Frequent Miler on the Air - Amex end game: What to do once you've signed up for all the cards? | Ep154 | 6-11-22

Episode Date: June 11, 2022

Yes, you can continue to march on the Amex point parade even after you've signed up for all the cards. 00:53 Giant Mailbag: What's the best loyalty program outside of the United States? 4:18 Mattress running the numbers: Magazines.com stacking deals https://frequentmiler.com/magazines-com-citi-offer-giving-15-on-20-spend-stack-with-aa-portal-simplymiles-or-40x-rakuten/ 9:08 What crazy thing did....Curve do this week? https://frequentmiler.com/is-the-curve-card-ready-for-prime-time-hint-not-yet/ 14:25 Main Event: Amex end game 15:52 No Lifetime Language offers (NLL) 19:26 A "lifetime" may be shorter than you think https://frequentmiler.com/bending-amexs-lifetime-rule/ 22:50 Downgrade / Upgrade path 26:11 Ways to earn more points with your existing cards (first up: referrals) 31:11 Authorized user / Additional cardholder bonuses https://frequentmiler.com/20k-membership-rewards-bonus-with-new-authorized-user-and-2k-spend-targeted/ 34:07 Pay Over Time bonuses https://frequentmiler.com/amex-20000-mr-for-enrolling-in-pay-over-time-check-link-to-see-if-youre-targeted/ 41:04 Retention Offers https://frequentmiler.com/a-well-timed-retention-offer-yields-18-75x-without-a-new-account/ 44:45 Post roast Nick Roasts Marriott https://frequentmiler.com/marriott-award-booking-adventure/ 48:21 Greg Roasts Nick https://frequentmiler.com/the-hidden-cost-of-point-transfers-should-you-take-advantage-of-that-transfer-bonus/ 53:09 Question of the Week: I got an Amex authorized user bonus. How long do I need to keep the AU accounts open? Join our email list: https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ Music credit: Annie Yoder

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did City do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event. Frequent Mylar on the air starts now. Today's main event, the Amex Endgame. What to do once you've already signed up for all the cards?

All the cards? All the cards. As you know, Amex is constantly coming out with amazing sign-up bonuses. And so a lot of us have been serially signing up for one after the other. But what do you do once you're through them all? We've got some great tips.

And we will- It's not over. It's not over. Not over till it's over. No, the end game does not mean you're done. Nope. Right. Spoiler alert.

All right. Time to dig into the giant mailbag. Today's giant mail comes from, I don't know, an unnamed source. Unsigned. We've had a lot of discussion. Okay. No return address. So, unsigned. We've had a lot of discussion about what the best loyalty program is in the U.S. I'd be curious as to your thoughts about which is the best outside the U.S. I've noticed that overseas loyalty program recognition can be incredible. And yeah, so what this person is

talking about, we've heard many times and some of us may have experienced that you might go to a, even like a holiday inn or something like that in Asia and get incredible service, incredible elite recognition. Whereas in the U S you know, you'd be lucky to get anything. So I brought this up, not because I have an answer. This is not question of the week time. But rather, it'd be very hard, I think, for our team to have a strong opinion about what loyalty program is best overseas, because we've only been to so many, you know, overseas, we've only participated in so many programs, you know, so what I'm, the reason I brought this up is so that people can let us know if you've had extraordinary

experiences overseas, thanks to your elite status with whatever hotel program, let us know, send it to mailbag at frequentmiler.com and just let us know what, what loyalty program was it? What hotel was it? And what country was it in? And it'll be interesting to see, you know, maybe we'll get an idea from that, who, who, which program gives you the most over the top, incredible, you know, benefits from the loyalty program. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if that varies by country or at least part of the world. I'm sure. Yeah. I would expect that I probably would, because like you said, I mean, we've gotten fantastic service from even chains that you wouldn't expect in Asia in particular.

And, you know, I mentioned that because people are often asking me about how to book Turkish Miles and Smiles awards because they can be really challenging with United. And I often tell people I email a bunch of ticket offices. And I've said, you know, sometimes you might want to email some of the foreign ones. And I've had decent luck with some of the ones in Asia because, again, that customer service culture is stronger. And so I expected and rightfully so. It seems that I would get some more responsive answers from some of the offices in that part of the world. Not all of them, by the way. So let me be clear about that.

But anyway, so, yeah, I think it probably will vary, but that'll be interesting to hear. You know, I've done a lot of travel. I've traveled to a lot of countries, but a lot of that travel was before I discovered miles and points. So my, my experiences, I feel like when I really think about it here are pretty limited in terms of the number of chains I've experienced abroad. So I'm curious to hear what people say. Yeah. Same here. Same here. In most of my abroad experience has been in Europe where I haven't noticed a big difference between how I'm treated there than in the U.S. But maybe there are some countries in Europe where you would do so. We'll find out.

Interesting. All right. Yeah. Okay. So I think that brings us to Mattress Running the Numbers. And so, no, wait. Am I putting things out of order? It's okay. If you want to jump ahead

to mattress running, we could loop back to crazy thing. That's okay. Okay, fine. Let's do it. Let's do it. Mattress running the numbers. So this week we're going to talk about mattress running the numbers. And so everybody knows that the finest mattresses in the world are built on magazine pages. So tell me, Greg, how can we do a mattress run with magazines? Yeah. So this has nothing to do with mattress running. We're using this segment to talk about it like a cute little deal. So here's the thing. Magazines.com is available through some card link offers right now. You can get $15 back on $20 spend out through city merchant offers if you get targeted for that offer, which it's broadly targeted or the same deal, 15 back on 20 with an Amex offer if you have that. Either one of those,

I wouldn't do it by itself because who wants a magazine even if it costs $5 these days? I mean, maybe I do. No, no, that was exactly my thought. I mean, I'll cut right to the chase before it even gets to any more of this. I was like, who still pays for a magazine? I mean, these things are free, aren't they? If you want a magazine, probably get it for free. Keep going though. Let's finish this up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the other thing is, at least as we're recording this, you can get 40 points per dollar through the Rakuten portal. And so even if you're just doing cash back, if you buy $20 worth of magazines, that's $8 back. If you get membership

rewards points back instead and you value them more than a penny each, then that's more, but let's just use $8. So now we're, we're slightly ahead. So $23 for $20 in magazines. I wouldn't bother with just that if you didn't want the magazine at all, but you know what, if you're, if you have the city merchant offer and you have an account with simply miles, which you could get for free, look in there, see if you could find magazines.com because you get 695 American Airlines miles for free because it has the magazines.com offer. You get that in addition to the other stacking things that I mentioned.

