Why I finally cancelled my UOB One Credit Card

I've been using the UOB One credit card for a long time - I remember using it to pay for my house reno in 2020. At that time I was consistently making quite a few large purchases so I could hit the 2k minimum spend in order to get 5% off. I think CardUp was also still accepting it at the time so I am pretty sure I used it to pay for my house mortgage as well. Then CardUp spends became ineligible so I cancelled it for the first time because I could only hit the lower tiers that gave 3.33%. Also there were other cards like DBS Live Fresh that gave higher cashback anyway. 

Fast-forward to 2022 or so, there were promos and during covid + wars the banks increased their interest rates and I signed up for the UOB One high interest savings account and got the UOB One card together with it. And that marked the start of my kind-of-annoying experience with the card.

1. I misread "statement month" as "calendar month", and missed out on the first quarter's cashback.

Considering I had this card before and was NOT new to credit cards, this was stupid of me. But that was also because the DBS Live Fresh card cashback was calculated based on calendar month, and somehow I had thought UOB had also changed their terms. But anyway, this sort of forebode my poor relationship with the card lol.

2. EZ-link card transactions are often posted late, even up to 5 days late. So one of my transactions did not make it within the month I intended it to, and I also "lost" the cashback. UOB was nice enough to accept my appeal though, since it was my first time. So I did still get the cashback for that month.

This is not the card issuer's fault I know, but because cashback was based on quarterly spending, so having to give up 3 months of cashback which I could have earned elsewhere was pretty annoying.

3. Refunds count for the statement month instead of the actual transaction, so I lost cashback for another quarter!

So this one pulled the trigger for me, because I had literally spent sufficiently for the quarter, but because I had a refund for a previous transaction from a different statement month, they disqualified my cashback. With regards to the refund, it was for an air ticket and I knew I was going to get a refund so I had spent extra for that statement month in order to hit the $500 minimum spend if I excluded the air ticket transaction. However the refund was credited in the next statement month so this deducted from my spending in that month, disqualifying me from getting cashback for that whole quarter.

So they called me to try and convince me to keep the card, but I was done man. Some other card issuers would offer an additional cashback to keep their clients, but UOB didn't so obviously I cancelled without thinking twice. And in retrospect I am really quite glad I decided to part ways for good. Like we are never ever getting back together haha. The card is just too much commitment and risk, plus I can only get/use the cashback in the following quarter.

Yep so that's that, just wanted to document the experience and I hope it can help some people decide on whether to (not) sign up or keep/cancel the card.

TTFN~