Citi Trifecta: Better Than Chase Trifecta?!

their stock is underperforming but they're doubling down in the u.s today we're looking at one of the best trifectas for normal people who want to maximize their rewards but hate the idea of jumping through hoops we'll look at the strengths some of the weaknesses and some other considerations in the meta before we dive into all of that though big favor is to jump through the hoop of giving this a thumbs up as much as i hate doing that it does help with discovery and if you are new here consider subscribing all right so why is the setup worth your time one of the big reasons is that it's relatively affordable for most of the setups out there you're looking at 550 to upwards of 1100 and here it's only 95. one of the other advantages that i'll probably hope throughout the video is that you cover a lot of ground number three is that one of the biggest expenses gas is actually accounted for for most other setups you either need to have a business card in order to get multipliers for gas or you need to deal with rotating categories which are fine but it's just not as efficient with that said let's look into the setup and starting off we have the city double cache which is going to be your enforcer so it's going to enforce that you get at least two percent back on all of your transactions one percent when you spend and one percent when you pay off the card the second player is going to be the city custom cash which gets you five percent back on your highest spend category at up to 500 every billing period categories cover a lot of real life things which i really like so gas stations grocery stores drug stores and also select transit if you're more about discretionaries then you have select travel restaurants select streaming and also live entertainment if you're about improvement then you have fitness clubs and also home improvement so five on up to 500 for the highest spend category anything else and anything beyond that is going to be one percent the city premiere is the point guard that makes everything work this is the one card here that has the annual fee of 95 but you also have no foreign transaction fees and it does a lot more than you think you get three eggs back on the big three of gas stations grocery stores and also restaurants you also get three eggs back for air travel and hotels and one x back everywhere else if you or someone that doesn't care about travel then three x back is still three percent given that it's a pretty solid option for team cashback and people who maybe want to run a one card set up if you're into either sweet spot or aspirational travel then this card ends up unlocking the potential of those other cards it makes it so that the cashback that those cards earn will become thank you points which can then be transferred out to partners meaning that it has a lot more value i've talked about this in other videos but when you do these transfers you're looking to get about two cents per point in this case three x would be six percent return on spend the two percent of the double cash would really be two x back meaning that it's upwards of four percent back the five percent from the custom cash is five x which is upwards of ten percent the two cents per point is not a fixed thing it's based off the prices that you would otherwise have to pay that's usually why it works so well for business and first because the prices are pretty expensive if economy costs thirty thousand points then business will often cost sixty thousand so two times as many points which might not be worth it for some people but the menu price might be five or ten times as much that's the core of your trifecta but i would recommend adding a glue guy with the rewards plus we don't really care about the multipliers or a lot of the other benefits so the roundup feature is nice but for our purpose unless you do a lot of five dollar and less transactions that's not really going to matter the reason the rewards plus is interesting is due to the 10 rebate that you get just by having the card and using the points with any of your other city thank you cards so for example if you redeem your points for cash back or if you transfer them out to partners then you're getting 10 back just by virtue of having this card so if you do 50 then you're getting 5k back it is limited to 100 000 points per year so only 10 000 points rebate but that's still not bad just by holding a card that doesn't have an annual fee the big brain question is what would happen if you have let's say two three four of these do they stack from the research that i've done it doesn't but it's still a cool idea side note if you do want to learn more about these cards or pretty much any other cards out there and you want to support the channel we do have links on our website ask savvy.com and also down below in the description box it's a huge way to support the channel so thank you guys in advance the city trifecta and potentially plus one is my recommendation for the no-nonsense setup so if you're professional if you have a newborn if you're someone who just doesn't like hoops then this is your setup one of the big benefits of the setup is that you have a ton of optionality so if you decide to move into a different setup maybe go back one or go forward one to a more expensive one then you can just downgrade the city premiere into a second or into a third custom cache with a lot of other setups you don't really have that choice you have to do a keep or cancel decision due to the annual fees or maybe you can downgrade it but you're still paying an annual fee and it's just a lot harder to stomach it's also great for gas which i keep harping on because that's a real pain point for people yes there have been other issues that have offered gas as maybe a higher category but most of them don't really keep it because they just can't justify it with a big bank they can actually choose to lose money here and make money elsewhere if you're a credit union or startup offering this it's just harder to justify it long term you use it for marketing and then you cut it off afterwards all right so now that i've sold you on the setup and why it makes so much sense let's talk about some of the weaknesses number one is that it's no frills but that's a double edged sword with most of the other big cards the thing that we see them adding is lounge access and all these other cool perks for people doing cool things were you at artbezel were you skiing in tahoe were you at that party so