So combine all that stackery, you get a handful of American Airlines miles, which count towards your loyalty points. So that gets you a tiny bit, a tiny bit further towards American Airlines elite status. The reason I like this, it's so little that it's almost like, why even bother? But it's also just so darn easy. So you just sign up for the, if you have it, the City Merchant offers and the Simply Miles and then click through the Rakuten portal, find a magazine that costs between 20 and $23.

I found, I think it was Travel and Leisure for like $21.95 or something like that. And you've made a tiny profit and you're getting those American Airlines smiles on top of it. As soon as you sign up, go back into magazines.com and change the subscription to not auto renew. So that takes another 10 seconds to do and you're done. And, you know, that's a good tip. That's a good tip. The turning off the auto renewal is a particularly good tip for that because you don't want to get hit with the fee. You know, you mentioned travel and leisure and I was like,

Oh, I've been getting that for free for the last year because T-Mobile had one of their T-Mobile Tuesday deals where you could pick a free magazine and, and I got a bunch of lines on T-Mobile. So we got, we get a bunch of free magazines, but the Travel and Leisure recently, I must've hit the year that it was up because I got an email saying that I was about to be charged for it. I was like, thankfully they sent me an email ahead of time. They told me I was about to be charged and I did cancel it in time. But anyway, this is actually a little bit better than my free magazine. I was like, who pays for a magazine? I got mine for free, but this is actually a slightly profitable deal. So I guess it's better than free, slightly better than free, but a little bit better.

I mean, if those miles will end up pushing you over a threshold with American Airlines, well, all the more power to you. The thing is, if you're interested in American Airlines status, I think each time these easy little deals come along, you have to just kind of hop on them because you know, if they'll add up over time and hopefully get you somewhere. It's true. It's true. Hopefully, hopefully. Okay. So there you go. Magazines.com for some easy American Airlines loyalty points and other stuff. So make sure you check that one out. And there's a post in the link, of course, will be in the description as it always is. So you find the

link to that post if you want to find all the pieces put together already for you. So that's that. Let's talk about crazy thing. This week, what crazy thing did CurveCard do? The Curve credit card, the Curve one card to rule them all. It went primetime on us, right? It tried.

Open the floodgates. So the CurveCard, the idea behind it is it looks and acts like a credit card, but behind the scenes, it charges whatever card of yours you really want charged. And so it's a great way, theoretically, to have one card that you use for everything. But behind the scenes, you're still maximizing your signup bonuses. You're still like, let's say you've signed up for a new card and you need to meet minimum spend. You could still direct all of the spend towards that, even though you're just using that one card. So sounds amazing. They have been beta testing it. And we have some, you know, sort of funny, bad stories to tell about, about the, how the beta test is going. And recently they've, they've opened up the floodgates to a lot more people

who are on the beta test waiting list. And maybe we could take turns, but I'll just say that people reported who got an email invite off the waiting list that there was a link that said, click here, and they clicked it, and it just brought them back to sign up for the waiting list. So that was one crazy thing that curve, which is the same thing that Steven experienced when he tried to sign up by the way. And it took like 12 emails to resolve. He said, so, uh, so that's not that, that doesn't surprise me when I saw somebody report that. And so, you know, here's the thing we're enjoying the curve card. We're using it and liking it, but also understanding that it's in the beta phase and knowing that it's going to be glitchy. And so like, I've been rolling my eyes at the glitchiness,

like, oh man, they got to get this fixed. But I think the thing is, if they're going to open it up to a lot of people, then you got to know if you're going to hop into this, that you're in for some glitchiness. And if you're the kind of person that gets worked up easily by glitchiness or bad customer service, this is not the card for you. No, not at all. are going to something called curve credit, which curve credit is like a credit card behind the scenes. And it's intended to be only there for when your primary card denies a transaction and then it goes to curve credit instead. But some of us have been having charges go there anyway. But that to me just feels like a bug. But what really gets my goat is the fact that when your bill is due, they don't tell you.

No email, no app notification. That's right. They just let you miss the statement and date and get charged interest. Right. And late fees, I guess. I don't know. I don't know if there was a late fee or not. Regardless, you're getting charged extra because you didn't pay on time and come on,

you didn't tell us. And not only did they not tell you, they also don't tell you how to pay it, by the way. There's not like an easy pay. You can't add a bank account and pay it from your bank account or anything like that. If Steven Pepper hadn't accidentally figured out that adding a debit card as one of your backing methods will give you the ability to pay the bill with the debit card, if he hadn't accidentally stumbled on that, who would know? And then if I hadn't accidentally clicked on the wrong place on the screen and found the statements, we wouldn't even know that there are statements. And again, those are things that I would kind of roll my eyes at, no big deal. If it was just 100 people that had the card, as had been the case, and I knew that they

were working through the glitches, I'm a little like I raised an eyebrow and I was like, oh, yeah, they're opening up to more applications because this is not ready, guys. Yeah, no. But yeah, so that and that's an issue because, like you said, you get hit with fees and I don't think it's something sinister. I feel like a couple of people are like, Oh, is this their business model to make money? Like $2 in interest at a time? No, it probably, I mean, the credit limit on the curve credit is $500. They're not going to make enough money to stay open. That was their plan.

