There's gift I've ever received has to be a bike when I was younger, a pedal bike.

It was a sort of slick little road bike and I remember it was all like it was so it was all wrapped up

but it was so obvious what it was obviously because nothing shaped like a bike and I had a little ribbon on it and I was so

I guess. For that was a life changer and I'm still sort of big on cycling around my area now so for that one change me a little.

Joy in every sip with red cups now back at Starbucks.

It's my pleasure to welcome you to the Clark Howard Show. Our mission is to serve and empower you so you make better financial decisions in your life.

The first thing I need to address today is something I can't believe how many questions we've had about it calls more than we've had on any other topic in years.

City is changing the double cash visa so the question is what does that mean to you and me I actually have one of these cards.

I'll tell you what I think I'm going to do how it affects me and what you need to know about your own card if you have a city double cash and later there's big happenings in the airline industry that could have an effect on your wallet.

Two airlines want to merge and so to a lot of people it makes something twice as bad it's spirit and frontier that are big sources of complaints you put them together.

Did the complaints square or did they double what happens and I'm going to tell you what it all means and where we're headed with air fairs generally in the industry.

So never underestimate the ability of MBAs to really screw something up.

City bank has this intensely popular product called city double cash.

I mean it couldn't be easier you get one percent cash back on everything you buy and then another one percent cash back when you pay your bill two percent cash back.

I mean they could be simpler they could just say hey you got two percent cash back on everything is charged but still it's simple as could be and it shows something to me about.

The lack of trust and institutions that people have there's been an uproar.

For a couple reasons one if city bank did a worse job of explaining the changes with double cash than they've done I don't know how they could.

So all those MBAs you need to go back and take Mrs. Wilson's English course from junior high school and learn how to write a simple English sentence again because the explanation is terrible so the explanation has been so bad.

That people have automatically jumped to conclusions that the card is going to be something you should dump that it's losing all its benefits and Christ I gotta kick out of this you know there are all these like we do this stuff on Clark dot com where we review credit cards and there are lots of credit card review sites and I've been reading how they've been covering the double cash story.

And what's been so funny is that the writer will say well you're still going to get two percent cash back it's just you got to go through an additional step to get your money and then people were writing responses I read three different of these reviews and people were writing in the comments section no you're wrong they're taking it away from us and we're only going to got one percent cash back now I don't know why you think we're still going to get two percent.

I mean okay so first things first city bank unless you're a real intention is diabolical with the change in double cash unless you're planning as a second step to degrade the cash benefit why would you take something that people just understood what it was and make it totally convoluted by tying it in with the

program the city bank culturally is all tied into this thing called thank you points and they're pushing cards that have thank you points so with the double cash what happens is you now have thank you points instead of direct cash and you can convert your thank you points directly at the same ratio to get your cash back you just have to go through the extra step but wait there's less because

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