Dining, Entertainment, and Popular Streaming Purchases
With the Capital One Savor card, you’re going to earn 4% back on all your dining, entertainment, and eligible streaming purchases. Naturally, you will want to make this your designated card for all purchases within those categories. Whether you’re someone who goes out frequently or prefers a good Netflix series on the sofa, this can really add up.
Hot Tip: Capital One categorizes dining as purchases as restaurants, cafes, bars, lounges, fast-food chains, and bakeries. Entertainment purchases can be movies, plays, concerts, sporting events, tourist attractions, theme parks, aquariums, zoos, dance clubs, pool halls, or bowling alleys. Eligible streaming services include Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+. You have plenty of options to maximize that 4% cash-back with each category!
Grocery Purchases
With the Capital One Savor card, you’ll earn 3% cash-back at supermarkets, meat lockers, freezers, dairy product stores, and specialty markets. This gives you plenty of opportunities to earn a solid return on all your grocery store runs.
Keep in mind that non-grocery superstores like Walmart and Target will not count toward this category.
Non-Bonused Purchases
This card earns 1% cash-back on all purchases that don’t fall within the dining, entertainment, or grocery store categories. If you don’t hold any other cards in your wallet that offer a higher return, then this card is certainly better than nothing.
After all, if you’re using the card for all of your purchases and paying your balance off in full each month, even the cash-back you earn from non-bonused purchases will start to add up.
Cash-Back or Statement Credit
Unlike with travel rewards cards, there aren’t any strategic redemptions available to greatly increase the value of your cash-back.
However, the pro to this method is that there are no hoops to jump through, no transfer partners to worry about, and no award charts to fixate over either.
When you’re ready to redeem your cash-back, you have the option of receiving a statement credit to offset purchases you’ve made or you can take the pure cash-back option and receive a check in the mail.
One relatively unique positive with the Capital One Savor card is that there is no minimum redemption requirement. This gives you much more autonomy when deciding the amount and frequency with which you use your cash-back.
When your eligible card is linked to PayPal, you can also checkout with PayPal and redeem your cash-back at a rate of $1 to $1.
Gift Cards
Like many other rewards credit cards, Capital One also gives cardholders the option to redeem their cash-back for gift cards. While this may seem convenient if you have plans to make a purchase with a certain store, we recommend you just take the cash-back or statement credit instead.
This is because both cash-back and statement credits are more flexible and can be used to cover purchases made with any retailer (as opposed to just 1).