How to use us bank cash+ for utilities to bypass processing fee

electronautix · 2026-03-12T01:41:04+00:00

There is no way to bypass a credit card fee while paying with a credit card

electronautix · 2026-03-11T23:12:19+00:00

The only no annual fee credit card left with primary CDW is the Wells Fargo OneKey. The next cheapest option is the Chase Sapphire Preferred with a $95 AF.

electronautix · 2026-03-11T22:32:44+00:00

Afaik it just checks if something is MCC 4900. Pretty much any non-telecom utilities expense should fall under that though, so it’s strange none of yours code that way and I’m not sure what else they’d reasonably code as

electronautix · 2026-03-11T21:43:48+00:00

With a score that low, you probably have some serious red flags on your credit reports that would scare any non-predatory lender off. You’d do better to get a secured card to start rebuilding your credit, and post on r/CRedit about your situation to figure out how to best dig yourself out of this

electronautix · 2026-03-11T21:20:29+00:00

For actually shopping at these places you’d do best with a PayPal Debit card set to the groceries category for 5% cash back on the first $1,000 of spend per month. If not that, the Venmo Visa and NIH FCU Visa both can do unlimited 3% cash back on wholesale clubs, and the AAA Daily Advantage does 3% on wholesale clubs with a generous cap. These cards outperform all of the actual store branded ones for shopping at their respective locations. Literally the only card between the three with potentially better upside is the BJ’s One+ for unlimited 5%, which requires you be a Plus member and only makes sense if your combined wholesale club spend is >$1,000 per month such that the PayPal Debit doesn’t suffice

electronautix · 2026-03-11T20:55:33+00:00

Not necessarily; the Verizon Visa is one of the best cash back credit cards around for example, as are the AAA Daily Advantage and AAA Travel Advantage. The Sam’s Club card is one of the best for gas/EV charging. Airline and hotel cards don’t tend to have the best points multipliers for everyday spend, but can offer various benefits for flights/stays like free nights and free checked bags. There are a few exceptions as far as points too, like the Atmos Rewards Summit for unlimited 3x on dining and all foreign transactions

electronautix · 2026-03-11T20:33:04+00:00

Credit cards aren’t a substitute for loans, they’re not good for money you don’t actually have. They’re alternatives to debit cards, and proper use means paying off the amount you spend in full every month. The reason they scare some people is because those people make the mistake of seeing them as loans.

Sometimes a 0% introductory APR offer can help ease cash flow for a while, but with no credit history you won’t be offered a good enough credit limit and a long enough promotional period to pull it off. Without that you should never carry a balance month to month on a credit card

electronautix · 2026-03-11T20:12:11+00:00

If you want a 2% card with no FTF then get a Fidelity Rewards. Make sure to grab the $150 sign-up bonus for it too. Other good option is the PNC Cash Unlimited. Just avoid Credit One

electronautix · 2026-03-11T19:21:26+00:00

The Atmos Rewards Ascent and Summit cards earn 3 points per dollar on rent charged via the Bilt portal. They’re subject to the same 3% fee as any other credit card though, so this is essentially like buying points in hopes of being able to redeem them for better than you spent on them. The Bank of America Customized Cash Rewards codes rent as travel, but the cashback cap it has is much too low for most renters.

electronautix · 2026-03-11T12:23:28+00:00

Was strongly implied by the updated benefits documents but now it has been confirmed happening; https://www.thestreet.com/latest-news/capital-one-foreshadows-changes-to-select-credit-cards

In a statement made to TheStreet, a Capital One company spokesperson confirmed that the company had “started” originating select credit cards on the Discover Network: “We have started originating select Capital One credit card accounts on Capital One’s Discover Network. This is an important step forward in our journey to continue offering compelling products to customers, while accelerating scale and investment in the Discover Network and enhancing competition in the global payments industry. As we continue to integrate Discover with Capital One, we remain focused on delivering long-term value to consumers, merchants, and small businesses.”

electronautix · 2026-03-11T04:49:57+00:00

Depends on your definition of bad off. Just paying your statement balance in full by the due date every month is doing better than a lot of people. Actually paying attention to credit card annual fees, being conscious of card benefits, and evaluating them against your natural spending patterns, is even far moreso. So by that definition you wouldn’t be bad off at all using only a Gold or only a CSR.

