Citi Custom Cash

The Citi Custom Cash is a free credit card that earns 5x on up to $500 in spend from your top spending category and 1x everywhere else.

If you have a Citi Strata Premier, it will earn 5x points instead of cash back.

• Since Citi points are worth about 1.5 cents each, that’s roughly 7.5% back when redeemed for travel.
• If you maximize the $500/month, you’ll get 30,000 Citi points.

This is a fantastic, if limited, deal, and pretty much all there is to it.

Spending on the Card

The classic way to use this card is to:

• Buy $500 in gift cards once a month.
  Preferably during a 4x fuel points promo.
• Keep it in a sock drawer the rest of the time.
  Using a 1x card is never a good idea.

This way, you avoid needing to track how much you’ve spent in different categories.

Getting the Card

While this card almost never has a worthwhile signup bonus, you can product change to it from other personal cards, including co-branded American Airlines cards.

The American Airline cards have notoriously good signup bonuses and notoriously bad value propositions after the second year, so they are a great card to product change to a free Custom Cash.

You can also have more than one Custom Cash card and therefore achieve 5x spend in more than one category. That said, we’d recommend picking up some of Citi’s other fee free cards before getting a second Custom Cash.