Not only that, I mean, everybody and their brother would be warning people against using curve if that was the standard way. I mean, that is not a sustainable business model. It's a glitch and it's a bad one. And the fact that they haven't thought to alert customers to a statement due date is just crazy. Crazy. I mean, don't these people have bank accounts and credit cards of their own?

I mean, you would think that the development team that develops this at the very minimum would be familiar with how banking apps work. You know what? We got a lot of people know that their bill is due somehow. We're not going to mail them anything. There's no website. So I guess we got to send a push notification or have something pop up in the app or send them an email. I mean, they've got to email us because a pop-up, even if they did the pop-up notification, you can easily miss that. Easily miss that, yeah. Yeah, I agree.

Email, email Curve. All right. All right. So Curve, not quite ready for primetime. Not ready. It'll be, if they fix all this stuff, it's pretty darn nice. All right. Enough of that.

Enough of that. If you're adventurous, hop in. If not, hang back. All right. So that brings us, I think, to this week's main event. Main event time. The Amex Endgame. What to do once you've signed up for all the cards.

So Amex. There's a lot of cards. Amex has a lot of cards. And you could go a really long time by just like, wait for them to have like higher than usual signup bonus offers, sign up, collect the bonus, and then move on to the next one. And so on. You could go a really long time with all those, all those bonuses. But the concern is once you eventually get to the end of all this, well, most Ame uh sign up offers say if you've ever had this card before you can't get a new welcome bonus for it so it seems like you're out of luck in burning lots of points in the

future so should we just give it up move on to uh city bank and bank of america and chase and everyone else no you shouldn't give it up. I mean, we're not done with you yet, Amex. You know, it would seem reasonable that you might think that that's the case. But Amex keeps that points parade marching along. And so there are things to know, things to do and things to look out for to position yourself to still continue marching on to the beat of the Amex points parade. So there's a whole bunch of different things that we need to cover here, I think.

So where do we even start? I guess we probably start with the fact that there are no lifetime language offers that come out now and then. So when I say no lifetime language, usually in the terms and conditions under an Amex, a new signup offer, a new welcome offer, somewhere in the terms and conditions under an Amex, a new signup offer, a new welcome offer, somewhere in the terms and conditions, it says this offer is not available to you if you have or have had the card before. And I want to point that distinction out. It doesn't say if you've earned a bonus on the card before. Some people who have really old cards might be like, oh,

I never earned a bonus on this card. I've had it for 40 years. It doesn't matter if you still have the card or you have had it before, they say you're not eligible. Or worse, some people I've known have signed up and had some frustration over the signup bonus issues and canceled the card right away thinking that, oh, well, I didn't get a signup bonus so I can sign up again in the future. Nope, you've had the card. That's not going to help. Right. But, but we do see these targeted offers come out pretty often, both via mail. You might receive one in the mail and the physical mail, something old, old school snail mail, something you might remember from a history

book, or you might get them in your email or even sometimes just on the MX website where you get a targeted offer. Like there's been one going around for a while now for up to 160,000 points on the business platinum card or one for like a 90,000 or 100,000 on the business gold card. And those targeted offers often do not have the lifetime language. So if you go into the offer details, they don't have them often. That's right. That's right. And these are also the last two that Nick mentioned are, I think of as a special case where most of them that we've

seen of those, the business Amex, business platinum and the business gold are specifically titled like extend your membership. The idea is you already have some business cards with us. We want you to get more business cards. And often and often it's the case that you not only have had that card before the business platinum, let's say, but you have it right now, or you might, might have two or three or four of them and they still advertise to you, extend your membership. Here's 160,000 points. If you sign up and meet the, meet the, uh, you know, requirements. And so they're actually begging you to get another card of the same type. They are. And it happens, like Greg said, it happens often to people who already have

one or two, but also it can happen even if you don't have one. I've had a business platinum in the past. I don't have one now, but I recently got the email. In my case, it was for 150,000 point bonus on the business platinum card. But again, it was a targeted offer for me, no lifetime language in there. So even though I've had the card before, I could presumably, if they would approve me, get it again. So I haven't applied for it yet because I'm working on other spending requirements, but I have that earmarked to apply for before that offer expires because, hey, well, who am I to turn them down if they want to give me the points again? So the no lifetime language thing is something to look out for. We typically report those offers

when we hear about them and know about them. Sometimes there's a link to check your eligibility online. If you currently have an Amex account, you'll probably have to log into it to see if you're eligible. Sometimes when you click that link in the post, it'll say this offer is no longer available. That means you're not targeted. So if that's what it says and you're not targeted, but those are things to look out for. And again, they come out in the mail. We mentioned the business platinum and the business gold, but we see other offers too on Delta cards and other cards. Sometimes those periodically, those no lifetime language offers come out. So it's worth taking a look at it. If you receive something either in the mail or in your email

to see, Hey, maybe I am still eligible, even though I've had this card before I have it now. Absolutely. We see a lot of that. The next category of things I want to talk about is when lifetime is a lot shorter than you think. So the conventional wisdom is that- Well, hopefully not, but yes. Well, let's say the word ever. If you've ever had this card before, the conventional wisdom is that ever is seven years, meaning that... I'd argue the conventional wisdom is that it's always, but I'm just teasing you. Yes, yes. The conventional wisdom is seven. They mean seven years. And what I mean by that is that if you canceled the card seven or more years ago, you are probably good to sign up for the card again, even if it says you're not eligible if you've had this card ever before, because they seem to forget after seven years.

Presumably that's how long an account stays in your report, right? So presumably once it's gone off the report, they kind of seem to forget or lose the file or something. It could be that. But sometimes we have many examples where it works in less than seven years. And we don't really know what the pattern is or why, but they forgot about my platinum card in about three and a half years. They forgot about my wife's in about four and a half years. And so it just varies. So wait a while and try again. One nice thing with Amex is when you already have accounts with them and you sign up for a new card, they don't usually run a new credit check.