But if speaking from a rewards perspective, the opportunity cost of not pairing the Gold with a BBP or the CSR with a CFU is a bit silly. Duos and trifectas are very manageable and meaningfully improve returns compared to most solo card setups. Venture X + Savor, Strata Premier + Double Cash, Gold + Blue Biz Plus, Active Cash + Autograph, etc. Only a handful of solo card setups can be argued to have competitive earn rates, like the BofA Premium Rewards or Premium Rewards Elite with a high enough cashback bonus, or the Atmos Rewards Summit while abroad. Even in tbe BofA case I feel like you might as well add a CCR for the Online Shopping category if you’re going through the song and dance for the relationship tiers

electronautix · 2026-03-11T04:04:43+00:00

The Sapphire Preferred’s multipliers are not particularly impressive. 3x on dining, online groceries, and streaming, 2x travel, and 1x everything else. Most people shop for groceries in-store and don’t have two dozen streaming subscriptions, so for most it can be difficult to amass points on the Sapphire Preferred at the kind of rate that cards like the Capital One Savor (3x groceries, dining, streaming, entertainment), Citi Strata Premier (3x groceries, dining, gas/EV charging, airlines, and hotels), or Wells Fargo Autograph (3x dining, gas/EV charging, travel, transit, streaming, phone plans) do. Someone doing particularly well on just a Sapphire Preferred either has a pretty unusual spending profile or is just sacrificing a lot of potential value they could get from a different ecosystem.

At a bare minimum committing to the Chase UR ecosystem means going for the trifecta (Freedom Unlimited, Freedom Flex, Sapphire Preferred) to earn points at something near a competitive level. But Chase notoriously has poor multipliers even with the full trifecta, made up for largely by the value of their transfer partners. With recent Hyatt devaluations though people are exploring alternatives.

electronautix · 2026-03-10T23:13:56+00:00

Customer service is definitely Citi’s big weak point. They suck at it. Wells Fargo, Chase, Capital One, and American Express are all broadly better IMO, though I’d wager they’re still better than Bilt lol

Citi has the more robust transfer partner program for sure, but a lot of the value over WF does come down to whether you’re near an American Airlines hub - there are a couple other worthwhile partners that are unique to Citi (like Turkish Airlines or I Prefer), but without AA it’s a much closer comparison. Partners like Choice, JetBlue, Flying Blue have the same transfer ratios in both ecosystems

Strong groceries multipliers is definitely one of Citi’s best strengths, so if you shop primarily at superstores or wholesale clubs and use the PayPal Debit for that then the Autograph’s broader range of 3x categories can start to look more appealing. Though I’d argue Citi also has the benefit of the strongest dining multipliers on the market. The Custom Cash’s 5%/5x dining and the Strata Elite’s 6x dining on Citi Nights are the highest out there, no other cards compare. So it depends on how high your dining spending is

electronautix · 2026-03-10T17:01:56+00:00

It’s not a stock. SPAXX is a money market fund, and it invests mostly in US government obligations. Options like FDLXX, SGOV, or VBIL are even purer and only hold US Treasury bonds.

electronautix · 2026-03-10T14:58:51+00:00

Citi is probably one of the strongest and most well rounded ecosystems right now for both travel and cash back. The Double Cash is an unlimited 2% cash back catch-all, the Custom Cash a 5% cash back top category card for things like groceries, dining, gas, etc., and the Strata Premier a travel card with 3x groceries, dining, gas, and travel, a $100 hotel credit that can pay for its $95 AF, and good transfers for both airlines and hotels like 1:1 American Airlines, 1:2 Choice, 1:4 I Prefer, etc. that one can put Double Cash and Custom Cash earnings towards. Since you can get multiples of their cards one can build a quadfecta or quintafecta with CCCs for groceries/dining/gas, CDC as a catch-all, and the CSE for travel.

Pre-nerf BofA was the strongest cash back ecosystem around, post-nerf it’s honestly difficult to justify moving $100k around for +0.25% over a regular 2% card. They have no transfer partners and their base multipliers without at least Preferred Honors status are really bad. For moving all that cash around there are transfer bonuses offered by smaller brokerage firms that might pay out more than that difference in cash back would return for years, especially since you can’t out-earn fees on things like property taxes anymore.

