Important Update: I've created a new post with all the new updates of the Plutus card in August 2024:
In a previous post I summarized the best crypto credit cards. In my opinion the best ones are Plutus and Nexo. The first one being the one where you can get more cashback in crypto and where you don’t need to know much about crypto to get it.
By just using the Plutus card and paying with your Euros or pounds in your daily shopping you get rewarded with up to 9% of cashback. But how does it work? No one usually gives free money, even if it’s just cashback.
Well, the idea behind is that when you earn your coins in Plutus, there is going to be more people holding the Plutus coins (PLU) and the more people that holds the money, the more interested people would be, and the value will increase.
To make this more interesting, the more PLU you earn, the higher your level of rewards becomes. For example, having 0 PLU means that you are only entitled to 3% of cashback, while having accumulated 3000 PLU means that you get 9% of cashback on everything you buy. This motivates people to hold the coins and therefore the value of the coin increases.
In this guide I will explain everything that I know about the Plutus card from my experience.
From cashback rewards, levels of reward, and if there are any risks or costs. I will also explain how I use it to earn back about 70 PLU (250€) per month, as well as how to pay taxes on your earnings.
I’ve taken my time to write this long and detailed guide to Plutus so that you know everything you need to know to use Plutus from June 2024 and to be able to get up to 9% of cashback.
Plutus card explained in details
1. How to make an account and use the Plutus card?
Well, the first thing to clarify is how to use the Plutus card and how to make an account. Making an account is very straightforward:
Download the Plutus App. My referral link here . If you use that both you and I get 10€. You would help me a lot!
Signup with an email address and a password.
Fill in your account information data.
Add your name as it shows up on your ID card, including middle names.
Pass the identification check. Check this guide from Plutus if needed.
Do a 20 EUR/GBP account deposit. Check this guide if needed.
Order your card, and activate it on delivery.
- Tip: If you want, you can order a physical card for 10€ but the virtual one is free. I’ve been using the virtual one with Google Pay and Apple Pay and I never had problems.
How to use it?
- It’s like any normal card. You basically put funds on it and then you can use them to buy anywhere where debit cards are accepted.
- The rewards will be computed automatically once you spend the money and will appear in your Plutus account one or two days after buying with the card.
- You will be able to withdraw them once 45 days have passed (my guess is that this is to avoid people selling the rewards automatically).
- So, in principle, there are almost no risks associated to it. You can pay with € and get rewards in crypto. However, the amount of rewards you can earn depends on the level in which you’re in, which I explain next.
2. Rewards and costs explained in detailed
There are two types of levels to consider in Plutus:
1) Your subscription plan: there are 3 types of subscription ranging from 6.99€ to 19.99€, each of them giving you a higher amount of monthly crypto that you can receive as well as more perks.
2) The amount of PLU you hold: this is the amount of PLU that you have in your account, or in any other crypto wallet that you can associate to the account. The more you have, the more % you will get back and the more perks of 10€ value you will get. A perk is basically a cashback reward of the whole 10€ and it works when buying in partner shops. Plutus offers lots of them (most of the supermarkets in Europe, tank stations, Netflix, Amazon, etc.) See the list here:
Both the holding levels and the subscription plans can be combined. Depending on how much you spend per month and how much you think that Plutus is going to keep having value, it’s worth it to have a different level. In general, the higher the levels, the more rewards you can have but the more PLU you need to hold.
Starter plan
Last year Plutus was offering only 3% of cashback of up to 250€ spendings monthly for free and 1 perk of your choice in which they would give you up to 10€ back in form of Pluton, the Plutus coin (PLU).That was of course attractive because by just doing your normal groceries without having any risk at all you could earn 17.5€ a month worth of PLU.
This year (2024), this has ended. To have the same service you need to pay 6.99€ monthly, which is the so-called starter plan. It’s still worth it because you get 17.5€ in PLU a month by just paying 6.99€. However, if the coin is going down by more than 60%, you may be paying more than what you get, which means, since this year there’s a bit of a risk involved.
Everyday plan
That’s in my opinion the most attractive subscription plan because it costs 9.99€ a month and you get 2 perks of 10€ value plus 3% on up to 500€. This means that for just 3€ more you get up to 35€ in PLU every month. That means that the value of the coin should have to go down by 72.4% for you not to have profit. So, it’s the option with more rewards per risk.
