The Fidelity Investment Rewards American Express is a 2% cash back card where you deposit funds into a Fidelity investment account. It has no annual fee. And normally it has no signup bonus.
Now you can get it with a $75 bonus for making $500 purchases within 60 days.
For avoidance of doubt and disclosure, this card does not offer any referral credit to me of any sort, and I do not have this card myself.
I’ve long written that it’s the best cash rebate card, most offer 1% or 1.5% or bonus only specific spend categories but this is 2% on all purchases. No signup bonus means it’s no all that leveraged for quick rewards. But it makes the opportunity cost of spending on a mileage-earning card where you earn just 1 mile per dollar two cents — in other words, the existence of this card means that every charge that earns one mile per dollar means you are buying that mile for two cents.
(HT: The Flying Scholar)
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Is there a foreign transaction fee?
You can redeem worldpoints and get a domestic airline ticket of $400 or less for 25,000 points.
Can I enroll this card in premium car rental protection through AMEX?
Wouldn’t the Barclay Arrival card be a better card than this (because of the 2% back as well as the 10% rebate), or am I missing something?
The point is that this is a cash back card, whereas the other cards quoted restrict redemption to travel. Presumably there is incremental value to having no restrictions on what types of expenses one can redeem for.
@M: Yes, there is
@R: interesting. Can you tell how? BTW, 1 dollar ean 1 world pt or 2?
@Alex: no. It is not directly issued by AMEX
@Points with a Crew: AMEX FIA has no Annual fee. Everyone has different opinions.
Does anyone know if Authorized Users on this account get their own card numbers? Or do they share the same credit card # as the primary account holder?
Couple of issues I can see…
What are the restrictions of withdrawing the funds from investment account.
And second would be, the notorious FR from AMEX.
Someone correct if I’m wrong, but I don’t believe this card is administered by AMEX (much like CITI administer AMEX cards), so the risk of FR would be less. Also, you don’t have to tie this to an investment account, it can be a checking account too.
The card is not issued by American Express, but rather FIA Card Services (Bank of America), so standard Amex benefits and policies aren’t applicable
ahh, thanks for the update. That will make it a LOT more feasible.
Does anyone know how long the $75 offer will last? Thanks!
@John K I have used this card for years. There are no issues whatsoever. Furthermore this is NOT an AMEX card. It is run by FIA. In my opinion FIA is the best customer service on any card I currently own. One more no fee 2% card is Priceline from Barclays. No sign up bonus and no fee. If you don’t want to open a Fidelity account this is another option. You can use the 2$ to erase charges on your statement. Barclays customer service stinks by the way. They are the very worst bar none.
There are ZERO restrictions on pushing the money to any of your checking accounts etc using their system. When you redeem ONLY redeem into a Fiedlity account or you wont get the 2%.
I am unable to navigate to this offer from my Fidelity account. It appears to be legit, but I would call Fidelity first to confirm this.
You must first have a Fidelity investment account, which you should probably do anyway for its mega bonus miles offers.
I have had the FIA AmEx for years, and strongly encourage anyone who is planning to get into applying for credit cards for sign up bonuses to first get the no annual fee 2%+ cards (this card, Priceline Rewards Visa, JCB Marukai Premium if you live in a quailfy state), both to guard against the possibility that banks might somedays start declining applications from people with histories of applying for lots of cards, and also to make sure people have the best alternatives available when considering whether to earn miles and points instead of cash.
I link this card to a regular taxable Fidelity brokerage account, which has no minimum balance and offers free ACH bank transfers in and out. I have never had any problem redeeming this way. For redemptions for ~40k points, it is possible to redeem directly for a statement credit, avoiding this work of doing this transfers.
There are two other variants of this card:
– no annual fee Visa that earns 1.5 points/$ on the first $15k, 2 points/$ thereafter.
– $200/year “private client” AmEx with some interesting benefits, but people had reported problems getting the promised airport lounge access card when I looked into it a few years ago.
The FIA AmEx card theoretically earns 2 “WorldPoints” per dollar. I believe WorldPoints is or at least as a rewards program shared by Bank of America. There are a few other redemtion options for WorldPoints besides $.01/point. The airline ticket mentioned by R in comment #2 is probably the most interesting. It also also possible redeem for points at Sandals resorts.
I hadn’t noticed this before, but WorldPoints has shopping portal that currently includes 15 points/$ on Skype (i.e., 17 points/$ total) and 4 points/$ at OfficeMax, among many other rebates, and some coupons.
To avoid confusion with benefits no longer available on the FIA cards, I’ll mention that it used to be possible to redeem 1000 WorldPoint for 1000 Aeorplan miles, but that those days are long past, and I got my card just before they added foreign transaction fees (although it’s possible to hide a foreign transaction fees by having a bigger spread in retail foreign exchange rates that the card charges).
There is no need for Any Fidelity retirement account, any other bank checking account to get your money PROVIDED you have at least 25000 Points. You just call them and they send a check to you free shipping. I’ve gotten more than $2000 in the last 8 years using this method.
To use the worldpoints portal for FIA cards, is it mandatory to use the FIA card or it works with any card?