Increasing Citibank Thank You Points
Over the last year or so there has been several promos with Citibank to earn money for opening up an EZ checking account. Also, if you link your account up at the thank you network you earn points each month if you have 3 or more “products.” If you have an account open you might want to consider this strategy to increase the amount of thank you points you earn each month. If not its probably best to wait until they have another promo for new customers and get $100 to $200 for that.
Before I get started note that it seems as though Citibank likes to make hard inquiries for every new product or account, so be aware of that if you want to open up new ones.
The amount of points you earn each month is based on the type of checking account you have and how many “products” you have. Midway down the page here is a listing of what qualifies as a product and how many points each account gets. In addition to what you’d expect for savings, checking, cds, etc you will notice that direct deposit, bill pay, and having a debit card count as products. So if you have a debit card, pay bills, and have direct deposit that is already worth the equivalent of 75 cents each month for an EZ account, which is what I have been earning until recently. Add in their new esavings account and its $1.50 per month. If you wanted to do more you could add a cd and checking plus(overdraft protection for $5 fee per year). Only caveat is the credit hits.
However, if you switch to The Citibank Account, your points more than double. The main requirement here is that you keep a balance of $6000 in your linked accounts. While the esavings is at 4.5% apy which isn’t the leader, it is still pretty decent. Up until now your probably thinking its not worth the hassel but the interesting thing is that the balances on certain linked credit cards from citi can count towards the total. So if you have large sums of 0% Balance Transfer money out you can link the accounts and not have to deposit the 6k to avoid service fees.
So with the checking, esavings, and doing bill pay and direct deposit you can net $48 dollars per year or if you wanted to add a cd (500 minimum) right now at 4.7% apy and checking plus you would net $96 $91 after the fee. You should have a debit card from when you opened the checking account and you can set up regular deposits from ing and regular bill pays to satisfy the other requirements. Paypal also counts toward the dd requirement. If you dont mind the hassel to set it up and the credit hits you can net some nice change.