Premium plan
That costs 19.99€ and you get 3 perks of 10€ plus 3% on up to 1000€. This means of course that you can earn up to 60€ of PLU every month but you would need to always spend 1000€ with the card and 10€ in 3 different shops where the perks are offered. The risk of losing the value is here 66.7%.
What about holding the Plutus?
To go straight to the point, I explained in detail how it works for the first level and for the others I’ve just updated the values accordingly.
Hero
If you hold 250 PLU, you get automatically 4 perks of 10€ value extra per month and 4% on your monthly earnings. This means having 250 PLU in your account, but you don’t need to pay anything per month. The only risk associated to it is that the value of the 250 PLU can decrease over time.
This combined with the plans before starts getting interested in terms of monthly rewards. Namely, having the everyday plan would mean 80€ worth of PLU per month. The question that comes naturally then, is: if I earn 80€ PLU per month every month and the coin keeps the same value, when will I have “protected” the PLU that I hold? You can go here for the answer.
Veteran
PLU to hold: 500
Rewards: 5% on everything
Perks: 5 extra
Legend
PLU to hold: 1000
Rewards: 6%
Perks: 6 extra
Myth
PLU to hold: 1500
Rewards: 7%
Perks: 7 extra
GOAT (spoiler, that’s my level)
PLU to hold: 2000
Rewards: 8%
Perks: 8 extra
Since this is my level, I will summarize again what it means. This combined with Premium allows you to have 8% on 1000€ plus 11 perks (3+8) every month. A potential of earning 190€ a month. In fact, Plutus offered a reward cap extra of 10000€ for one year if you increased to this level last year, which means that I have a potential of earning 990€ per month worth of PLU.
Honey Badge
PLU to hold: 3000
Rewards: 9%
Perks: 9 extra
3. Are there any risks of having the Plutus card?
If you don’t have any subscription plan, there are no costs and no risks associated to having the card. But since 2024, you can also not earn any rewards or cashback without having a subscription plan.
If you have a subscription plan (e.g. everyday plan) or you hold your PLU to get rewards, the risks that are associated to the Plutus card depend on the value of the coin. For example, if you pay 9.99€ a month for your subscription and you get 35€ in PLU every month, the main risk is that if the coin goes down to more than 72.4%, your 35€ would be worth 10€ and then you would not have earned anything (if you sell your coin at that point).
If you have earned PLU (before 2024) and you hold them, they’re basically “free” so you don’t have risks (your risks are only on your free rewards being less). However, if you’re buying some PLU yourself to increase your holding level, as explained above, you are at risk of the Plutus coin losing value and therefore, you are losing value of what you paid initially.
As a summary, as in any other cryptocurrency or stock, the main risk is the value of the coin going down.
4. How do I use it on my day to day?
As mentioned above, I started using Plutus in 2023 and I started accumulating PLU enough to go up on different levels up to GOAT. That means that I have 8% of rewards in form of PLU on everything I buy plus 8 extra perks. I am using the everyday subscription plan, which gives me a total of 10 monthly perks and a total of 500€ cap / mo.
This combined with the 10000€ rewards extra cap that was offered in September allows me to earn PLU every month on up to 10500€ spendings, which is of course much more than what we spent. It has the potential of earning 950€ / month on cashback and perks. But how much do I really earn per month?
My wife and I use Plutus every day for groceries, shopping and in general every time we can pay with card. Since we have a virtual card, we can install it in any mobile phone with NFC.
5. How much do I earn per month?
Having everyday plan and GOAT level gives me this 8% rewards and 10 monthly perks for 10€ a month. Since we use it in our household for common spendings and we are two people, we can calculate our earnings in PLU by assuming we spend what the average German spends per month, which according to this site is about 1500€ per month per person (for 2 people 3000€). This means that for two people, we would be earning an average of
8% of 3000€ (cashback) + 10 * 10 € (perks) – 10€ (costs of the subscription) = 330€
each month.
6. What if the PLU value decreases over time?
The main risk of using the Plutus card is that your earnings become less valuable than what you pay to get them of course.
