Best Strategies To Maximise Your Credit Card Cashback

One of the fastest ways to maximise your cashback is to maximise your credit card category bonuses. Many credit cards offer double, triple or even quintuple points in certain categories of expenditure. For example, the UOB One Card offers up to 10% on GrabFood spend, purchases at Cold Storage, Giant, Guardian, 7-Eleven, and many more merchants. This is more than 3 times the cash rebate that you’ll get for all other retail spend, which is only 3.33%. 

If you like to eat out and drive often, cards like Citi Cash Back Card will give you up to 8% of cashback benefits on petrol, and up to 6% on dining and groceries. So be sure to know what bonus categories each of your credit cards offer and try to gain the cash back benefits you need or earn bonus points whenever you can.

By strategically timing your high-cost purchases, i.e. new furniture for your new home, honeymoon vacation or holiday gifting, etc, you’ll most likely be able to make the most out of the cashback perks that your credit card provides. For instance, if you've just moved into your new house and you’ll probably be spending thousands on new furniture in the coming months, it’ll be wise to wait until then to apply for a new credit card. This way, everything that you’re going to be charging to your credit card can go towards earning significant cash back or even a generous welcome bonus.

Certain credit cards have loyalty rewards programmes which lets you convert your reward points or even accumulated air miles to cash rebates or other cashback-related benefits. For example, if you hold a OCBC 90°N card, any OCBC Travel$ points you earned are essentially flexible rewards which can be converted to cash rebates or even deals on the OCBC STACK marketplace such as free hotel nights (for exclusive partner hotels), club lounge access dining vouchers and more. 

There’s no minimum spend and no cap on the amount of points you can earn each month. Other cards like Citibank’s Citi PremierMiles card allows you to earn and accumulate Citi air miles, Citi ThankYou PointsSM or Cash Back quickly when you use your Citi PremierMiles card to pay for your big-ticket bills such as rent, insurance premiums, vice versa, which you can easily redeem as cash rebates via their mobile app.

This strategy requires a bit more bookkeeping for you as you’ll have to make sure to not go over the cash rebate limit of that particular credit card you’re using. You’ve got to maximise the respective categories per month without going over any limits so that your spending efforts will not go to waste. 

Let’s say you’re using the HSBC Visa Platinum card which offers 5% cash rebate on dining, groceries and petrol but has a $250 cash rebate cap per month. So if you’ve spent a huge amount that month and that 5% of your total spending for that month exceeds $250, you’ll still get only $250. Thus, overspending to a certain amount may not be that beneficial when you’re holding certain credit cards with cash rebate limits.

When you pay your credit card bills on time and in full, you will not only maintain a good credit score, but also get the most value out of your credit card rewards. As most credit card interest rates are in the double-digits and rewards rates are typically single-digits, carrying a balance may most likely offset your earnings. In order to avoid missing out on any cash back rewards, pay off your statement balance in full for every billing cycle. This will help you avoid an unwanted debt too.