FutureCard Review
Background
FutureCard is a high-reward debit card with a focus on sustainability, but it doesn’t mean you have to be the most eco-friendly and green to take advantage of this weirdly good card. I’m a pretty standard credit card churner. I open a couple new cards for the sign up bonuses (SUBs) a year. I know which categories for which cards get the most points, I try to get at least 2%+ back on every dollar spent and I like to find a way to redeem the points for at least 1 cent per, aiming for higher. I’m a big fan of no annual fee credit cards, as the math behind annual fee credit cards becomes much more difficult, especially after the SUB. Some good staples to have in your wallet are the Chase Freedom and Bank of America Customized Cash Rewards, both of which feature rotaing categories quarterly / monthly respectively for 5% back. Then you should have a standard 2% back card on everything, both Wells Fargo Active Cash and CitiBank Double Cash offer that.
But back to the FutureCard itself.
Pros
Debit Card
This isn’t a credit card so there isn’t an interest rate on your balance because there can be no credit taken. Low risk for anyone who is worried about that aspect of rewards cards.
Interest on Balance
In fact they give you interest on your balance that you keep in the card. This is a new feature they’ve added in the past couple months. 4.10% APY interest, which is pretty darn good all things considered. Makes it really easy to just add money to the account and not worry about it.
5% back on multiple categories
MTA
Utilities
Thrift and Secondhand
Plant-based Food & Restaurants (like Just Salad, Chopt, Sweetgreen, and PLNT Burger)
Sustainable Beauty and Fashion
Even more on other categories (that I personally don’t use)
EV Charging - 10%
Bike Shops - 10%
Community Solar - 10%
Newly Added Ongoing Promotions
Revolving cycle of offers like increased cashback on:
Metro North, LIRR, NJT, and Amtrak
Groceries
Cafes and Plant-based Food & Restaurants
Great Rewards that are undervalued
Tickets, gift cards, memberships etc.
Cash redemption at a solid 1:1
Having a solid redemption for cash makes its baseline pretty safe.
Customer Service
They have always responded and are very friendly to all of my inquiries.
Exposure to Sustainable Companies
I learn of new and upcoming sustainable companies and concepts, and get to test them out often with a little financial incentive. Companies like Back Market and Nuuly have been featured in the past with pretty nice deals.
Cons
Janky app
The app has some issues and can be a bit buggy, but works overall.
Debit Card
You only have the money you put in, so that can be frustrating if you get somewhere and you need to pay, it’s not exactly the moment to try and get some funds transferred in, especially when it takes 1-3 business days. So you have to be proactive and prepared for what you may want to spend on.
Highly Manual
Redeeming rewards like the two aforementioned ones meant emailing back and forth with customer support to get my reward. Unlike most other credit card rewards which are automated, this is a manual and can have a significant multiday time delay on receiving the rewards. Receiving the Hans Zimmer tickets took 17 hours, albeit I ordered on a Sunday and their office only opens for standard weekday business hours, so it is when I expected it to go through, but something to keep in mind. Bathhouse’s redemption gift card took nearly 90 hours to deliver.
Customer Service
It can be slow and there is no live chat function.
Still Trying to Figure Themselves Out
For awhile they focused on you doing missions that would be measured in CO2e and you would earn coins for every 1,000 kilograms you would save. But they recently just ended this program.
They started a promotion that said once a week between Monday through Sunday, then changed it in the second week to be a rolling 7 day period, which threw off my efforts.
No Transfer Partners
I mean it makes sense, but the redemption options are quite limited.
My Experience
I joined April, 2023. Over the nearly two years I’ve had it, I mostly have only used it for the subway. A 30 day pass is $132, and you’d be getting $6.60 back at 5%. In reality though, with OMNY now in full swing and the 7 day auto cap I can be much more efficient about it, and I never do the 30 day pass. It helps that I have a flexible hybrid schedule. So personal estimated math on just this main category is that I took about 400 subway rides in 2024 (sort of, I capped counting when I maxed out the 7 day cap). And I maxed out 7 day caps of 13 rides 20 times. By doing so, FutureCard gives you a $5 bonus. So the rough math here is I spent $1,160 on the subway, on FutureCard. They gave me around $100 in bonuses and $58 in 5% back rewards; for a total of $158, and a net spend of $1,002. Now this is already biased because I didn’t track the number of trips that were fully comped by FutureCard. They have random free subway days, weeks, promotions, etc. So there are even more savings in there. I’d estimate my subway savings for 2024 at somewhere between $200-$250 (an additional 17-35 rides).
For example, this January, 2025, they just gave me a month of free subway rides… so… that’s probably $100 worth of savings to start the year off.
There are other 5% categories. Most notably utilities, but also for the next few months, groceries. This is probably $60 for the utilities and $100 for groceries in rewards for this year. Who knows what else they’ll add or rotate in too.
With the Points in the app you can redeem them 1:1 for cash, which is a solid redemption. But there is some extra value in the other Rewards you can get. I’ve done three, and they’re all very good deals.
Hans Zimmer
$20 for two tickets to his concert in Baltimore. Because I already had tickets to Brooklyn, I knew the value of these, and I snagged them immediately. I resold them for $245 (post reselling fees and below both the tax threshold and market value). I mean that’s technically 12.25 cents per point, though yes, I didn’t know how much I would actually get for the tickets when I redeemed them. They quickly ran out of these tickets, so don’t expect this sort of arbitrage very often.
Bathhouse
$80 in points for a gift card worth $209… that’s a redemption value of 2.61 cents per point. Way better than the cash redemption.
CitiBike
$150 in points for an annual membership worth $220. That’s a redemption value of 1.47 cents per point. Also way better than the cash redemption.
With these three arbitrage opportunities. I saved / made $424. I personally was going to spend on the latter two anyway, so these were actually net benefits.
Add to that the promotions they run. There’s the $5 back at a cafe weekly for 3 weeks, and $5 back at a salad place for 3 weeks. $5 for TooGoodToGo, etc. I’ve taken advantage of a lot of these. I’ll estimate $20 of net savings, because technically I probably spent more money than I would have. These promotions forcing spending is certainly a negative as well.
So my quick and dirty math here is that this no annual fee card has earned / saved me in the last 12 months probably $850. I mean… that’s ridiculous value for a no-fee card.
Who Should Get This Card / Final Verdict
This card is a must for anyone who lives in New York (or one of the other cities that has both reliable public transportation and is supported by FutureCard) and doesn’t pay for it through another program like pre-tax commuter benefits or student discounted rates. With that as the base, you’ll find that the rest of the card to be situationally valuable and with the 4.10% APY interest, there’s no reason not to keep a healthy amount of funds in the app to maintain its functionality without paying for immediate fund transfers.