Citi Simplicity Card Review - No Late Fees For Late Payments

Summary - The Citi Simplicity® Card is Citibank's latest credit card offer with a unique twist. This card will waive any late fees if a purchases or cash advance is made within the same billing period. Aside from this unique feature, it has an excellent 0% introductory apr offer for 21 months on both purchases and balance transfer. The apr is very low too. Read on....

No late fees? - The unique features of the Citi Simplicity Card is that if you make a late payment, your fees will be waived if you have made a purchase or cash advance during the same billing period. Balance transfers do not apply. (Note that late payment is often reported to the credit bureaus after 60 days and hence you do not ever want to be late if you can avoid it).

Fees - The Citi Simplicity Card has no annual fee. You get an introductory apr of 0% for both purchases and balance transfer for 18 months. For purchases, 0% apr applies from the date of account opening. However, for the 0% apr on balance transfers, it applies from the date of the transfer. And you also have 12 months to make the first balance transfer.

Other Features - The Citi Simplicity Card has features that cardholders should be taking advantage of. You can set up automatic payments so that payments can be taken from your bank account automatically. If you do this, you do not have to worry about late fees. You can also choose to receive email alerts on your bills and set up online payments. Citi also offers a free Identity Theft Solutions benefit to all cardholders. This service involves monitoring your card activities for fraudulent uses and also working with the credit bureaus if you become a victim of identity theft.

To be honest, the Citi Simplicity is an exact replica of their own vanilla cards, the Citi Platinum Select Card and the Citi Diamond Preferred Card. But let's still look into it.

Citi Simplicity vs Citi Platinum Select - Like I said earlier, for all intends an purposes, these are identical cards. The Citi Platinum Select Card has the same 21 month 0% balance transfer deal that this card has. But perhaps this card is slightly better in that you could get late payment fees waived.

Against Citi Diamond Preferred Rewards - The Citi Diamond Preferred Card also has identical features with both the Citi Platinum Select Card and the Citi Simplicity Card. But the Citi Diamond Preferred Card has a concierge service which is very rare for a no annual fee credit card. But if you are looking for a card to transfer your balance, then both these cards have identical 21 month introductory deals.

Versus Chase Slate - Chases' vanilla card is now called Slate from Chase (the officially name). It is different from the Simplicity Card because they have a feature called the BluePrint. BluePrint is a feature which allows you to define an expense category which you want "technically" to be paid off. So even if you carry a balance, you will not be charged any interest on that category of expense that you chose to "pay in full". At this moment, the Chase Slate is waiving any balance transfer fee on their 0% 12 month deal.

Conclusion - The late fee waiver is an excellent feature. To avoid late fees, the best thing to do is to actually set up an automatic payment with Citibank so that your credit card payment is automatically deducted from your bank account each month (you can never be accused to late payment). However, for those who insist on sending a check or to pay bills online manually, this is a very useful feature. (Please note however, that a late payment will still be reported to the credit bureaus if you are late for 60 days).

However, even without the late fee waiver feature, we would recommend the Citi Simplicity® Card to those looking for a low interest rate credit card. It is a low apr, a very good 0% apr introductory offer for 18 months for both purchases and balance transfer. Please also check our balance transfer deals page for the best 0% deals.

Verdict : Highly recommended.

Positives

• Late fee waiver
• No annual fee
• Low apr
• 0% apr for 12 months (both purchase and balance transfer)