if you're that person then this setup is not that interesting with that said though especially for lounges the easy solution is just to add another card specifically for that purpose there's a few options out there that are 95 and you get maybe 10 visits it pretty much just becomes a math equation on whether a card makes sense and you can add and remove it as necessary kind of like adding insurance to something if you are worried that leads into number two which is the lack of insurances back in the day a few years ago city was the king of protections they had all the delay cancellation lost protections that you can think of that you'll see across the screen the city prestige also had the best in class trip delay protection at three hours compared to everyone six hours with this current setup and the iteration of benefits you would either need to buy it separately or maybe don't have any protection alternatively similar to the first point you can just add a card for this and use that specifically for that purpose i would say that it's pretty normal to add something like the chase sapphire preferred given the 50 effective annual fee so you pretty much just use that card for its primary cdw that would normally cost you 25 dollars per day and the car covers it and you also get the other protections on a note of travel number three is that the city trifecta is a bit weak for normal economy travelers so even though 3x can be potentially worth 6 return on spend if you are more economy focused it's probably gonna look more like three percent with a lot of other setups like chase 3x is 4.5 and this is very easy it's just booking through their portal yes there's the idea of sweet spots but either it might not apply or you don't want to do the research for example i can tell you that if you want to go to hawaii transfer your thank you points to virgin in order to book delta and that's a pretty good sweet spot but most of you are probably not going to do the like work to research how that works okay so you can tell that the weaknesses very much center around travel the benefit is that they're all relatively addressable or they might be non-factors lounges being a pretty good example of this so for me i don't mind going to the airport early because i have my macbook anyways and i can just do work do some emails but for a lot of people they just prefer going to the airport last minute moving into the last part let's look at the meta game and how this can tie into the grand scheme of things regardless of how you slice it i think it's pretty hard to hate on the setup you have so much optionality in terms of upgrades and downgrades and the fact that it flows pretty well once you do chase you move into maybe barclays u.s bank capital one the harder to get issuers and city and bank of america are right there all of these issuers for the early and mid game have repeatable bonuses so generally two years with that said though i think there's three big questions are elephants in the room the first one is what about the prestige card so this is a card that previously existed and i guess technically still exists if you have it but it's not open to new applicants and you can't product change to it in its heyday it was one of the best if not the best travel card out there in terms of benefits and protections and also multipliers we talked about a lot of weaknesses but do they plan to relaunch a card that covers those weaknesses or is this a card that's never going to return or if it does return is it dramatically and materially different the second elephant is why is there not a business add-on to this setup so for pretty much everyone else you can add additional business cards that will focus on categories like office supplies and especially advertisement this is a good and bad thing because yes they don't have it but they have the potential to add it also a reminder that i feel like i need to make is that you can use personal cards for business expenses you can still deduct it against your business as expenses there's no problem here the third elephant in question and the more interesting one to me is how is city going to make money so yes they quit the rat race and that makes sense for them but how are they going to maximize what they're doing are they going to stick in this niche and if they do how do they turn a profit from it with a lot of the other expensive setups and cards they're either trying to cross out you to other products so maybe mortgages or other loans or they are buying credits for pennies on the dollar in effect they're a marketing firm that has a very high market clientele the interesting thing too is that what we're seeing on the card level we're also seeing on the corporate company level city ceo is reorganizing strategy for 2022 as profits dropped 26 percent one interesting thing i found is that they're either selling off or winning down some of their international pieces so for example for south korea as well as australia they realized that it didn't make sense it sounds like they were spread a bit too thin but the interesting thing for us is that they are doubling down branches in their top six us metro markets maybe i'm crazy but for us as consumers i feel like there's a bigger end game and something big is coming overall i feel like they're pretty well positioned and there's a lot of play of their cards so i'm looking forward to it again if you want to learn about cards we have links on the website askstabby.com and also down below in the description box my question for you is what are your thoughts on this setup what do you like what don't you like and is it a setup you would either run or are you currently running it let me know and everyone else know in the comments down below if you're still watching feel free to put a basketball emoji down below so i'll heart it and let me know if you are okay with basketball analogies i feel like i use those a lot all right mandy is putting her shoes on and i think we need to leave but hope you guys liked it see you guys next time [Music] [Laughter] [Music] you

Channel: Ask Sebby

Views: 67,513

Keywords: asksebby, ask sebby, citi trifecta vs chase trifecta, best gas card, how to save on gas, citi premier, citi custom cash, citi double cash, citi trifecta explained, citi credit card tier list, citi prestige vs chase sapphire, chase sapphire preferred, best travel credit cards, cash back credit cards

Id: KoZUUEwQexA

Length: 10min 52sec (652 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 24 2022