In the post What’s in Greg’s Wallet? 2024 Edition, I explained that I have three Custom Cash cards which I use exclusively for grocery purchases. Since these cards earn 5x on the category you spend the most, but only up to $500 per billing cycle, I can maximize earnings by using them only at grocery stores and only up to $500 each per month. Instead of keeping track of this myself, I used the Curve card to manage my Custom Cash spend. Whenever I spent more than $500 on a single Custom Cash card, I used Curve’s “Go Back in Time” feature to move the charge to another Custom Cash card. That was easy. But now, in the US, Curve is dead.
I could keep using Custom Cash cards for grocery spend, but I’d have to be more careful than before not to go over $500 in a billing cycle with a single card. One way to do that is to buy $500 grocery store gift cards at my local supermarket once per month with each Custom Cash card (or with only one or two if I find that I’m not spending $1,500 per month at grocery stores).
Maybe that would be worth doing if 5x was way better than I could do with other cards. But it’s not. My wife has an Amex Gold card which earns 4x at US grocery stores on up to $25,000 spend per year. An easy 4x sounds better to me than a “work for it” 5x. So, when my Curve card died, I added my wife’s Gold card to my Apple Pay wallet and started using that for all grocery spend. Problem solved!
But now it looks like the Gold card is going to be revamped into a more expensive and more complicated coupon book than before. And while I would probably do well with the added $50 every six months Resy credits, I’m not a fan of complicating my life with more coupon-ish credits to deal with.
So now what? Short term, I’ll wait and see what really happens with the Gold card. There’s a chance that our next renewal will be at the current $250 annual fee. If that happens, we’ll keep the card for another year and I’ll keep using the Gold card for grocery spend until late 2025.
If and when we eventually cancel or downgrade the Gold card, I’ll consider other options. I could go back to my Custom Cash cards and do the work. Another option is to use my Altitude Reserve card since it earns 3x on all mobile wallet payments. Alternatively, I could get the Citi Strata Premier card which earns 3x at grocery stores and several other categories. The problem is that I also have the Citi Prestige card and wouldn’t want another annual fee in my Citi ecosystem. Another option is for my wife to apply for the Capital One SavorOne card. It has no annual fee and earns 3% on dining, entertainment, select streaming services, and grocery stores. Even better, since my wife has a Capital One card that earns Miles (the Venture X card in her case), she could transfer the SavorOne rewards to her VentureX and then the rewards would be transferable to airline and hotel partners. At the moment, I think the SavorOne option is best. But the credit card space changes rapidly. The best option now may not be the best option if/when we ditch the Gold card. When the time comes, we’ll see.
The post How I pay for groceries now that Curve is dead appeared first on Frequent Miler. Frequent Miler may receive compensation from CHASE. American Express, Capital One, or other partners.