Dream Card for Students
Written: Feb 17 '01 (Updated Feb 18 '01)
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Pros: Decent benefits, excellent customer service, undoubted accountability and great convenience
Cons: Simply no cons
The Bottom Line: I don't know any better card than this one, do you?
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| david_chunyu's Full Review: Dividend Card for Students (Citibank) |
As I am only a graduate student presently, not having started my career yet, I don¡¯t have adequate experiences with all kinds of regular credit cards and am not in the appropriate position to review them from a holistic perspective. However, I am quite an active student credit card user and am feeling quite confident in commenting credit cards for students. The theme of my presentation is very simple¡ªamong all the credit cards I¡¯ve ever used the Citibank Dividend Card is the best! Yes, the best, I have no single doubt about that. Its beauty will grow very conspicuous when compared to the other credit cards I¡¯ve ever used.
For a credit card, the No.1 concern we shall have is the credit line. Yes, that is how much money we can get and use with this card. The more, the merrier! Absolutely! Well, $2,700, how does this sound? Not a big number of course but when you know how much the Associates and GTE and Capital One can give you--$500, you¡¯d say ¡°Wow¡± for this Citi Platinum offer. Essentially, for a student such as me, isn¡¯t $2,700 decent enough? And the approval for this initial offer is very straightforward. Just attach your student ID photocopy with your application and you¡¯ll get approved instantly without further trouble. Yet for the Associates and GTE and Capital One, after you submit a first round application, they will request some other trivial stuff like utility bills, financial statement, ¡which is quite annoying. Just for the pitiable $500? Why bother with them? Of course, this $2,700 is just the beginning. With a well-carried balance, you¡¯ll get a regular $1,000 credit line raise.
The next concern you tend to come up with a credit card is the customer service. As to this point I'd say Citi people are the sweetest people I have ever dealt with. They are always very patient and truly helpful no matter what kind of issue you present to them, and anytime! Reliability, security, and comfort, that¡¯s all you get from them! However, dealing with Associates, GTE, and ATT Universal people is always disappointing. For illustration, the former two simply do not have well-trained representatives, who appears to lack adequate professional skills, sometimes only exacerbating situations. For ATT I always try to avoid contacting them, since that would be the best opportunity for them to trap you into some charged programs regardless of your primary and real concern. To be worse, they even contact you initiatively¡ªto charge you under whatever pretext.
Another feature of the Citi Platinum Select MasterCard is the online account service, which is really cool! Now I can review my balance daily, which is really helpful when you are making big purchases. Take my case for example I once bought a laptop online using my dividend card. After the purchase an instant red alert appeared in my online account suggesting that I contact the customer service immediately for the sake of security. So I called them, and they told me what was going on to my account and how much had been charged, making sure this was an authorized purchase. And of course I affirmed them there was no problem. What is more exciting about the online service is the click-to-pay function, that is, after providing your checking account number, you can just pay your statements online regularly by inputting the amount of money you want to pay and then simply click to authorize. You¡¯ll no longer need to bother with writing a check and mailing it cautiously.
The last beautiful thing about the CitiBank Platinum card is its cash back benefit. 1% cash back based on your total purchase is just good enough, as it is pure cash back without any trick. But watch this, the Associates claims to offer 3% cash back, but 3% of what, I bet you¡¯ll get a headache trying to figure out what the hell this is. It is true GTE and ATT Universal offer some free calling card, yet I never dare to use them no matter whether that is a $10 or $100 value because the unbelievably prohibitive rate will exhaust that value into zero in no time and make it negative so that you will definitely get a surprise from your next statement!
Ok, that¡¯s all I want to say, and to conclude¡ªif you are a student the Citibank Dividend card should be your first choice.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
david_chunyu
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Reviews written: 3
Trusted by: 1 member
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