I can't believe you would sell your principles away for only 3%. I wouldn't for anything under 5%.
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Apple Card Extending 3% Daily Cash to More Merchants, Starting With Uber and Uber Eats
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While this is welcome news, 3% back from Apple stores and services is still lackluster. Amazon, Target, Best Buy, and IKEA all offer 5% cash back (or more, like Best Buy which gives me 6% for being an Elite member and occasionally runs promotions that net you a whopping 11%). Amazon does require you to be a Prime member to get 5% however, so hopefully if Apple comes out with an all-in-one subscription fee, they could do something similar and also offer 5% to those committed customers as well.
That brings up an interesting thought. Several credit cards, including the MasterCard World cards include extended warranties/ coverages on purchases made with the cards. I wonder if Apple would include complementary AppleCare (maybe even Apple care Plus?) for purchases made with the Apple Card.
It would eat into AppleCare sales, but it may drive purchases to the Apple Card (still in services revenue )
A fair number of places prefer accepting cards over cash, though. Maybe not as many as in, say, Europe, but they're out there. Those would likely be fine with Apple Card.
It's an incentive. For people that pay their balances in full each month a lower interest rate doesn't mean much. If someone was going to pay cash for an item though and they can get cash back for using a particular card and pay it off end of month they may elect to use the card (as well as for other benefits such as warranty coverage and such). The card issuer gets a transaction fee on the purchase from the merchant and the card holder gets a slight discount on the item via the cash back.
That said I'm not a fan of these types of incentives. The reason being is they only work as long as a small subset of the population uses cards with these big benefits. If everyone has a card that averages 1.5% cash back and everyone starts using them for all purchases then merchants need to build that into their pricing model (they already do but under the assumption that not everyone is using the highest fee cards). In the end that means that it becomes a shell game where we all pay more for goods and services to collect less (than the price increase) in benefits. Until that happens the folks using big benefit cards are getting an advantage off of those who aren't.
I believe that person was referring to the transaction fees charged to merchants, not the card holder. Their certainly are transaction fees charged to merchants (invisible to you) when you use Apple Card.
I am talking about moving the earned cash from Apple cash to your bank - it may be an issue with my particular bank (Citi)
How can you purchase Netflix, HBO, Tivo, Xfinity Mobile, etc through Apple? Only Comcast has Apple Pay.
Cash back is meaningless on any card you don’t pay off completely every month. Period.
Everyone here does realize that the money to pay the 3% is coming from somewhere and everyone is paying for it in the form of higher prices. The credit card companies are not giving anything away to get you this "free" money. I am kind of baffled as to where the money comes from as my business takes cards and our average cost per swipe averages 1.75% (the vast majority are in the 1.7% to 1.8% range) and we have never paid higher than two percent with the exception of AMEX cards which we stopped accepting after I noticed one that topped 3.5%. The merchant solution is to raise prices to offset the fees. With something like Uber you are paying for the 3% with no way to know what the fare costs since it is dynamic. The 3% just becomes another part of the price calculation.
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I own a business that takes cards and everyone one of my customers pays for credit card swipe fees. It is built into the price they pay. No one is eating any of the cost of these benefits cards.
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They most likely are not losing any money on the transaction. End users are being played by thinking they are getting 3% back when the reality is 3% is added to the calculated fare after all of the other dynamic pricing elements are combined.
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I own a business that takes cards and everyone one of my customers pays for credit card swipe fees. It is built into the price they pay. No one is eating any of the cost of these benefits cards.
But you'd happily give money to Goldman Sachs, the wretched company that issues the Apple credit card?
As a merchant, if you're using interchange plus you are paying extra for the premium cards - if you're using flat rate then it gets averaged out across all of the cards that your facilitator accepts. Either way it doesn't affect the price at most places. The percentage of people that use rewards cards is actually pretty insignificant, and card-not-present fees are going to be high no matter what anyway.
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Yeah, I'm 830 and debt to available credit ratio is single digit. Income over $200K. We'll see once I've been in this home longer. I'm pretty happy with the AMEX Platinum and Chase Sapphire Reserve though better rewards if you travel.
There is a large majority of individuals that use cards for the perks but pay off their balance every month. Also, do you have any idea how dangerous it is to carry cash these days? Or use your ATM card and PIN to make a purchase? My friends ATM card was skimmed in Los Vegas last week and they took him for 1k. He has kids and can't afford to have his money taken like that. What's even worse, in some cases you can never get that back.
That's why people use credit cards. It's a safer transaction. Not to mention the purchase protection benefits some cards offer. I had an expensive camera that was covered by my Citi card for 1 year form the purchase date. I dropped it and they replaced it. There's a lot more that goes into this than just, "I don't have money, but I want that shiny thing."
You know... Assumptions and all that.
Also, APR is an Annual % Rate... So even if your APR is 24% that breaks down to 2% each month. If you have a month where you need to carry a balance of say $500.00, that's 10 dollars in interest. There are times when bills hit unexpectedly (medical bills) and you need time to move things around or figure out a solution.
I don't know what the highest available is but I can state at least double that has happened.
edit to clarify: I'm referring to credit limit of at least $30k, not the interest rate. Someone misunderstood so making my post more clear.
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More than 60% of American households do not revolve credit card debt, that is they pay all their credit card bills in full every month.
Thus the interest rate does not affect the majority of cardholders.
Length of credit history (age of open accounts) is already factored into the credit score. The majority of jobs are not reported to the credit agencies and only available to the bank if they ask you to send in proof.
If you have an Amex plat and a CSR (though there's very little reason to have both) you shouldn't even be interested in this card at all.
your transaction fees vary by card type though and any swipe fee you pass on to customers is a constant. If there were no high benefit cards then (presumably) transaction fees to the merchant could be lower and you could keep your prices lower (or lower the swipe fee) across the board. Currently only some card holders have high benefit cards, as your swipe fee is based upon blended averages of all card types, the customers with standard cards are in effect subsidizing the customers with high benefit cards. If everyone moves to high benefit cards then your average transaction fee will increase so you'll increase your prices or swipe fees and everyone will take a (bigger) hit. Under the current approach some customers receive a net benefit even with your swipe fees included, under the situation in which everyone has high benefit cards your increases will more than offset the benefits they receive and we would all lose.
I realize this is pretty convoluted but hopefully I've clarified my point somewhat.
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I have both and signed up for Apple Card too. It won't be my primary card but no harm in getting it either.
If a subscription service offers:
- App Store subscription billing (e.g., HBO NOW), switch over to get 3%.
- Apple TV Channels (e.g., HBO NOW), switch over to get 3%.
- Gift card (e.g., Netflix), purchase it from a retailer that supports Apple Pay to get 2%. It's annoying to have to do this every few months though.
- Supports Apple Pay on Safari on a Mac (e.g., Comcast), use it to get 2%.
10K limit & 12.99% APR. (Credit score as of last Spring was 840+)
Apple isn't trying to compete with great travel cards like Chase Sapphire Reserve, which IMO is the best overall travel for frequent travelers (I find Amex Platinum too restricted for my needs).
Perhaps at some point Apple will offer a premium credit card with annual fee, maybe including perks such as AppleCare+ and Apple subscription service, and higher reward on spendings at Apple.is
Those are only two factors in a top-secret approval formula. We’ll never know, because individual banks will never say, but your decline could’ve been because of something like the length of time at your job , or if you’re self-employed, for example.