It’s already been another year with the Citi Premier Card.
As such, the one-year mark is when an important decision must be made about the card: keep it or cancel it withing 30 days after the $95 annual fees hits?
Call Results: My Retention Offers for the Citi Premier Card (2020):
Before making any “keep or cancel” decision, I’ve found it wise to always call the card company and see if there are any retention offers available.
I called Citi customer service at the number on the back of the card.
I quickly got a representative, told him I was trying to determine if I should keep the card and that I also held the Citi Prestige card, so I wasn’t sure if I wanted to pay $95 to keep this particular card.
I then asked him if there were any fee waivers or retention offers available to me.
He immediately came back and said, “yes, there are two offers” before reading aloud the following:
Offer #1: Citi would “allow me” to use 7,500 of my own Citi Thank You points to pay for the $95 annual fee.
Offer #2: Citi would give me 5,000 Thank You points after spending $1,000 in the next 90 days.
Note: I had about $1,000+ worth of spending on this card during year the last year.
To Keep Or Cancel?
I actually find decent value in this card as it’s one of the “go-to cards” in my arsenal due to the wide-ranging bonus categories it has (especially gas and entertainment categories).
In fact, the bonus categories even out-perform the marquee Citi Prestige Card.
This is also a good card to add authorized users to because of the earning potential from the categories, no foreign transaction fees, and because it’s free to do so.
Which Retention Offer Did I Choose?
By my math, I valued Offer #1 at $1.25, and Offer #2 at $62.50.
How?
Here’s The Math:
Offer #1: It would cost me 7,500 of my own Thank You points (worth $93.75 [with the Premier’s 1.25 factor]) to pay the $95 annual fee. This is a savings of a whopping $1.25 dollars. This is clearly NOT A GOOD DEAL.
Offer #2: It would pay the $95 annual fee, but I would gain $62.50 in points [5,000 points x 1.25 factor] to offset the cost. With this offset, the effective cost of the annual fee would be $32.50.
Obviously, I went with Offer #2 as I would much rather pay $32.50 out of my pocket than $93.75.
The Bottom-Line: Call Results: My Retention Offers for the Citi Premier Card (2020):
I gotta be honest, these retention offers were some of the worst I’ve ever received on any card.
Granted, I only had about $1,000 in spending on this card last year, but “allowing me” to use my own points is a new low. It’s essentially the same as “allowing me” to use my own cash to pay the annual fee! Ridiculous!
Still, I’ll live with paying $32.50 out of my own pocket to keep the Citi Premier’s 1.25 factor bonus on my Thank You points. That alone will be worth $287.50 (at a minimum) when I [hopefully] cash in my hoard of Thank You points on a big trip to Africa later this year.
Cheers!
