Recently I was talking with some friends about credit cards; specifically which one offers the best rewards. At some point during the conversation I realized that my work with Ledger had set me up to provide an interesting case study. It could also settle whether we were all being silly and debating over superficial gains. If math and accounting bores you then you should skip to the end to see the fancy graph result.

So first I decided to pick my candidate cards to compare. I only chose cards which return cash or reward points that are pinned to a dollar value (e.g. 1 point == $0.01). I avoid other cards because without pinning the value the reward company can change the value whenever they want. For example if a flight from Toronto to Vancouver was worth 1000 Aeroplan points what’s the dollar value per point? Well the answer is that the flight dollar value and point cost can change daily making it hard to evaluate.

Ok back to candidate cards, I selected these three which I’m considering:

  • PC World Elite MasterCard (current card)
    • Annual Fee: None
    • Effective reward value: 3% cash back at preferred merchants, 1% elsewhere
    • Preferred merchants: PC brand (Zehrs, Shoppers Drug Mart, Loblaws, etc)
    • Rewards redeemable: purchases at PC grocery stores
    • Has a minimum income requirement
  • Tangerine Money-Back Credit Card
    • Annual Fee: None
    • Effective reward value: 2% cash back in 2 categories, 1% elsewhere (+1 category if you use Tangerine savings account)
    • Potential Categories: groceries, furniture, restaurants, hotels, gas, recurring bills, drug store, home improvement, entertainment, public transpot and parking
    • Rewards redeemable: cash
  • MBNA World Elite MasterCard
    • Annual Fee: $85
    • Effective reward value: 2% cash back on all purchases
    • Rewards redeemable: cash
    • Has a minimum income requirement

For each card I’ll calculate the effective cashback percentage using my historical purchases over the last 20 months as recorded in my ledger. This means my cashback rates aren’t definitive. They are specific to myself but its potentially interesting nonetheless. I will calculate effective cashback percentage as follows:

effective_cashback = (cashback - fees) / total_spend

I’ll present Ledger commands and run them on my transactions but won’t post the actual values. Instead I’ll present my total_spend as $1000 and present all other numbers relative to that.

PC World Elite MasterCard

To identify the max rewards returned for this card I’ll need to calculate two variables: preferred_merchant_spend and other_spend. The first tracks the amount I’ve spent at PC preferred merchants and the second tracks all other credit card expenses.

The preferred merchants which I used are: Esso, No Frills, Real Canadian Superstore, Shoppers Drug Mart, and Zehrs.

With the above information I can perform the following two Ledger reports to calculate rewards:

// Returns total credit card spending
ledger bal "Liabilities:Credit Cards:PC" -l "amount < 0"
     $1000

// Returns credit card spending at preferred merchants
ledger bal "Liabilities:Credit Cards:PC" -l "amount < 0 and payee =~ /Esso|(No Frills)|(Real Canadian Superstore)|(Shoppers Drug Mart)|Zehrs/"
     $99

// Now to calculate effective_cashback
total_spend = $1000
preferred_merchant_spend = $99
other_spend = total_spend - preferred_merchant_spend = $901
cashback = preferred_merchant_spend * 0.03 + other_spend * 0.01
         = $99 * 0.03 + $901 * 0.01
         = $2.97 + $9.01
         = $11.98
effective_cashback = (cashback - fees) / total_spend
                   = ($11.98 - $0) / $1000
                   = 1.20%

Tangerine Money-Back Credit Card

I personally have a Tangerine savings account so this lets me pick three categories with preferred cashback rates. First I have to figure out the categories where I spend the most. Thankfully I already have a head start on the report for this analysis on my other Ledger post. There is however, one modification I need to make which is limiting expense transactions to only those that occurred from my credit card. Thankfully Ledger has me covered.

// Returns top expenses from credit card. Remember normalized to $1000 total credit purchases.
ledger bal --flat -S -T Expenses and expr 'any(account =~ /Liabilities:Credit Cards:PC/)'
    $137 Expenses:Food:Restaurants
    $112 Expenses:Shopping:Electronics
     $87 Expenses:Food:Groceries
     $67 Expenses:Car:Gas
     $55 Expenses:Vacation:Flights 
         ...

Now I can calculate effective cashback using my top-spending, supported categories: restaurants, groceries, and gas.

total_spend = $1000
preferred_category_spend = $137 + $87 + $67
                         = $291
other_spend = $709
cashback = preferred_category_spend * 0.02 + other_spend * 0.01
         = $291 * 0.02 + $709 * 0.01
         = $5.82 + $7.09
         = $12.91
effective_cashback = (cashback - fees) / total_spend
                   = ($12.91 - $0) / $1000
                   = 1.29%

MBNA World Elite MasterCard

This card should be the easiest one to calculate the effective cashback rate because it does not disciminate purchases using preferred merchants and categories. However, since I am using a normalized spending of $1000 the $85 annual fee will eat up all the cashback. I’ll show two examples to illustrate this point.

total_spend = $1000
cashback = total_spend * 0.02
         = $1000 * 0.02
         = $20
effective_cashback = ($20 - $85) / $1000
                   = -6.5%

total_spend = $20000
cashback = total_spend * 0.02
         = $20000 * 0.02
         = $400
effective_cashback = ($400 - $85) / $1000
                   = 1.58%

This means that there is a threshold of spending where if you spend more than the threshold value the MBNA card will have the best cashback return.

Summary

The Tangerine and the PC credit card provide almost the same return rate for my purchases but the Tangerine card comes out on top. This is surprising because the Tangerine card is really easy to get. It comes with no annual fee or minimum annual income requirement like the other two cards. Kudos Tangerine! If you spend more than $12K/year then the MBNA starts to provide the better return.

Now that the objective properties are out of the way we can think about the overall impact: was this a worthwhile analysis? Well I learned more about using Ledger value expressions and limit param. This will probably come in handy when figuring out TFSA/RRSP contributions. But what about changing my credit card? Will I change? Probably. But in the big picture I know my choice won’t have a big impact on my life. Sometimes just running through the analysis can be fun :)

If you have feedback or requests about this post email me@olivercardoza.com