Using Your Card for All Your Purchases
Since the card doesn’t have any bonus categories and instead rewards you with 2% cash-back on all of your purchases, this is really the best and only way to earn as much cash-back as possible. This way, you’ll know that every purchase you make is earning you 2% back towards paying down your loan or adding to your SoFi Invest or SoFi Money account.
Pay Down a SoFi Loan
SoFi’s first-ever consumer product was its loan product. Namely, the service allowed you to consolidate and refinance your student loan debt at more favorable rates. Now the platform even offers the ability to apply for and take out a personal loan directly through the app.
While both these services can be helpful depending on your situation, both are debt obligations that you’ll certainly want to get paid down. This is where the SoFi card can help because as you earn your 2% cash-back rewards, you can then apply those rewards directly towards your loan balance to help you pay it off more quickly.
Invest With SoFi
Looking to grow your net worth? SoFi’s investment platform allows you to purchase stocks and even cryptocurrencies directly through the app. You can buy and sell virtually any public stock through the platform, along with 28 different crypto assets. Plus, you can redeem rewards from your SoFi card to help boost these balances even further.
You can earn rewards on every purchase you make, then redeem them to grow your investment account, where ideally they will then grow even further. Talk about a win-win!
Save With SoFi
The SoFi Money account is a cash management account that allows you to earn a 0.25% APY on your deposits, has no account fees, and free ATMs at 55,000+ Allpoint locations. You can handle all of your bill payments using it, and if you set up direct deposit, you’ll automatically get your paycheck up to 2 days early each time you get paid.
Just like with a SoFi loan or a SoFi Invest account, you’ll earn 2% back when you redeem rewards towards your SoFi Money account. However, if you’ve already built up an emergency fund and your bills are paid for this month, you might be better off redeeming your rewards to pay down debt or invest, as both of those options will help you save more or grow your money faster over time.
Statement Credit
Finally, SoFi gives you the option to redeem rewards as a statement credit to offset purchases you made with your card. But when you redeem this way, you cut the value of your rewards from 2% back to just 1% back.
Because of this, we highly advise against redeeming this way. Not only can you do much better than earning 1% back on purchases with another card, but if you genuinely want to offset purchases made with your card then it would make more sense to earn 2% back by redeeming to your SoFi Money account, and then using those funds to pay the balance on your SoFi card.