Frequent Miler on the Air - How we use our Amex Gold Card coupon credits | Coffee Break Ep45 | 2-14-25

Episode Date: February 14, 2025

The American Express Gold Card has a $325 annual fee, but it offers up to $424 of value in credits. Here we'll talk about how we make sure to put those credits to use. Read more about maximizing American Express credit card rebates and credits here. (01:07) - $325 annual fee Find out more about the Amex Gold Card here. (01:19) - Category bonuses (01:42) - How do Greg and Nick use those category bonuses? (03:12) - Up to $424 in credits (or as we like to call them, "coupons"). (03:28) - Resy: $50 semi annually (08:59) - Uber: $10/month (12:12) - Dining partners: $10/month (Goldbelly, Wine.com, Five Guys, Seamless/Grubhub, The Cheesecake Factory) (14:08) - Dunkin: $7/month Visit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media. Music Credit – Beach Walk by Unicorn Heads

Welcome to Coffee Break, where we focus on a single topic related to miles and points. And each Coffee Break is limited to 20 minutes or less, or your money back. On today's Coffee Break, we're going to talk about how we use our American Express Gold Card coupon credits. American Express loves to offer perks that give you rebates for very specific things. And so we jokingly refer to these as coupons. And not that long ago, the gold card, the annual fee went up a bit, but they added more coupons to offset that annual fee. And I was kind of mad at the time, because it was like, I don't want more coupons to deal with. But here I am, I don't know, six months, a year later.

I don't know how long it's been. I still have the gold card. I haven't canceled it. And so I thought it would be cool to talk about how I and Nick use our gold card coupons. And maybe in the discussion, we'll figure out, was it actually worth it? Sounds good. Well, let's start out by just kind of laying, taking the lay of the land here, laying out the key details. So the gold card has a $325 annual fee that puts it high mid-tier in terms of annual fees. Category bonuses on this card are 3X on flights booked with airlines or booked with Amex Travel,

4X at U.S. supermarkets on up to $25,000 in purchases per year, then 1X and 4X dining restaurants worldwide up to $50,000 per year now on the restaurant category bonus, then 1X. All right, so those are the category bonuses. So let's talk about how we use them. Do you use the Amex Gold card at restaurants or for flights or for your groceries? As far as earning 3X for airlines, I'd rather use, for example, my Sapphire Reserve card to get 3X Chase Ultimate Rewards points and also better travel protections with that card. How about you? Yeah, primarily I want better travel protections. So truth be told, I had forgotten this card even had that 3X bonus category because I've just never even really seriously considered using one of my Amex cards for flights.

I prefer to use Chase cards for better travel my MX cards for flights. I prefer to use Chase cards for better travel protections in general for flights. It is also our primary grocery card. So primary supermarket card. I have mixed in a little bit of Capital One Saver lately, but that card only earns three points per dollar and this one earns four. So for as long as we have it, this is our primary supermarket spend card and my primary dining card. It finally made its way back into my wallet. Like I said, I had been using the saver a bit for those types of purchases, but Forex is nice. And I think the math works out for us to keep this card. So since it does, it makes sense to earn Forex in both of those categories. I do not have the city prestige card that Greg mentioned.

So I'm using my gold card for Forex because that's, I think the best return you can get on dining otherwise. Okay, yeah. You know, unless you have a, right, the no longer available city prestige card, then you can do better. All right. So that's how we use the built-in category bonuses. But now let's talk about the coupons. The card has several rebates that you can get.

We'll see how we each use the credits that are available. Yep. All right. So let's start out with the resi credit. So the gold card has a credit for up to $50 in purchases at resi restaurants twice annually. It's a semi-annual benefit. So up to $100 total per year. So January to June, you can use it at a Resi restaurant for a $50 statement credit. And then July to December, you can do so again, you don't need to make your reservations through Resi. Resi is a restaurant reservation platform, primarily, but you don't actually need to make a reservation to use this, you could just walk into any restaurant that's on the Resi reservation platform, and use it spend $50 and you'll get your $50 statement credit. So how do you use it? Yeah. So for me, I don't have like a set specific way I use it. What I've done in the past

