Last Saturday, I finally received my “free” iPad from MoneySmart through the credit card gift programme. I applied on 5 Jan 2026 and received my iPad on 25 Jul 2026. That’s almost 7 months of waiting.
Well, it’s free anyway, right? No, it is not free in my case. In their marketing promotion, it appears that if you fulfil the credit card criteria, you can redeem a few listed gifts for free. For example, an iPad.
However, what you actually receive is not the gift, but SmartPoints. And you’ll be using them to redeem the actual gift. But it makes no difference, right? Since at the end of the day you still get an iPad? Not exactly.
On 5 Jan 2026, the amount of SmartPoints you were going to get allowed you to redeem the iPad. No issue. But the problem is, by the time I received my SmartPoints on 1 Jul 2026, the amount was no longer enough to redeem the same iPad. WTF.
So the points required went up, and I needed to pay $130 to purchase enough SmartPoints to redeem my “free” iPad. Again, WTF.