Some of you OG readers may remember I made a post highlighting Oxygen Bank. They offered multiple Elements that offered different rewards. Each Element had an AF but you could qualify for them with a direct deposit or meeting a spend requirement. Read the original post below for how it worked
Thanks to Kung and EveryPennyEvan on the Simple Finances discord, I learned that Oxygen is making major negative changes to their offerings. Below I will detail the key changes they are making compared to what they were offering
TL:DR
Just like their email, this post is quite long. I unfortunately am away from home so no audio companion for this post for now (maybe soon) so I will give a synopsis of the key points here. I will be leaving some stuff out though if you want to see it all read on!
- No more annual fee waiver for elements based on deposits and spend
- Element Annual Fee is being raised for all tiers
- Spend to get a discount on another element AF is astronomical ($25k spend for $150 off Fire!!!!)
- Oxygen day requires you to wait for all your cash back & referral credits to come in on that day (8th of the month)
- $1 food and coffee is basically gone and tied to small list of merchants
- All cash back is now tied to small list of merchants
- Minimum spend for all cash back has been raised (some to $9.99 some to $24.99)
- You have to activate cash back every time you want to use it, it doesn’t just keep the previous activation
- You have to activate specific merchants for a specific cash back, not just the generic cash back
- Removed the Peloton and Netflix reimbursements
Upcoming Changes
I did not receive the email (thanks Kung for sharing the screenshots of the email shown below), but Oxygen emailed some customers sharing upcoming changes to their products. These changes go into effect on September 5th, 2023. I will break down each section they highlighted, share the changes and my thoughts on them
I also find it deceptive and unprofessional to make the email SO LONG in addition to not even sending it to me. No one is going to read all of this email (except me I guess) so most people won’t even be aware of the major negative changes below
Annual Fee Changes
UPDATE: I read this table wrong. The fees are going UP not down. The original fees were already ridiculous, now these are an insult.
Old text: These are welcomed changes. The annual fee was absolutely not worth it for almost any of these elements. I signed up using a Point referral program which waived the AF for the first year
APY Changes
This was never a key feature of Oxygen anyway so these changes are negative but don’t have much impact on the product IMO
Cash Back Changes
This is where the bulk of the changes are and I will be diving deep into the individual changes
Merchant Restrictions
Previously, the categories were mostly assessed using MCC or merchant category codes. Meaning, their cash back for things like $1 off fast food and coffee was really for any restaurant purchase or the gas category working with any gas brand. Below, they are changing to a merchant specific setup where each category will be tied to a small subset of merchants. Obviously a negative change
Cash Back Activation
Previously, you could activate your cash back offer once and it would remain active forever, you would just have to wait for the 24 hour or longer cooldown depending on the offer. This is being changed to the following
Once a cash back offer is used, you will no longer have any offer active. You must activate prior to every use
In addition, the offers must be activated per merchant. For example, previously I would activate the $1 cash back offer and use it at any restaurant. Now, not only is it limited to a small list of merchants, but I have to activate the offer at that specific merchant. Huge PITA
Cash Back Minimum Spend
The minimum spend for these offers used to be $3. This has now been raised to $9.99 and even on some others (see next section), they go up to $24.99 minimum
Previously I would purchase coffee on this card and save anywhere from 5%-33% on the purchase. Now the maximum you can earn is 10%. This makes the use case for this card even more niche and no longer useable for sub $10 transactions. This will genuinely change how I spend because I justified much of my coffee spending with the $1 discount
Spend Requirement for Earth Cash Back
Their free Element, Earth, used to offer 2% in all of their categories in addition to the $1 offer. Now, you must spend $350 per month to unlock this. The $1 offer is always available however
Paywalling Merchants
Not only did they add restrictive merchants, but they are also paywalling some of the merchants behind elements
More attractive merchants are now paywalled behind their higher elements with $49.99 and $199.99 AFs. The merchants exclusive to these Elements are listed below. Note, anything included in the Air element is also included in the Fire element, but not vice versa
- Air: HEB, Publix, Charge America, Tesla, Lyft, Citi Bike, CVS, Blue Apron, BP
- Fire: Oculus, Vitamin Shoppe, Zipcar, Home Depot, Sam’s Club, Staples, FedEx
Keep in mind, the limit on a single transaction for all of these cash back categories is $5. If you have Fire, you’d have to use an offer at it’s max value 40 times in a year just to recoup the Annual Fee. This was not an attractive proposition before but it makes it near impossible
Introduction of “Oxygen Day” & Cash Back Redemption
I assume they saw Bilt’s “Rent Day” and decided to copy it. Oxygen Day, which is the 8th of every month, is the only day you will be awarded for your cash back offers earned before that date. Meaning, if you make a purchase and earn cash back, you cannot redeem that cash back until the 8th. They did remove the $10 minimum for redemption, but for those who use the card more often, like myself, you may have preferred the $10 minimum to this new implementation
They also made it so your referral rewards will only credit on Oxygen Day
TSA Pre-Check/Global Entry
One of the only improvements, Air and Fire will now both offer TSA Pre-Check when it was previously only available to Fire. This is very nice as you can now get GE for $49.99 (Air’s AF). Oddly, there is no mention of the Priority Pass access Fire & Air currently get. I am unsure if this is going away or not
Netflix & Peloton Reimbursement Removal
Fire used to come with two months of a $15.49 credit to pay for Netflix and two months of a $12.99 credit to pay for Peloton Digital. These have both been removed
Oxygen Ambassador Rewards Addition
Oxygen used to allow you to qualify for your next year of any of their Elements for free (if you moved up you’d have to pay the difference) if you met specific spend/direct deposit requirements. This has been replaced with what they are calling “Ambassador Rewards”
These spend requirements are laughable. Who in their right mind is going to spend $4.2k in a year on a 2% debit card let alone $25k
International ATM Reimbursement
I did not know this was a thing but it is being removed as well
Takeways
These changes savagely gut the usefulness of Oxygen. I carry 5 of my over 30 active debit/credit cards in my wallet and Oxygen was one of those. They do not support Curve so I specifically juggled them in my wallet because of their $1 offer and used the Netflix reimbursement. With these changes, they will be removed from my wallet
Oxygen has been teasing changes coming to their rewards as if it were a good thing (which I knew it of course would not be) but this is a slap in the face to anyone who actually liked the product
I imagine the next thing to go will be the Referral program so get your $100 while you can (here is my referral link)
They mentioned you can opt out of these changes so I may call them and see what options they give for opting out. The fact that I did not receive this email at all and that the email was SO LONG shows they do not care about their customers. All of the important information, most people will not spend the time to actually read and notice has changed for the worse. Really bad look
Personal Finance 
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