Careful with the Citibank offer to convert to Thank You points on Amazon

[dvalley]

Just a PSA. I received the attached email offer. Except they forgot to tell me that the $50 cash rewards magically become $40 on Amazon so your net gain with this offer is only $5 and only restricted to the 'sold by amazon' products. If you convert more points than $50 the return could be actually negative. There's also no way to convert the thank you points back to cash rewards either

[CaptTom]

I avoid any scheme which gives me "points" instead of a cash value.

I know what cash is worth. I have no clue what a point is worth today, or if it will be worth the same tomorrow.

I suspect many of the credit card companies outsource their points game to some third party. Think about it. Someone ELSE is now in the loop making a profit, and selling your personal information on the side. How does that help YOU?

With an in-house cash rewards system, there's no cost beyond the computer program which automatically does the transfer.

[CoolRich59]

I generally avoid these conversions because you tend to get less than a 1-for-1 exchange. However, last year Hilton had a promotion where you got a bonus for converting airline points to Hilton Honors points. IIRC, it was a 20% bonus and I jumped on it.

[dvalley]

The points conversion was stated as $1=100 points. So you don't seem to lose any value converting to points on the surface but Amazon only wants to give you $.80 on the dollar for these Thank You points- which wasn't mentioned anywhere. For other things like miles, hotel points etc it might be different because I know a lot of people use them for those things.