Home Trust Preferred Visa Card Review

Home Trust Preferred Visa Credit Card Review

The Home Trust Preferred Visa credit card is one of Canada's only two no-annual-fee credit cards with no foreign transaction fee.

If you are not fully aware of credit card foreign transaction fee of a credit card, whenever you buy something with a foreign currency, your credit card issuer charges you an additional 2.5% markup for providing the conversion service. There are some cards that waive these 2.5%, which are cards known as cards with no foreign transaction fee and are one of the best methods of payments abroad. You can read more about this in detail here.

Given that this is a great benefit, not many cards offer it, and most of them come with an annual fee. The only two that come with no annual fee and offer this benefit are the Home Trust Preferred and Brim Mastercard.

In short, we recommend going for the Brim card because it's a slightly better version of the HomeTrust card. In addition, we don't recommend using either of these two cards for non-foreign transactions because neither of these two cards has great rewards.

In this post, we will go into the details of the Home Trust card and discuss its various aspects in great detail.

The Rewards

How You Earn Rewards

The rewards of the Home Trust card are very simple.

• 1% cashback on all eligible purchases. Foreign transactions don't receive cashback

  
  

Even though you don't earn 1% on foreign purchases, this card is more favourable than many other cards because the 2.5% fee waiver is worth it. The 1% on all eligible purchases is a very average cashback rate which many other credit cards can beat. Let's compare the cashback rate with some other popular cashback credit cards.

Reward comparison to other popular cashback credit cards

Home Trust Preferred vs Brim Mastercard

Brim earns 1% on all purchases, the same as what Home Trust earns, with the only difference that Brim also earns that 1% on foreign purchases. Given that both have no foreign transaction fee, BRIM would be a slightly better card because of this slight difference.

Home Trust Preferred vs Simplii Financial™ Cash Back Visa Card

Simplii Financial earns 4% cashback on food (With a $200 reward annual cap, meaning $5000 spent), 1.5% cashback on gas, groceries, drugstore, recurring payments (With a $225 reward annual cap), and 0.5% on everything else.

So given that Simplii earns a lot on many of the more popular spendings, but for some people, if they have a lot of spending in categories other than the ones mentioned, BRIM would be better, which is something most people don't have. So, for most people, the Simplii card is a better one.

Home Trust Preferred vs Rogers Mastercard

If you are a Rogers, Shaw or Fido customer, you will earn 2% cashback on all your purchases with the Rogers Mastercard (3% if you redeem for Rogers, Fido or Shaw purchases). It's very obvious that the rewards you can get with the Rogers card are much higher than Home Trust preferred, and if you are looking for rewards, the Rogers card is a much better choice.

If you are looking to maximize your rewards, you could use FinlyWealth's credit card calculator to find the best card for you using your own spending pattern!

Note on rewards

Our general recommendation is that if you decide to go for the HomeTrust card, is that you should also carry another credit card as well. One which you use in Canada with the goal of maximizing the rewards you earn and the HomeTrust card when you travel abroad. This combination would give you much better value than just using one card.

Welcome Bonus

Unfortunately, the HomeTrust Preferred card does not come with any signup bonuses; therefore, there is nothing else to note here.

2 benefit of Home Trust Preferred

1. No Annual fee

Having to pay no fee to access the no foreign transaction fee benefit is an obvious benefit of this card.

2. No Foreign Transaction fee

As mentioned multiple times, the No Foreign Transaction fee benefit of Home Trust might be the only reason someone might want to go for this card as there are not any other mentionable benefits.

2 downside of Home Trust Preferred

1. Not the best card for Canadian Purchases

As discussed in comparison with other card sections, there are many better alternative cards that give much higher rewards compared to Home Trust, so for your transactions in Canada, definitely take a look at using other credit cards.

2. Not that many benefits especially compared to the alternative

When compared to many other cards with no annual fee, this credit card does not have a very comprehensive list of benefits, and it's missing some basics, like an extended warranty.

But when compared to the other no annual fee credit cards with no foreign transaction fee, meaning Brim, it's a much worse card because the brim card comes with a lot of extra benefits such as Boingo Wi-fi hotspot, Travel accident insurance, Event Ticket protection and mobile device insurance, making Home Trust a much less favourable card compared to Brim.

Final Verdict

In general, we don't recommend going for this card. It's not a great card to use for transactions within Canada, and if you are looking for a card with no annual fee and no foreign transaction fee, the Brim Mastercard is a much better alternative.