I tried 5 of the highest rated cash back apps to see which one works best. The main use case is that you have a set of credit cards personal to you and you want to find out which credit card to use to yield the most cash back without doing mental acrobatics every time you buy something. Some have sign up bonuses, some have double rewards the first year, some have limited time cash back offers. With all these factors, it can get pretty complicated very quickly. That’s what your phone is for, it can do these calculations for you and let you think about more important things.
How’s it going everybody this is beat the bush the question we’re trying to answer today is given whatever number of credit cards that you have you go to some store which credit card should you use for the best cash back previously my best solution is to make a little cheat sheet like this but this has gone very outdated and no one wants like a little cheat sheet
In their wallet like this anymore in this an age you can use an app and put all the credit cards that you have into this app so that it knows which ones you have when you arrive at a certain location it will just tell you which credit card you need to use for the most cash back it’ll tell you how much cash back that you’re going to get just very easy without any kind
Of thinking now the problem with this is it still requires a small amount of thinking and i used to falter a little bit after i had a beer or two so today i’ve tried five of the most popular apps i’m gonna rate each one and i’m gonna tell you which one is best to use for which kind of people before i begin this video is sponsored by weibull you can get a free share
Of stock just for signing up and depositing a hundred dollars check out my referral link down in the video description below one of the apps that you can use is called award wallet award wallet has a look up tool you can select look up and then you can put in the merchant name let’s go safeway and then it has safeway gas stations or safeway grocery store because
This is keyed differently so let’s just go grocery store and then it’s going to tell you which credit cards have which kind of bonuses over here american express gold 4x membership rewards points it has american express everyday preferred 3x membership points it also shows the chase freedom unlimited at 1.5 but the drawback about this app is that it does not
Let you customize your wallet it shows you every single card there is and there’s thousands of them so you don’t want to look through every single card so because of this concrete interface this app is absolutely useless to me another app that is pretty good is called card pointers card pointers at first to me seems like it’s not a very good app until i realized
That you can add a shortcut to allow you to look up which credit card to use so you can’t directly go inside the app to figure out which card to use you have to enable this shortcut thing go on the top right corner where there’s a little gear and then you say suggested shortcuts and then you have to select which card over here and then you’ll add a shortcut in
Your iphone it’ll have a shortcut called which card and then you can click on that if you happen to know which category that you need to spend on let’s say you’re at a restaurant you just scroll on down and go okay restaurant it says sears platinum mastercard so i’m going to click on that it says you should use the sears platinum mastercard 10 percent this is my
Personal 10 on one dollar spent on restaurant purchases now the cool thing about card pointers is that it allows you to add a lot of these cards that many other apps does not allow you to add the sears platinum mastercard is a grandfathered card that most apps does not allow you to add so because it’s such a good card for me i really like the ability to add this
Card within this app it also allows you to add customized cashback options in case you have special offers for a limited time so you can go to category bonuses click custom and then you have a start date and an end date and then you can go let’s say gas station you press and hold and you can just change it to whatever amount that you want sometimes when you
Get a credit card you do not absolutely have a fixed cash back amount like bank of america credit cards if you participate in their platinum honors program if you have a certain amount of assets like 50 000 or 100 000 of investable assets you can climb those tiers of 50 extra cashback or 75 extra cashback in my bank of america cash rewards if you look at the
Customized category bonuses over here i actually get five point two five percent on gas stations it used to be three so three percent plus seventy five percent on top of this is five point two five uh home improvement store online shopping restaurants all this is 5.25 so it’s really cool that it lets you modify the rewards a little bit to tailor it to whatever
Situation you’re in now the drawback of card pointers is that you cannot look up by gps location this is just a feature that it doesn’t have some apps have gps lookup some apps don’t but i think this is a reasonable trade-off because i rather have all my cards in one place and then give up the gps feature that other apps have another cool app that’ll tell you
Which credit card to use is called the max rewards max rewards have a lot of mainstream credit cards as you can see here discover cashback bank of america premium rewards chase freedom chase freedom unlimited bank of america cash rewards a city double and even the target red card now i already checked it does not have the banana republic card nor does it have