So getting that denial, if you do get a denial, won't hurt you. And in fact, you probably won't get a denial. What you'd get anyway, if it's been less than ever, meaning if they think you've had the card before and want to stop you from getting the welcome bonus, you'll get a pop-up telling you so, and it'll let you cancel the application. So no harm, no foul. Yeah. And I'm going to add something to that. When you mentioned that they haven't been hard pulling people, and now of course, your mileage may vary. They might give you a hard pull. I mean, they by all rights certainly can, but most people have been reporting that they haven't been getting a hard pull if you're an existing cardholder and you apply again. And I can add to that that somebody recently made a comment on one of my posts or in Frequent

Miler Insiders, I say recently, within the last couple of months, saying that their credit files were frozen and they didn't even have to thaw them in order to apply because I've always taken off the freeze. I have a couple of my bureaus frozen and I always end up thawing the freeze temporarily to apply for stuff. And they said that they didn't even have to do that. And so this week I was applying for the MX gold card and I was trying to lift the thaw, but I couldn't get logged into my Experian account. I was trying to reset the password. I was having all sorts of issues with it and I couldn't lift it. And I said, well, you know what? Somebody said it worked.

Worst case scenario, I'll probably have to call in and give them a pin or something like that. So I said, oh, you know what? Let me give it a shot and see what happens. And sure enough, I got approved with the file frozen. So that's something to know, I guess, if you want to avoid that step of inconvenience. Right, right. Yeah.

Very good to know that. All right. So ever is not as long as you think. Let's talk about downgrading and upgrading. Yeah. So you probably know that you can product change cards. And so you may be able to, well, you should be able to downgrade a card. For instance, let's say you've got an everyday preferred card. If you don't want to renew it and pay the $95 annual fee again, one of your options is to call or chat with Amex and ask them to downgrade to the everyday card, which is similar, but has no annual fee, a slightly different earning structure. So the everyday card, the nice thing about that is A, it has no annual

fee, so you're not paying anything for it. And B, it maintains your points as transferable points. So if you were to cancel all of your other Amex cards, but you still keep the everyday card, you'll pay no annual fee and you'll still be able to transfer all your points to transfer partners. So it's good to have either that card or the Blue Business Plus as your long-term no annual fee card anyway. But then an additional bonus is a lot of times people find that they are targeted with upgrade offers.

So for instance, we've recently seen a lot of people reporting the fact that they've been targeted with an offer to get 40,000 points after spending a couple of thousand dollars by upgrading their everyday card to an everyday preferred upgrade the card meet the minimum spending requirement, get 40,000 points, which let me say that again, 40,000 points for the upgrade to the everyday preferred. And the reason that I'm emphasizing that is because that's more points than the welcome offer is on the everyday preferred. If you were to open it brand new, you wouldn't get 40,000 points. So that can be a strategy. And those upgrade offers are not lifetime language offers.

I've never heard of a lifetime limit on the upgrade offers. In fact, some people have downgraded and upgrade a whole bunch of times in the past. Right, right, right. And, you know, Hilton cards used to be very dependable in that way, but, you know, there's three different personal Hilton cards that you can kind of downgrade and upgrade and earn points. We've seen less of those lately, but I wouldn't be surprised if they come back. And so it might be a situation where it's more finely targeted that you may or may not get an offer there. Sometimes we've seen on the chain of green cards, gold cards, and platinum cards, sometimes people who have gold cards get good offers to upgrade to the platinum card or that sort of thing.

So those are things to watch out for. They don't seem as predictable as that everyday and everyday preferred cycle. Yeah. And I should mention on this train of thought here that if you've never had, let's say you have the everyday card right now, and you've never had the everyday preferred before. One thing to know, and this isn't necessarily a reason to stop you, but a thing to know is that if you upgrade to the everyday preferred, well, now you have had that card before. So you're not going to be eligible to get a welcome bonus on the card in the future. So the everyday to everyday preferred is an example where it probably still makes sense because the upgrade offer is better than the new card offer anyway. But in some cases, the upgrade bonus won't be better than the public welcome bonus. So you'd rather apply for that everyday preferred, let's say, as a new account to earn your once

in a lifetime, the seven-year lifetime bonus before you take an upgrade offer because those upgrade offers will still be around and will not be limited by the fact that you've had the card before. Great point. Great point. All right. So now we have a whole category of ways of earning lots of points with Amex with your existing cards. So it's not about getting new cards or anything. They have these great refer a friend offers all the time. They sure do. And in fact, just recently we saw a great offer and on the MX gold card, it was 90,000 points and 20% back at restaurants for the first year or something like that. The offer has changed since, but I bring that up because that's why I opened the card in order to get that offer.

But then Amex was also recently running an offer to get an extra five points per dollar when you referred somebody else by June 8th. You'd earn an extra five points per dollar on restaurant spend for the first three months on up to 25K. We've seen similar offers like that run a number of times. So I'm fairly confident we'll see something of that sort come back around again. So when I opened up the gold card the other night, I said, okay, well, I've got the gold card now. And that card already earns four points per dollarx account so I could pull it right up and get my referral link immediately after approval. And so within a few minutes after being approved, I generated the referral link and referred my wife to open up a business green card because there's no annual fee in the first year. It's got a tiny little bonus, so it's not

particularly exciting, but it won't cost us anything. And in exchange, I'll earn five extra points per dollar at restaurants for the first few months. So that type of thing can help you generate points. Now, of course, that's kind of small ball, small game there, because a lot of times we see referral bonuses in the range of 20 or 30,000 points, sometimes even more. I've heard people report maybe 35,000 points for referring somebody to a new card. So even if your player two, let's say your spouse is not eligible for a new welcome offer, you could still refer them and they could open the card. And even though they don't get a welcome offer, you still earn your referral bonus of your 30 or 35,000 points. Preston Pyshko, MD, MPH, And hidden in what Nick said a minute ago is also the fact

