New Revision To BOC SmartSaver

With effect from 1st Dec 2016, the feature for BOC Smartsaver will be revised to be much worse in my view.

Right off the bat, the usual $500 credit card spending will be nerfed to 0.8%(of the 60k). You can however spend $1,500 on it to get 1.6%. Those who do a lot of groceries shopping can consider buying $1,000 - $1,500 of ntuc shopping vouchers every month, spend and keep the rest to still be able to qualify for the 1.6%. Those who usually only spend $500 per month will be very upset due to the drastic reduction to 0.8% interest. One work around I can think of now is to buy $1.5k ntuc voucher using Family card and sell all via carousell at 4% disc to meet the spending requirement(that way you earn a 1% spread as you get 5% direct disc from buying).

One important thing to note, the AXS payment transactions are no more eligible for Card Spend Bonus, means they have more or less closed this loophole. Previously, one can just use AXS app to pay other credit cards using BOC Great Wall debit card and it will be counted as credit card spend.

Secondly your salary credit needs to be $6k and above to get a better interest of 1.2% instead of the usual 1%. $2k - $5,999 you will only be entitled to 0.8%. There is no work around for this, as manually giro or split salary crediting will not work. If you can hit $6k a month, your interest will be better than the current one.

Thirdly, the pay bill criteria interest is reduced from 0.6% to 0.35%. I usually just pay $5 to three credit cards now the minimum payment per bill is $30. This criteria's interest is reduced by 0.25%, not good. Still you can consider paying $30 to BOC Family, SCB Stand Chart and DBS live.

There is a new criteria now called Extra Savings Bonus. This is basically a criteria to make sure you have more than 60k in the account. As any additional amount after $60k to $1mil will get you 0.6% interest if one of the three above criteria is met(Card Spend, Salary Crediting or Payment). Means effective interest is 1%(0.6% + 0.4% prevailing). I think this is not useful at all, one can just dump their excess cash into CIMB fast saver to get 1% without doing anything.
I have been using this since the first day it was released, I have even gotten a $100 cash card from them. Really milked alot of risk free cash from this(considering this is just my cash portion). This new changes maintains the total effective interest to 3.55%(3.15% + 0.4%) if you manage to meet all three max requirements. I will most likely still continue to use this until I can think of a better alternative(Have till end of Nov to think). The only problem I have is the credit card spending hike to 1.5k. If I only spend $500 to buy ntuc vouchers I will only get 2.75%(2.35% + 0.4%). The 0.4% is the prevailing interest rate.

I guess all good things will inevitably come to an end. Will give another update by end of the year on my work around. You can read the full details of the change here.