Should I buy a Citi Custom Cash Card?

Citi is an advertising partner.

Cashback cards can be a valuable addition to your wallet if you’re interested in getting some of your money back. Citi Custom Cash℠ Card breaks the traditional cashback form by offering rewards that match how you spend.

This card gives you 5 percent cash back on your highest eligible spend category in every billing cycle, up to the first $500 spent. All other purchases earn unlimited 1% cashback.

The good news is that Citi tracks your spending and automatically applies 5 percent to your spending category. If you’re looking for a new cashback card, here’s how to decide whether or not to buy a Citi Custom Cash Card.

When is Citi Custom Cash Card beneficial?

When you want to be rewarded for minimal effort

As discussed earlier, Citi Custom Cash automatically earns 5 percent on the category you spend the most in each billing cycle. Depending on your spending, the following categories may be your highest category:

• Restaurants
• Filling stations (excluding gas purchased from warehouse clubs)
• Grocery stores
• Choose your trip (including flights and hotels)
• Choose public transport (including car rentals)
• Select streaming services
• Pharmacies
• Home Stores
• Fitness clubs
• Live Entertainment

The Citi Custom Cash Card is a flexible category card designed to tailor your rewards to your spending habits. For example, you can get 5% cashback on groceries within one month if you spend the most money on it, but the next month you can get 5% cashback on meals.

Let’s say you take $500 a month from the grocery store. If this is consistently your highest spending category, you could be earning $25 every month for a total of $300 a year in cash. It also doesn’t include everything you earn at the 1 percent cash reward rate.

Either way, you only need to spend $500 per month in one of the qualifying categories (easy to do for many cardholders) to max out 5 percent, and since your top category is automatically selected, you can earn solid rewards with little effort.

When you want to receive cashback for travel fares

Citi Custom Cash can still come in handy for domestic travel. A 5% reward rate may apply to select trips, including flights, hotels, cruise lines and purchases from travel agencies.

The map can be even more useful once you’ve arrived at your domestic destination. When exploring San Francisco (or another major American city), you can spend money on ferries, subways, bridge tolls, parking, car rentals, and more. They all fall under the category of select transport, so your Citi Custom Cash can benefit from all of these purchases while you travel. And since the card has no annual fee, you don’t have to worry about it lowering the value of your rewards.

When should you not use the Citi Custom Cash Card?

When you often travel the world

Citi Custom Cash charges a 3 percent foreign transaction fee, so we do not recommend actively using this card while on holiday abroad.

The card is technically a cashback card, but rewards with Citi ThankYou points. As with many other credit card rewards programs, you can book rides directly on the Citi ThankYou portal to earn ongoing rewards in Citi Custom Cash to use on your rides. However, given the $500 spending limit and the fact that international travel is usually more expensive, we recommend that you purchase a card that brings higher rewards and does not limit your spending.

you might consider Citi Premier® Cardwhich earns 3 times more points for restaurants, supermarkets, gas stations, flights and hotels and does not charge a transaction fee abroad.

When you spend more than $500 a month

In fact, after paying for groceries, gas, meals, and other purchases (online shopping, streaming subscriptions, etc.), it’s hard to spend just $500 a month, even for one person. In fact, our average estimated spending per year is $15,900 ($1,325 per month), so if your reports for the last six months or a year are around that amount, you should keep shopping.

With that said, if you find the $500 cashback cap on Citi Custom Cash to be restrictive rather than generous, you should choose a different rewards card. There are many other cards with unlimited rewards and no spending limits that will give you great cash back on your purchases.

bottom line

The Citi Custom Cash Card may appeal to you if you are looking for maximum cash rewards with minimum effort. Because this card applies a 5 percent reward based on how you spend, all you really have to do is shop as you normally would. Of course, you can still be strategic in what you take. And you might consider pairing it with a flat rate cashback rewards card to get 1.5 percent or more cash back on purchases that are not eligible for the 5 percent reward rate.

Rebecca Lake is a freelance writer and blogger specializing in personal finance. Her areas of expertise include credit cards, debt management and personal money management. She began writing for CreditCards.com in 2018, where she writes articles on topics ranging from credit score management to travel rewards and small business loans. She has been quoted on the blogs Father’s, Consolidated Credit, Grow Out of Acorns, and the Haven Life blog, among others.