that you can refer people to other cards besides what you have. So with their membership rewards cards, you could literally refer people to almost any other Amex card. The only exceptions that I know of are some co-branded cards like the Schwab Platinum, the Morgan Stanley cards, those kind of things. But almost any other card, you can refer your spouse, a friend to whoever, and you'll still get the bonus on the card that you referred from. It's unrelated to the card you referred to, as long as they get approved. That's big. That's important. And that's worth highlighting again, because a lot of people get confused by this. So if you know, if you have a, an MX gold card, let's say, and it says you'll earn 30,000

points. If your friend is approved for a card, again, they do not need to open the MX gold card. You can send them your link and they can click through. We have a whole YouTube video that I'll link to in the description here, showing you how to do it. You could, from your MX gold card, generate a link for them to apply for the Delta platinum card, let's say. And if they're approved for the Delta platinum card, you get your 30,000 membership rewards points. You don't get Delta miles or something. You get the points from the card you use to generate the referral. Right. And where it's more constrained than that is with their co-brands, hotels, airlines. So with DeltaCard,

if you have a DeltaCard, you can only refer to another DeltaCard. Now you can refer people to any of the DeltaCards, which there's like seven different ones, but you can't refer them to like a Amex Gold card. Same thing with Marriott cards and Hilton cards. You're constrained within those co-brands. Yeah. Yeah. But if you have a membership rewards earning card, it's a great opportunity. And not only can you refer them to almost any other card, keep in mind, hopefully hidden in, in what we've said here too, is that it doesn't have to be, you know, if you have a consumer MX gold card, they don't need to open a consumer card. They can open a business card or vice versa. Like I said, I opened the Amex Gold card, which is a consumer card, a personal card. And I referred my wife to a

business green card, again, business card, and she was approved for it. And immediately I got the email saying that I'd earned the extra five points per dollar at restaurants. So now while I'm meeting the welcome bonus, I'm going to be earning my welcome bonus and I'm going to be earning an extra five points per dollar at restaurants. But like I said, even better deal probably for many people are those offers where you can get 20 or 30,000 points. So let's say your spouse has had an everyday card before and they're not eligible for the welcome bonus, but you have a card where you can earn 30,000 membership rewards points per referral. So refer player two and have them open in an everyday card, no annual fee, and you'll get your 25 or 30 or 35,000 points, whatever the offer says. Right. Right. And, you know, and it's not

that hard to get friends involved too, because, because you can refer to just about any other card, there's usually some amazing offer going on that is really good for your friends. And so, you know, it's worth like posting on Facebook or wherever and saying, hey, everyone, there's this amazing offer for, you know, the green card, let's say. So then you can get some referrals that way. The other thing, sometimes, sometimes if you take your referral link and open it up in a private browser window, in an incognito window in Chrome, you'll see an even better offer. And if you could tell your friends or your spouse or whoever how to do that, then they can get a really smoking deal.

So watch out for those kinds of things as well. Very good. But of course, the refer a friend is not the only way that Amex likes to give out points like candy. There are lots of other ways too. For instance, we frequently see authorized user bonuses or additional cardholder bonuses. So my wife's had one for a while now on her Amex gold card, where if she adds an authorized user and they spend $2,000 in the first however many months, she'll earn 10,000 points. So we've seen similar offers on the platinum card for 20,000 points when you add an authorized user. And it's worth mentioning in the Platinum card, they don't need to be Platinum card authorized users. When you add an authorized

user to the Platinum card, you have the option of adding them as a Platinum card holder, which costs you money. If you don't have any of those Platinum card authorized users anyway, it varies a little bit based on which card you have. But the key note here is that you can add a free gold authorized user card, additional card holder to your platinum card. And that free gold card is not like the Amex gold card. It's just like a platinum card, but it's yellow instead of being silver. And the nice thing about the yellow ones is the yellow ones are free.

So you can add an authorized user with no cost to yourself and earn 20,000 points when they meet the spending requirement. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And that's like what crazy thing has Amex done forever, which is their naming conventions are so confusing. It really is. So having a gold card that you can get along with a platinum card that has nothing to do with the Amex gold card and how it operates. I mean, it's just craziness. It's confusing. It's so confusing. So they have that on the personal side, but then on the business side, they've also been doing that quite a bit. A lot of people

have received offers to add five authorized users and get 20,000 points for each one of them after they meet, I think, $4,000 spending in the first however many months it is. And some people have been able to add significantly more than five. Yeah. We've seen people adding 99 employee cards and getting the bonuses on all of them. That's a lot of points. That is a lot of points. That's 1.8 million or so. But you have to be able to do a lot of spend with all those guys to make that work. I sure do. So another thing that constantly comes up or intermittently comes up, but every year is pay over time bonuses. So what this is, is some Amex cards are not credit cards. They're what we used to call charge cards, which charge cards have to be paid in full every month. And that's where they different from credit cards. But Amex makes them act just like credit cards by letting you enable pay over time, which, as I said, lets you pay over time so that it works like a credit card. It lets you incur

interest fees. So that makes Amex happy, makes you unhappy. The point is that to incentivize people to turn on pay over time, they often will offer 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 points to do so. And so the idea is make sure you go through all of your charge-like cards, your platinum cards, your gold cards, your green cards, and turn off pay over time. And we have a post that says how to do that. And then every now and then when you see people are getting offered these bonuses, there's usually a link to check to see whether you got this bonus offer. You click that link for each of your cards. You have to make your card like the primary card and try that link.

See if you get that offer to turn on pay over time and get 10,000 points or 20,000 points just with no work at all. No work at all. And it posts in a couple of days. I think when I've done it in the past, very quickly. Right. So, I mean, it's clicking a button for 20,000 points.

