which is advantageous to some due to the newly added transfer partners.
This targeted offer also has a lower annual fee of $59 (vs. $95) – the fee is waived the first year, regardless.
Has Incomm bought BB and Serve from AMEX? Shutdowns don’t happen anymore? Pls confirm
Also can I reapply for BB if shutdown before?
FYI: I’ve had this card for a couple of years now and have yet to pay an annual fee. When it posts I just call customer service and ask if it can be waived. I put about $10k/year on this card and they’ve waived the fee each time I’ve asked.
Are you able to use someone else’s offer. My father just got it, and why should it go to waste;)
Yes.
How do you apply for a targeted offer?
Good luck to anyone applying for this and thinking the bonus will actually pay out. Now that Capital One has set a precedent of retroactively changing the terms of a promotion on their 360 Money Market Savings, what stops them from doing the same on other promotions? They don’t appear to respect CFPB complaints, so that leaves… small claims court? I guess at the $2,500 level that could be worth it — if you can also claim damages for your time spent chasing them.
Is that card really worth all of that spending?
as I said before re: Cap1.. good luck if you try to ms on card. They wont let you at all. Endless FA even on a 505.95 charge.. requiring you to resend them SS #/elec bill etc. had to do that on my Spark last year for a 500.00 bonus. Then after all that got cancel notice. Did get the 567.00 bonus (with 2%) but lost over 230.00 in cancelled bonus. As poster above stated..they are weeding out MSers. And time spent on phone clearing FA can take up to 40 minutes..plus 3 HP..lousy.
Why don’t you split the tender and put 95 cents on a debit card
I think you’re doing something wrong there. I charge $10k at GCM, get a fraud alert via text, respond and clear via text, resubmit order to GCM. Once that’s done, the next $10k goes through without any alert.
It’s a business card. They expect big charges, not $505.95 eight to fifteen times a day.
If you are LOL/24 ignore this mailer. Despite being ‘targeted’ all you will earn for your efforts is three hard pulls. You are not likely to get the card.
Cap1 is a profit driven bank whose main source of revenue is credit cards. It takes them several years to earn back the cost of a new card holder acquisition and the only way they make money is if you hold on and use the the card for many years. They lose money on gamers and they are doing all the can to weed us out.
So if you want to get a Cap1 card, do it early in the game, just like you would a Chase card.
Source: Conversation with the new client acquisition marketing manager at Cap1 in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia.
Looking at various DPs, my impression is that they won’t approve anyone who has lots of cards and has $0 balance reported on all such cards. My understanding is that pretty much all churners play the tricks to ensure 0% utilisation, and take it for granted, even without ever acknowledging it.
I carry up to 30% on some cards on 0% APR, and up to 10% on my overall utilisation, and got a pleasant surprise by being approved for the 75k Venture offer a few weeks ago, at 9/24, and for a very competitive CL as well (think CSR level).
BTW, in my experience, Capital One has excellent customer service as well. If you get any transactions declined or whatnot, you can easily score statement credits; I’ve tried that with Chase or Barclays, and they’d never gave in, even if it was clearly their fault that transactions are declined, they wouldn’t even go as far as to acknowledge that it’s even their fault at all. Plus, it seems that with Chase, they not only don’t care about wasting your time by declining transactions, their fraud line is 100% outsourced, even if you call in during business hours and on a Visa Signature product. I really hate dealing with Chase, TBH, you can never expect anything of value from any CS interaction, IME.
Rubbish. Cap1 is no Chase.
I’m struggling to believe Cap1 is going to be happy when people get this card and just put $5k/mo in Simon orders onto it for the first year. Maybe that’s the price of doing business because I’ve never considered one of their products before?
Does anyone have experience with this level of MS at Cap1? I can’t seem to find many DPs on their tolerance level, or stories about clawbacks/RAT teams, etc.
I’ve had no problem ms ing the sparks cash and miles card. They seem ms friendly to me
Your WM still allows you to MO $5k a month? That’s impressive. All the ones here have been pretty much shutdown. My HH did $100k a month (with P2-P4, Simon, and Legacy Ink + office).
Meaningful MS will get you shutdown. But most people are pikers so shouldn’t be a problem
I’ll say that in my own experience, Capital One was quite willing to waive the AF year after year, even scheduling a time to call me for the next year to waive it again.
How much yearly spend were you putting on it?
This card isn’t even worth having after the signup bonus anyways. You can get many 2% cards tha don’t require 3 Hard pulls and no AF
If you can get the AF waived like in the comment above, then it’s a great 2% card with generally high limits.
The hard pulls are irrelevant once you already have the card, which you’d presumably get for the signup bonus.
My thoughts exactly
I’ve never paid an AF on Cap1 Spark in the last 8 yrs. Always call them up and they waive the AF.
While they’ve never called me to waive the fee, they have always waived it for me each year when I call in. It’s a great card for all my non-bonus category business spending.
Any suggestions on *how* to generate that much spend?
Does Plastiq still allow you pay the mortgage with a credit card?
Depends if this is a MasterCard or Visa
It’s a visa
Buying groups
I ms 20k a month without thinking. Very friendly Walmart with bb and serve
with 20k loads of BB and serve, quite lucky you seem to be, not faced shutdown. How do you spend so much loaded from BB and Serve and where? Mind sharing???
Leave a balance of like $10 on the bb.
shutdowns have been basically nonexistent since incom bought them. I still cycle. VGC and WM
My BB got shut down like most of people here. Now Incomm bought it I wonder if I can reopen it?
I wanna know about it too If I can reopen a new account (with same info) with BB SINCE I was shutdown last year
Own a business.
Bottle service NYE with your favorite 40 friends.
Underwithold and pay a lot of 1040ES?