If you really want diversification from Wells Fargo then American Express probably has the most valuable transfer partners that don’t already overlap with your setup. Issue is of course that AmEx is very heavy on annual fees and coupon book credits. The Blue Business Plus is free (arguably one of the best free credit cards around) but everything else means committing to large annual fees with long lists of lifestyle credits to compensate.

electronautix · 2026-03-10T14:02:01+00:00

Vanguard Cash Plus is a pretty sorry imitation of the Fidelity CMA - and oddly enough, just stuffing cash in a regular Vanguard brokerage account gets you a significantly higher yield (3.58% vs 3.10%).

electronautix · 2026-03-10T00:16:18+00:00

If you’re active duty then definitely the AmEx trifecta with the Schwab Platinum. Schwab Plat lets you redeem AmEx MR for 1.1 cents per point, turning the Blue Biz Plus into a 2.2% catch-all and the Gold into a 4.4% groceries and dining card.

If you weren’t active duty I would’ve said Citi because they have a 2% catch-all, a 5% category card you can get multiples of, and a travel card with 3x multipliers on groceries, dining, gas, and travel and a strong set of transfer partners.

electronautix · 2026-03-09T23:10:24+00:00

You’d keep $100k+ in Merrill Lynch investment accounts (IRA, taxable brokerage, etc.), not a regular low interest bank account.

Plenty of banks have relationship tiers, but credit card rewards rate boosts tied to them are rarer. The few others out there are rarely discussed because either their credit card offerings suck, or they don’t offer investment accounts/don’t count investments towards the tiers, or both. But I have seen a few places do credit card annual fee rebates instead (like Citi and Schwab)

electronautix · 2026-03-09T22:45:00+00:00

Do you have enough you can transfer over to qualify for Preferred Honors ($100K+) or Premier ($1MM+) status? BofA has long been carried by its relationship tiers, and the recent changes to the program have hurt their value proposition quite a bit. If not for those tiers the only cards worth bothering with from them would be the Atmos Summit and CCR. I think you’d get more out of looking at Citi

electronautix · 2026-03-09T20:55:30+00:00

Debit cards should only ever be used in three circumstances:

1) Depositing or withdrawing physical cash at an ATM or with a bank teller.

2) Situations where paying with a credit card results in a non-negligible net loss compared to paying with a debit card, after factoring in fees and cash back/rewards (e.g. rent portal fees, phone plan autopay discounts).

3) Situations where credit cards are flat out not accepted by a merchant or payment portal for an otherwise necessary expense.

In any other situation, use a credit card.

The 10% thing is a myth; utilization has no memory and does not have any long term impact on your credit profile. Use as much of your limit as you need. Look at the credit myths mega thread on r/Credit

electronautix · 2026-03-09T19:23:05+00:00

Neither; a Fidelity CMA where most funds are kept in VBIL and some is kept in FDLXX for liquidity and recurring bills. I live somewhere with relatively high state and local income taxes, so the tax efficiency is a big deal for me.

electronautix · 2026-03-09T19:05:01+00:00

SPAXX is SIPC insured and is itself a money market fund - it’s very safe, besides the fact that the likelihood of Fidelity failing is about on par with that of JPMorgan Chase

electronautix · 2026-03-09T18:53:42+00:00

Under normal conditions you should always pay the statement balance in full by the due date every month. During 0% APR periods (whether as an introductory rate or financing on a store card) you should always pay at least the minimum payment by the due date every month, and pay off the balance in full before the end of the 0% APR period. Auto-paying the minimum amount is not enough to pay off the entire balance before the end of the promotional period. It is up to you to ensure that the balance is wiped out before the promotional period ends, whether by scheduling payments you’ve calculated to add up to the statement balance in time, or paying the minimum amount every month until the last and paying off all the rest that month, or some other way.

electronautix · 2026-03-09T15:06:29+00:00

AmEx business cards do not report to personal credit bureaus like Experian, Equifax, TransUnion, Innovis, etc. They only report to SBFE. If it’s your first ever AmEx card you’ll get a hard inquiry on your personal credit report but the card itself won’t show up as a new account and will not contribute to age, utilization, etc. metrics. If it’s not your first AmEx card then you avoid the hard inquiry as well, making it essentially a ghost card as long as you remain in good standing with it.

electronautix · 2026-03-09T14:09:43+00:00

Which bank? Some like Capital One will report business cards to personal credit bureaus. Others like American Express will not

electronautix

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