Right. No spend requirement. You don't ever have to pay overtime. I've never done so, you know. So, yeah, it's just there to try to get you into that trap of paying interest. So don't be the person who does pay interest. But luckily, you don't have to worry about that too much because unlike the Curve card, Amex will send you an email. They'll let you know you have a balance. How innovative of them.

Right. Might even send you a bill in the mail if you didn't turn on paperless, but nothing like that with Curve. So yeah, that's an easy one that you can repeat. And I should mention the authorized user bonus going back to second is also repeatable because we've had that come up multiple times on the same platinum card and gotten that bonus. I know we mentioned on the business side that some people have been targeted with the ability to add five or up to 99. But on the personal side, it's usually one authorized user card. But within the last year, my wife's gotten it two or three times, I think, where she's gotten the offer again and gotten the 20,000 points again when she added another authorized user. So it's worth knowing that you can repeat that bonus, even though it kind of sounds like it's limited to one. It's limited to one at a time, but after you've completed it, if you see the offer pop up in your account again, then you can go ahead and do that again.

So you know what? Before I step forward from there, I've got a question that somebody asked this week that I had had as a contender for question of the week that I decided not to, but this fits in with that. So Jan had asked, they were confused about when adding someone as an authorized user counts as a hard inquiry. Does it count as a hard inquiry for the authorized user with all of Amex's authorized user bonus offers? Should player two and I add each other to our Amex cards or will that ding our credit? Does it differ on personal versus business cards? Does it matter whether one is added later or at application. So when you add one of these authorized users, Amex requires you to add their social security number within 30 days, 60 days, something like that. So eventually

you do have to enter that information. So does it ding their credit? Does it result in a hard pull? What's the story, Greg? Yeah, no, there's no hard pull. There's no credit impact except for the fact that with the personal cards, they will show up on that authorized user's credit report as authorized user cards. So it won't hurt their credit score in any way whatsoever. In fact, in some cases, it can actually help. We've talked about adding these cards to like your teen children's so that they start building a credit history. But the one place that can be inconvenient is if you add personal cards to, let's say, your spouse's, to your spouse, you know, you add your spouse as a authorized user,

and then they go to sign up, try to sign up for a Chase card. And Chase has that 524 rule, which says if you've opened five or more cards in the past 24 months, we're not going to approve you. And their automated system treats those authorized user accounts as if they are real accounts. And so then you get denied and then you have to call chase and say, but those are authorized user cards and then they can work past it, but that's a hassle. Right. Right. Right. And I feel like we've had one or two people at some point that said that the chase reconsideration rep was not willing to look past it, but we've had so many success reports on that, that I would probably try to hang up and call again. If you,

Ryan says that they have to count the authorized user accounts, I'd say, okay, thank you very much. I appreciate your help click and then call back and speak to somebody else. And they probably will be able to pass those. Right. So, so, so quick answer. If you're adding business cards, don't worry about it. It's not going to hurt in any way that I can think of. Uh, if you're adding personal cards, yeah. If there's someone in your family or friend, who's friend who's not interested in signing up for new cards, ask them if it's okay if you add them. They never even have to get the card, you know, physically. It's just that, you know, that way you don't have to worry about them getting that 524 issue. Right, right.

And Jen also had asked whether it matters if you add them in application or later. It doesn't make any difference in terms of anything that we've talked about here so far. The only thing that makes a difference is usually they don't offer a bonus. I say usually. Usually they don't offer a bonus for adding an authorized user at the time of application. Certainly not on personal cards that I've seen and all that I can remember. So I definitely wouldn't add somebody else at the time of application on the personal card because you probably will eventually get an offer to add them that'll give you bonus points later on. So I definitely wouldn't do it at a time of application on a personal card. And I said, usually because on the business side, we have seen a couple of those targeted offers where they've said you get the 160,000 point offer on the business platinum, for instance, is 150,000 after you meet the minimum spend and 10,000 points for adding an authorized user or an employee card, as they call it at the time of application and spending a thousand dollars on that card and X amount of time. So that's one where you would need to add the authorized user at the time of application,

but that's a pretty rare exception. Right, right. All right. I think that the last category of big bonus opportunities that I've thought of, or that we've thought of is retention offers. When, when your annual fee comes due each year, you call or, or, or message Amex and say, Hey, I think I want to cancel this and see whether they will offer you something big in return for keeping it. And with my platinum card, for example,

last time I did this, I got an offer for 60,000 points after 4K spend. And so, boom. Get another welcome bonus. Fantastic, yeah. Without signing up for a new card. Yeah. And this is definitely something that you should do. If you've had all the cards already and you're stuck here and you're like, oh, what do I do for more points? Then it's worth doing that because

it's probably worth considering canceling a card that if you're not getting enough benefit out of it. And I always say, if the bank thinks your business is worth X amount to keep you as a customer, who are you to argue with them? Take them up on it. And this is pretty easy because like Greg said, you can call or when he said message, that's chat. You can pull up a chat. If you do it Monday through Friday, I think it's like 9am to 5.30pm Eastern or something along those lines. It's daytime hours, business hours. Then you can chat with the retention team right online. The first person you speak to is probably not going to be the retention specialist. We always recommend that you make it clear that you're considering canceling or you're thinking about canceling or you think you want to cancel rather than say, I want to

cancel. Sometimes an automated system or a jumpy rep might take that and cancel it right away if you're very definitive. Although with Amex, there's usually a whole disclosure that they have to read to you and get you to confirm before you do. So with Amex specifically, it's not usually much of an issue upfront. You're not going to probably get a card canceled quickly with Amex. It takes a little bit anyway, but then you get transferred to a retention specialist. And it's not usually something that's negotiable in the sense that it's not like the person you get to is going to review your account and be like, well, I think your account's worth