is sometimes I've gone in person to a nearby restaurant that's on Resi and bought a gift card to that restaurant. And because you're paying right at the restaurant, it, you know, it shows up as that restaurant and then Amex gives you the credit for that. The other thing I've done is just, you know, pay attention when I'm dining out. Am I going to a Resi, a restaurant that's on the Resi platform? Now, for me, there's not very many desirable restaurants in the Ann Arbor area where I live. So, it's usually when I'm traveling, I try to pay attention to that. And that's a little tough because I don't, while my wife travels with the gold card, it's actually in her name, I don't travel with it. And so,

if I happen to be at a restaurant where I could do tap to pay, then I could pull it up on my phone. But you know, where you have to leave the card for them to take away, I'll often not think ahead. So I have not been great about making sure I do this every six months. Okay, we've done a little bit better, surprisingly, on using it every six months. So we've used it a couple times exactly the way that Greg mentioned in the with the gift card approach, there happens to be a restaurant about 30 miles away, where my wife and a friend of hers like to go out to lunch about once every six months. And so we've bought a gift card, you know, just when passing that restaurant by a couple of times already that she's then used to go out to lunch. So that's one way we've used it. And we have also used it to stack. Recently, we made a trip to New York City. And I wanted to use in kind credits because there's been lots of deals on buying

gift cards for in kind from Costco, they just recently had $100 gift card for 60 bucks from Costco for in kind in kind is a payment platform you can use at some restaurants, you can use it to check out. And so if you're, you know, eat your dinner, and then you get your bill, then you can pay the bill with the in kind app and walk out without having to give anybody your card or wait for anything. So I recently tested this by using credits that I had in the in kind app to pay for my meal, I had a bunch of referral credits. So referral credits covered the meal, but I used the Amex gold card to pay the tip for the meal because the tip has to be paid with a credit card. Even if you've got enough in in-kind gift cards or referral credits or whatever to cover the cost of your meal, the tip has to go on a credit card still.

So put the tip on the credit card and sure enough, that did trigger the gold card credit because that restaurant was on the Resi platform. So I had to find a restaurant that was on both. And I didn't actually set out with that intention. It just so happened that we picked a restaurant from in kind and discovered that it was on the Resi platform. So it wasn't something I set out to do that way, but it worked.

Now, I want to mention I did an order for pickup and an order for delivery from the same restaurant. And the pickup order, the tip on that triggered the credit. The delivery order, the tip on that one did not trigger the credit. So it's a little variable. We had different reports from different readers in terms of whether or not that strategy worked. But I mention it because it's worth knowing, especially if you've been one of the many people to pick up these in-kind gift cards, that you might try this if you're dining at a restaurant that is on both platforms. So that's another way we've used it.

But those are the two ideas. So I just want to make an observation that this is probably the easiest no-brainer of the coupons that come with this card for most people. Yet both of us have made it way more complicated than it needs to be, right? Because in my case, if I just use the gold card as my dining card in general, I would probably just trip this, you know, every six months, like automatically. Because, you know, even though there aren't many restaurants in Ann Arbor, you know, I travel enough that I go to ones that are on the platform. And, you know, because I default to a different card, that's why it doesn't just happen

magically. And in your case, you're trying to stack extra things on top. Well, yeah, I was trying to stack for the in-kind thing. I thought that was worth the mention for people stacking. But like I said, we bought gift cards at a restaurant nearby. And also, when we were traveling over the holidays, we bought a gift card at a restaurant closer to a different family member as a gift. So, you know, certainly there's enough ways, like you said, if you travel a bunch, enough ways to do that. But yeah, so that's, you said, the easiest of the various credits. But we pretty easily get close to our $100 in face value, at least in my household over the course of the year. Close, obviously. You can't quite figure it at $100. face value, at least in my household over the course of the year. Close.

Obviously, you can't quite figure it at $100, but somewhere in the range. Yeah. And if I just gave it just a modicum more thought, it would be easy to get that $100 a year. And I'm not sure that I've done it every six months. But anyway. Very good. What's up next then? All right.

Next up is $10 per month of Uber credit. And that credit can be used towards Uber rides or Uber eats. A new change in it is that you have to set up your Amex card as the like backup card to pay in case you don't have enough credits for whatever you're you're paying for um which kind of unfortunate because it used to be like you could set up like a you know card that earns better um rewards for ride share um as your as your payment card on top of uh this but that's no longer the case anyway um yeah how do you use your Uber credits, