In this weeks weird card Wednesday we will looking at the VITAL credit card, self described as the “credit card that pays you to share”.
Card Basics
- No annual fee
- Earn 1% cash back on all purchases
- ‘Share To Earn program’
Given that this card earns 1% cash back on all purchases and there are lots of other cards that earn 2% cash back on all purchases, the share to earn program needs to be very useful to make this card worth using. Let’s take a look at in more detail. Everytime you share your Vital link and somebody signs up, you’ll receive 4 points. If they refer somebody you receive 2 points, if that person refers somebody else you receive another point. To help you visualize I created this handy graphic:
The amount of money you earn from this share to earn program depends on the total spend in the Vital system. The example they give is somebody with 280 points earning $525 when there are 100,000 total Vital users spending an average of $1,500. That means cardholders are spending $150,000,000 per month in total. It looks you’re earning $1.875 per point in this case. We don’t know the total amount of points in the system so we can’t see how much they are paying out. If that $150,000,000 was instead put on a card that earn 2% cash back a total of $3,000,000 would be earned. With Vital $1,500,000 is being earned by cardholders and then an undisclosed amount is going into the share a friend pool. I’m guessing it’s less than $1,500,000 though.
One thing in particular that doesn’t make sense is that you get points for referring friends, but you only need to spend $1 per month. That means you’re actually best off referring as many friends as possible and spending $1 per month (and also getting them to spend $1 per month). Then you’re making money off the people using this card as a daily driver.
Our Verdict
In case I wasn’t clear enough, this card is terrible and awful. I’d call it the pyramid scheme of credit cards, but I think they prefer multi level marketing term these days. Getting this card makes no sense, you should get a card that earns 2% cash back on all purchases. If you really value your friendships so little that you’d be willing to sell them out for this, I’d recommend trying to make some new friends.