this many points and you might negotiate for more. They'll tell you what the offer is. Sometimes, occasionally, maybe there's more than one offer and you can ask if there's another offer and they'll tell you, but it's not like, you know, Greg got 60,000 points. And if they offer you 40,000, you're not going to negotiate your rate of 60. It's just, you got the 40,000 point offer. And so you've got to decide whether you want it or not. Right. Right. In my case, if I remember right, I think they actually offered me a $600 bonus or the 60,000

points and I took the points. But, you know, of course you should kind of be ready to do some quick math in your head because sometimes it's not going to be obvious which, which offers best if they offer you several. So, um, yeah. But, and, and to add to that, those retention offers sometimes even happen on no annual fee carts. We've seen people get retention offers on the blue business plus, which has no annual fee and it earns two X on the first 50,000 spent every year. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. It's crazy that they give you a retention. You feel almost silly like asking, but you know, it, it works. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. So you can amass a decent number of points with those retention offers. And especially

if you can stack those retention offers at the right times, like, you know, I talked about the recent referral offer and last year there was a similar one for five extra points per dollar. I don't know, like, um, home improvement places. And then there was a small business one. And at some point I was able to stack one of those referral offers and a retention bonus and some other short time bonus so that I was earning a bunch of points per dollar spent. And that can really ramp up your points quickly. It sure can. All right. Very good. I think that brings us to the end of our main event. I think so. So it's time for the post-roast. Post-roast time.

Yes. Okay. So this week I'm ready for the post-roast. I'm ready too. Okay. So I'm going to start. I'm going to kick it off. Go for it.

Go for it. And I'm going to roast, not really Greg, but this is going to be a post-roast, but I'm going to roast Marriott. So Greg wrote this week about his misadventures, adventures, his difficulty, his near disaster, rebooking his reservation at the Annette Bay Harbor using his free night certificates. And within the comments on that post, somebody linked to a Flyer Talk thread that was off the hook. I don't know. Did you read this, Greg? I did. I can't remember the details. Okay. So here's the deal. I don't know. Did you read this, Greg? I did. I can't remember the details.

Okay. So here's the deal. Greg had a bunch of trouble and you can read about Greg's trouble trying to change his reservation to use free night certificates instead of points. But the flyer talk thread that somebody linked to was highlighting other problems that people have had with their free night certificates. The one that quite a number of people encountered is they tried to make a reservation using a free night certificate and the booking errored out somehow. And what ended up happening was Marriott charged them for buying the points for the reservation. They were buying the 35,000 or 50,000 points. They charged them at the full 1.25 cents per point or whatever, and then deposited the points a couple of days later in their account. And of course, nobody wanted to buy 35 or 50,000 points. They wanted to use the free night certificate that

was in their account. And somehow Marriott charged them for the points and then wasn't able... Of course, initially Marriott said, oh, well, point purchases are non-refundable. So sorry, but you're stuck with those points, which obviously doesn't make any sense. So a couple of people had mentioned filing chargebacks. And so that becomes a headache too, because if you file a chargeback and then Marriott decides that they want to fight that with Amex and say, oh, it was an Amex card in this case. That's why that came to mind and say, well, no, you were logged into your account and you did it. Then maybe that opens you up for a headache with Amex over it, blah, blah, blah. So I think I'm hoping that they have it mostly resolved or that at least it sounds like

agents know what's going on. And now if you call, you'll probably be able to get your money refunded easily. But wow, what horrible IT, Mary, on these free nights certificates and getting them attached. Like this whole top off thing has not gone as smoothly as one would hope. Yeah. Yeah. That was crazy. Craziness. Although I did notice that you can do the top offs now in the app, which I think when I first rolled out, it was only on desktop.

So that's nice. I mean, I can't promise you won't get charged for all the points, but. One person at least, it errored out. And so they tried again and it errored out again. And they got charged for the points like multiple times. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my goodness.

But there's a lot of weirdness there in terms of, I've noticed that too. I saw somebody else in the comments on your post. The comments of that post were gold in terms of the different problems people have reported. And in some cases solutions. But I've run into one recently, too, where the rate is different. I'll click it and I'll see the one rate and then I start to go through the checkout process and then come away from it and go back. And then that rate isn't available anymore and something else is or it will show that no rooms are available when rooms really are. And so I've had some weirdness with the Marriott app website lately. I think their IT is just poor.

Yeah. Bad IT Marriott. But that's not new. That's been forever and ever. Yeah. Even before IT was a concept, Marriott had bad IT. All right. So my post is okay. Oh, unfortunately for you, this is, this is a roast of your post. So, so shields up. Okay. I feel almost bad doing this. All right. Nick wrote a post, not bad enough to not do it. I mean, I have to do that. This is my job. We have this post-roast segment, which we never skip. So I've got to do it. Right. my job. We have this post-roast segment, which we never skip, so I've got to do it. Nick wrote a post called The Hidden Cost of Point Transfers. In parens, I think this was part of the title, should you take advantage of that transfer bonus? The concept was this, and Nick pointed out that sometimes it makes sense to cash out your membership rewards when you have, like, if you have so

many, or you've been earning so many that, that, that you're not going to use them all for like better than 1.5 cents per point value, which is our reasonable redemption value. It sometimes makes sense to cash them out for 1.1 cent each if you have the Schwab Platinum card. And I'm not arguing with that at all. I agree. We've talked about that at other times plenty. And then he took that concept to say, well, if you're going to cash out your points for 1.1 cent each, should you instead consider transferring points to a partner during a transfer bonus? Because if you can kind of think of it as like, let's say there's a 40% bonus to Avios, to British Airways or whoever's Avios. He points out that the number of points you would get

compared to the amount of cash back you would get if you cash out means that you're kind of buying points with a 40% transfer bonus for only 0.79 cents each. So- Less than eight tenths of a cent. It would be as if you could take that cash back that you cashed out and bought those miles for less than eightenths of a cent. It would be as if you could take that cash back that you cashed out and bought those miles for less than eight-tenths of a cent. And so, I mean, that's like an amazing price.

And so, that's, I think, a logical approach to how to look at that. Here's my roast. When you get down towards the conclusion, you say, I'm not a speculative buyer of airline miles at those rates for a couple reasons. First, and I'm only going to talk about the first one. First, by keeping my points flexible, transferable, I have a lot more freedom to cherry pick the best redemption value when I'm actually ready to book something. All right. So that was your reasoning. But the whole premise of the whole article is that you've already decided that you're willing to cash out these points, make them non-transferable for 1.1 cent each. If you're not willing to do that, then the whole idea that they cost 0.79 cents

is out the window. The whole premise of the whole first part of the post is out the window. If you say, no, I want to keep my points transferable. Well, you see, I disagree. So I understand what you're saying. And the point you're making is not a bad one. But I think what I'm saying there is that I wouldn't take advantage of the transfer bonus speculatively and say, okay, let's just speculate and transfer now because maybe I'll use the points someday. If that were my goal, that maybe I'll use the points someday, then I would get the points more cheaply than 0.8% of a cent per point. It's only worth it if I need the points now because otherwise it's kind of expensive. I could instead cash them out. Preston Pyshko And you sort of said that in point two, but your first point…

Jeff Bullas You want to cut that part off. Just go to the first point, right? Cut off the… Preston Pyshko Well, the first point, I just thought it was important to be clear that those point values only make sense if you say, these are points that I'm already deciding. These are membership rewards points I'm already deciding. I am not going to keep around as transferable. I'm either going to cash them out for 1.1 or I'm going to transfer them in order to get a transfer bonus. No, because I think you're looking at taking away the flexibility

to either transfer or redeem them as cash. And so if you're going to do that, go ahead. No, it doesn't make sense to use that 1.1 valuation unless you're ready to give up the transferability. I'm going to stop there. All right. You can argue with me in a later time. Fine.

I'm going to hold on to that one and think about that and come back to the rebuttal next week. All right. So that brings us, I think, to the question of the week. And so this week's question of the week is going to be about the platinum card. I liked this question. Melissa posted this one in our Frequent Miler Insiders group. Said, my Amex platinum annual fee is due in July. And for reasons I can't explain, I'm renewing it. It's a currency I don't value that much.

I have plenty of Amex points, yet I love that stupid coupon book. My question is, last year, I thought that was hilarious. Last year, I was offered the 20,000 point authorized user deal that we've just been talking about here and i took advantage of it two times so she twice was targeted with that deal to get 20 000 points for adding an authorized user she did it both times do i need to renew these cards as well in order to not lose the 20 000 points associated with each of those authorized user cards my authorized users joined in December. Thanks.

So she had the 20,000 points for authorized user in December. Annual fee on the card is due, like the main card, the primary card is due in July because those authorized user cards, if you add the platinum cards and pay for them, then they get charged whenever you add them. So they're on like a totally different scale. Yeah. So what do you do? Wow. So they're on like a totally different. Yeah. Yeah.

So what do you do? Wow. So, so she didn't go for the, she didn't go for the free gold card. She went for the platinum authorized user cards that she had to pay for. Yes. And so I happen to remember when Melissa originally asked about that, at least I think I do. And I'm fairly sure that she intentionally did the platinum because I think she had like a,

maybe it was a kid that was in college or something like that, that was going to use the lounge access, I think, for like a, maybe it was a kid that was in college or something like that, that was going to use the lounge access, I think, for having a platinum card. Right, right. So you pay for the authorized users at the time you do that offer, but do they charge for the authorized users at the time of your annual fee? No, I'm like 92% sure that that gets charged like every year in December that she'll get hit with that. So then there's no reason for her to cancel them until next December. Except she's considering, well, she's so, okay. I see what you're saying. Yeah,

no, there isn't. I was, I was looking at it differently. I was thinking the question differently. Yeah. So you need to keep the card. The key is you need to keep those authorized user cards for a year. So yeah, you're not going to get hit. That's I don't even know why I didn't think about that when I saw this. You're not going to get hit with the fee for those cards in July. You're going to get hit with the annual fee, the six hundred ninety five dollar annual fee for the platinum card in July. You won't get hit for the authorized user fee again until December. You do need to keep them, though. The point that initially came to my mind is you need to keep them for a year. Otherwise, Amex may claw back the points and they have clawed back the points on some people.

Yeah, yeah. And it might be possible. It probably is possible to downgrade the authorized user cards to gold cards. I bet that would probably work. But there's no point in worrying about it until you get charged for those authorized gold cards. I bet that would probably work, but there's no point in worrying about it until you get charged for those authorized user cards. Yeah. And at that point, if you don't want them to still be platinum cards, then yeah, I would think that downgrading would be the way to go downgrade them to golds. If you don't want to get rid of them altogether, I guess. All right. So keep those for a year, Melissa, keep those until December, but you don't want to have to worry about paying for them. I don't think anyway, if somebody knows differently than, than set me straight on that, but I'm, I'm quite sure that

that was charged on a separate schedule when I've had that situation in the past. All right. So that I think brings us to the end for this week. I want to thank everybody for being out there listening. If you've enjoyed today's show and you'd like to get our posts in your email inbox each day so that you can decide whether or not Greg is right when he roasts me on the weekend, you want to go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe. Again, that's frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media, wherever you're listening to the show or watching it, subscribe, enable notifications, and please leave a comment, whether it's just that you like the show or you have a question or whatever else, leave your comments in the comments here on whatever podcast platform you're listening on. Thank you guys very much for being out there and we will see you again soon. Oh, and if you have questions or if you have questions or comments, you have you have items for the giant mailbag, send it to mailbag at frequent miler.com. See you next time.