How much cashback will I be losing out now that I’ll be earning 10x Discovery Miles? [Calculator]

I received another “good news” email from Discovery Card the other day… Subject = “Now MORE places to earn up to 10x more Discovery Miles”, and I read it with the good news anticipation that it called for… until I got to the last paragraph.  Lucky I was used to receiving these emails with misleading subject lines.  See here for more info: https://www.discovery.co.za/portal/individual/credit-card-news-cashback-miles-benefit

Here’s the paragraph that “takes it away”:  “As Incredible Connection, Toys R Us, Babies R Us, Reggies and The Pro Shop become Discovery Miles Multiplier partners, from 15 April, you will no longer earn cash back when shopping at these stores.”

Ok, so how much cashback hath Discovery taken away?

Well, I’m on Diamond Vitality level, so I get 20% cashbacks calculated on a maximum monthly spend of R10,000.
To do that, my total credit card bill needs to be 5x the spend, so that’s a total bill of R50,000.

That means a cashback of R2,000 taking the purchase down to R8,000.

What will that same purchase cost from 15th April 2017, ie: how much will I be losing out?
I have a platinum credit card – so the monthly miles cap is 10,000.

Well, according to my calculations, it will be R1,333 less in my pocket

Here’s the tabulated figures for someone that is on Diamond (and has been on Vitality for more than 5 years):



The miles are also capped per month… which isn’t mentioned in the email.
The cap is linked to the type of Discovery credit card that you have:
Blue or Gold cards: 5,000 miles per month… Platinum card: 10,000 miles per month.
(see here for the info’s hiding place: terms and conditions: https://www.discovery.co.za/discovery_coza/web/linked_content/pdfs/card/terms_and_conditions/discovery_miles_ts_and_cs.pdf)

As you can see there are (true to form) lots and lots of loops to jump through – and it’s not surprising that people are so “accepting” of all these changes!

To see how much you are losing out, use my handy calculator and change the 3 purple cells: DiscoveryMilesComparedToCashbackCalculator_2017.xls