The sears platinum mastercard that i like so much now here’s the rub i have with these apps is that sometimes it does not take into account your signup bonus because if you have a really good signup bonus credit card like right now i have the bank of america premium rewards you have to spend three thousand dollars and you get 500 right this is effectively about
A sixteen point six percent that is added on top of whatever cash back that you would get in that card so let’s say you’re going to a grocery store and some credit card has a five percent cash back but you also have another credit card that has a sign up bonus giving you an effective 16 17 percent cash back you would obviously use the one with the more cash back
First before you attempt the five percent cash back card so i think the drawback with the recommendations in these apps is that it does not take your signup bonus into account most of the time though when you get a sign up bonus you’re very aware of it you go oh my gosh i gotta spend three thousand dollars and then you just have this credit card and you just keep
On charging and after thing after thing to it you could just try to remember to use whatever special credit card that you’re trying to get for the sign up bonus max rewards also does not have my grandfather chase inc business credit card and the unfortunate thing is when these apps don’t have a certain credit card that i have it does not allow the customization
Of allowing me to add in that credit card by myself it needs to have something where it’s just a complete blank and i say okay this is a serious credit card i get 10 you know just put it all in manually this particular app does not have this feature so because of this it’s completely useless to me now if you go around using this app and you find that it has all
Your credit cards and it does everything perfectly for you then great you can have another feature called the gps location thingy where it’s this icon at the bottom it says best card and you can go search or you can see my location and it’s just going to look up wherever you are but let’s say right now i want to look up safeway and i’m going to say okay safeway
In fremont and then it’s going to pop up the first thing which is safeway you got to click that first before it will show you all the credit cards and then it’s going to show you all the credit cards that you added in your wallet this is amazing bank of america cash rewards 3.5 this is with the platinum rewards program added in so it already says this bank of
America premium rewards 2.63 again with the 75 platinum rewards program and then it goes cd double is 2 chase freedom unlimited is 1.88 i actually didn’t even know it does 1.88 because you know i thought it was a 1.5 cash back thing and then chase freedom why is it 1.25 i don’t know so it doesn’t really matter i just look at the highest rewards that you get you
Go oh i get 3.5 percent oh just take that out of your wallet and then use that the next app i like to talk about is called birch when i started this app i got kind of annoyed because it immediately asked me to connect my bank to this app but since i’m reviewing this okay i will put me in my information so i put in my bank of america information and because of
The fact that every single card that you want to add to this you have to give them your longing information i completely despise this because you should be able to just put in whichever credit card you have in there without giving your login information and it should be able to do its job now if an app is really really good let’s say it has every feature that i
Like i might want to consider giving them my login information just so that they can track the amount that i’m spending and tell me when i hit the quarterly limit of let’s say 1500 or maybe i’m turning a credit card and i hit the limit of 3 000 or let me know how much i have left then this is a reasonable time to ask for my login information right when i sign
Up for this app it asked me for that so i thought this was a deal breaker over here when i tried to use the location service it just kind of froze so i’m like okay i can’t use this you know for whatever reason maybe some of you have better luck with this the last app i like to talk about is called maxi view maxi view to me is kind of crippled because you can
Definitely add a lot of cards it even have my favorite sears thank you rewards card and also the chase inc business i talked about but even though it has a sears thank you rewards you can click over here it says show rewards but you can’t modify anything with it i cannot tell it any kind of special offers i got which is a 10 off of gas groceries and restaurants
I can’t enter that in there and it does not allow you to modify things for sign up bonuses or the bank of america platinum rewards program even though it has a location aware feature where you just look up wherever you go and then they’ll give you a recommendation of which car to use well if it does not have all the information about your credit cards then it
Cannot give you an accurate recommendation of which card you should use i find the interface sort of very simplistic it’s like a app that someone just created and it’s just not quite hashed out in terms of all the features that you need in order to truly make this into a very very useful app thanks for watching this video i hope you guys enjoyed the review of
All these apps i personally am gonna use card pointers going forward instead of that little cheat sheet thing don’t forget to give me a like let me know if you’re using one of these apps already and as always push that subscribe button and ring that bell icon thanks for watching you
Transcribed from video
5 Best Apps to Max Out Your Credit Card Cash Back By BeatTheBush
