50,000 Citi ThankYou point offer expiring today

(expires today)

Citi usually offers a 25,000 point bonus for Citi ThankYou Preferred Card, which carries no annual fee. However, they have a 50,000 point offer that expires today. You get 25,000 points after $5000 in purchases in each of two consecutive 6-month windows for a total of 50,000 points. Their Citi Premier Card also offers a bonus of 50,000 points, but it carries a $125 annual fee (waived for the first year). The Premier card is probably a better offer for most customers--unless you already have one, in which case why not sign up for both? Or if you don't like the idea of signing up and canceling after a year, the Premier card is better with no annual fee.

I would not recommend using the Preferred card regularly after you get your bonus miles except possibly on airfare, where you can get points on miles you fly, even some award tickets. For example, if you book a JFK-LAX, you would earn a bonus of 1650 points (33% of the round trip total of 4950 miles). But you don't earn this bonus unless you have an equal amount of regular spending. So it's something like double points on airfare, but not that great.

I find ThankYou points to be worth just under a penny per point because you can redeem at a penny per point for a wide variety of gift cards such as Amazon.com and Home Depot. However, if you have a ThankYou Premier card, which gives you 25% off airfare booked at ThankYou.com, the points are worth about 1.3 cents. If you fly regularly and rack up bonus flight miles, you can get about 2.7 cents rebated to you for airfare purchases. And with the Premier Card, you get a 20% bonus for spending at grocery stores, gas stations, and drugstores, so that is around 3 cents back in airfare in these categories. But only if you can bank the flight bonus points, which is relatively easy because award travel where taxes are greater than $50 generally counts.