If you don’t buy any PLU to increase your staking level, the maximum cost is 20€ per month if you get the Premium card. As mentioned in detailed above, the value should have to decrease by more than 70% for you to not have been worth it. Once you have more PLU accumulated, so that you get to a newer stacking level, you have many more rewards per month, which decreases this risk significantly.
For example, if we pay 10€ but we get 330€ back in PLU every month (as mentioned above), the value of PLU would have to be reduced by 97% for us not to have been worth it. I know that it takes some time to get to this level (for me it took me about 1 year, but I’ve been stacking a little bit of PLU, since I thought it was a nice project), but having enough patience, you can achieve a stacking level that allows you to have a similar “protection” in case the PLU reduces in value.
7. When will I have earned so many PLU that there is no more risk of the coin value going down to zero?
This is probably the key question to have some kind of objective. (example below)In general, your App from Plutus lets you know how much PLU you have earned over the entire time of you having the card. When you see that you have earned as many PLU as what you required for your stacking level, you’re basically in what I call “net zero”.
Net zero means that you can sell all the PLU that you were stacking externally to have the stacking level and you will still retain the same stacking level for free, from all earned Plutus. So, everything, you earn from this time on is basically for free and you don’t have any risks associated to money related to euros.
For example, if you are having a stacking level of Hero, by having stacked 250 Plutus in an external wallet, you will be able to sell all of them when you will have earned 250 PLU via the Plutus App in cashback. Because then, you can sell all external 250 PLU and from that point on, all money you earned will be for free without any risk on losing value of what you purchased with FIAT (euros, dollars, etc)
8. How do you pay taxes on PLU?
This section is a bit trickier and more difficult to answer because it depends on the country you reside. I don’t want to give tax advice because it’s not my expertise and it’s also dependent on each different country and its legislations. However, I can say that for some countries, having cashback is free of charge by default because it counts as a sale on the product price.
However, if you’re getting rewards of other kinds (unclear with perks for example), it’s probable that you need to pay taxes on these ones. As I said, this is only my experience in Germany, and I can link to a website for taxing cryptos in German that was very useful to me but for other countries it may differ.
To be more specific, in Germany, you need to tax staking rewards, airdrops and so on as part of a special income and there is an exemption limit of 256€ per year and I do this every year with my earnings from my different crypto exchanges that give me different percentage of cashback. See my previous post for the details in how much cashback can you earn staking at different exchanges.
9. How can you stake PLU to increase your rewards faster?
The best way to stake PLU to increase your rewards faster is to create a defi wallet using Metamask or Binance for example and then linking your wallet number to your Plutus account. You don’t need this step to use Plutus every month with the typical perks and the low percentages. This step is a bit more technical because it involves the use of crypto exchanges. I describe it here in details for people that are interested in doing so. Actually, doing so is part of the steps of being your own bank (BYO Bank), which is the part of controlling the money yourself and not a bank. See my previous post for more details on how to be your own bank.
To transfer the PLU you need of course to buy it. Now, you can buy it in Metamask directly or in other crypto exchanges offering the coins for trading such as Kucoin or Huobi HTX. I’ve been using both of them and they work fine.
They have similar fee costs and you can transfer crypto or FIAT (Euros, pounds, etc.) directly to the exchanges using SEPA transfer at no cost.
When transferring your PLU to your Metamask or Binance wallets it’s extremely important to match the Network of the transaction. The PLU coin work with the Ethereum Network, so you should be sure you use the classic Ethereum Network for this transfer.
10. Conclusion
I would recommend using Plutus because it’s a way of earning crypto without you needing to know much about this world and with few risks associated to it (mostly the risk of getting lower rewards if the value of PLU goes down over time). You can just pay with your currency (Euros, Pounds, etc.) and earn crypto directly by using your card! You can earn crypto from 3% to 9% depending on the amount of PLU coins that you own and your subscription plan (as explained here).
The Plutus card is a Mastercard and is accepted anywhere where you can pay with a Mastercard. It also works with Google Pay and Apple Pay.
I hope you liked this guide from BYO Banking where I explained the Plutus card in details on how to earn crypto with the Plutus card by just using it on your day to day.
Comentarios