INTRODUCTION

If you are new to credit card and have yet to read my articles below, I recommend you read them first before proceeding:

As mentioned in my article The Best Credit Cards in Malaysia 2025, generally, credit cards users can be categorized into many categories:

1. Cash Back Fans;
2. Air Miles Fans;
3. Both Cash Back and Air Miles Fans to optimize;
4. Debt accumulation and a slave to the bank paying interest as no money to pay with cash (e,g, refusing to go to government hospital but admit to a Private Hospital to accumulate debt or also applies to no money to Duit Now to eWallets where we are not imposed any fees);

For this article I will only touch on Cash Back related to Petrol (and today EV charging too).

For most people, Petrol is part of their monthly essential expenses in addition to their housing loan, car loan, groceries, mobile plans, broadband bill and utility bills. Therefore, with the ever increasing cost of living where the government have been introducing all kind of new taxes (e.g. Shopee Shipping we now need to pay extra because of tax, SST expanded since 1st July 2025 and 2% on dividends effective 2025 and etc) and petrol subsidy to be revised.

The government has yet to officially announced T15 classification where this group of people will not receive any subsidy for petrol. But the problem is our government’s classification is based on household income (big difference between a bachelor staying alone and a married couple with children or even single mum) and NOT DISPOSABLE household income!

I tell you, married couples with children classified under M40 or T20 and some T15 in Malaysia are having a hard time trying to stay afloat to survive! Seriously, a household with children in Klang Valley earning RM15K a month after deducting housing loan, cars’ loans, children related expenses, Groceries, Utility Bills, Astro, Petrol, maid (not necessary for the children but to take care of aged parent and etc have very little money left for anything. On the other hand, a bachelor who is renting or staying in his own home and categorised as M40 may have lots of money to burn!

Yes, the government should consider the number of children in a household in determining the categories of B20, M40 and T20 because they know it cost a small fortune to raise just one single child.

According to AKPK (a government agency), minimum cost for a child 0 to 6 years old is RM3,108.33 per month (RM37,300 per year)!!!

Above images are from AKPK, so the government is not aware of the cost of a baby and then feeding the baby until he/she graduates?

Because of the high cost of living, many people are in debt – i.e. from car loans, personal loans and credit cards!

You think the credit card issuers are so generous to give you FREE money from your essential expenses? The fact is the card issuers know most people will end up having Monthly Outstanding Balances where they will pay interest to them. So they come out with different credit cards to entice one to sign up, basically all credit cards’ features/benefits are marketing gimmicks to entice a person to sign up for the credit card. Credit cards are designed to make money for the card issuers and not to benefit the card holders!

However, those of you who do read my articles are taught how to benefit with different credit cards based on your spending pattern and most importantly not paying a sen in interest to the credit card issuers! Basically the first rule is get a FREE FOR LIFE credit cards that have no annual fees. The only time where one pays annual fee for a credit card is that they earn much more in return – example, pay annual fee of RM3K but they earn enough air miles to redeem a one way First Class ticket to Europe which cost more so for this than RM10K).

So for this article, since it is about cash back for Petrol, where we can earn between RM50 to RM100 per month in cash back, it is imperative that we hold a FREE FOR LIFE credit card.

To start your lesson on cash back credit cards for Petrol, click here to page 2.