A neat little hack with some cards can make it effectively almost across-the-board.

Some rewards cards let you select "online shopping" as your high rewards category. You can extend that to in-store shopping at Walmart by enrolling that card in Walmart Pay and then paying in-store via that.

For a lot of people, "online shopping" and Walmart together will cover 95+% of their credit card use.

Are there any of those that are 5%? If so I’m very interested.

BofA has a card that is 3% in your selected category, which can be boosted to 5.25% if you have a large enough total in your accounts at BofA and Merrill Lynch.

The base card is 3% in your selected category (online shopping; gas; dinning; travel; drug stores; or home improvement and furnishing), 2% in grocery and wholesale clubs, 1% everything else. The 3% and 2% are limited to $2500 per quarter.

The base rate is multiplied by 1.25, 1.5, or 1.75 if your total at BofA and Merrill Lynch is at least $20k, $50k, or $100k, respectively.

> Enough of them wind up over-extending and paying interest to make it lucrative.

Yes. I understand this. I'm asking, why do they keep the others' accounts open?

> I'm also not aware of any across-the-board 5% rewards cards

I'm not either, but many people just rotate to a different card instead of using the same card for less cash back. And who never miss a payment or rack up interest. Meaning they always use those cards at a loss for the company. I'm asking why do these peoples' accounts get kept open.

> why do they keep the others' accounts open?

It's a loss leader.

Even for people who have years of history showing they have no intention of taking the bait?

I suspect you're overestimating how many of those there are.

I suspect you're underestimating? A lot of people (around half of Americans if not more) don't carry a balance. I don't know what fraction of them try to extract the most from their cards, but judging from the sheer number of websites that explain what card you should get to maximize which reward and bonus, I'm skeptical that the number of people who pay attention to this is negligible enough that it'd cost companies more to simply close their accounts than to let them go on.

>sheer number of websites that explain what card you should get to maximize which reward and bonus

These sites are mostly blogspam that push referral links.

My explanation seems more likely than the credit card companies acting as a money-losing charity towards rewards maximizers, doesn't it?

Yes, but my original explanation seems far more likely than both? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20805156

If an individual's data was worth $500+ annually like that, Intuit would be realizing substantially more revenue from Mint.com.

It's not the same data? Mint doesn't know where you made each purchase and for how much.

The only thing Mint's lacking is the geolocation of the individual merchants - something they can garner in a lot of cases from the merchant name. The grocery store I frequent includes a store number in the transaction name, for example. (Mint definitely has the "how much" bit - they've got each transaction individually, including the amount.)

On the flip side, Mint has all the rest of the credit card data for the person (across potentially many different cards and card networks), savings and checking accounts, brokerage accounts, mortgages, car loans, student loans, and tax returns if you use TurboTax.

I think that balances out the equation pretty handily - that amount of linked, collated data should easily be worth more than a single CC can garner.

Ohh, sorry, you're talking about Mint -- somehow I confused it with Credit Karma. Yes, they have transaction history and all that from across cards. I agree, it should be pretty valuable for Intuit. What indicates to you that it's not (or not as much as you expect)?

> What indicates to you that it's not (or not as much as you expect)?

Intuit's a public company, making both their revenue and the number of Mint users publicly available. They're not making anywhere near what they'd need to make off their extensive data holdings to make your theory work.

What I meant was, could you cite the numbers and math you are arriving at that tell you this? The 10-K I'm seeing says they make around $200M/year from desktop TurboTax and $2.2B from Mint and other services, and that's just with 20 million Mint users. That seems plenty to me.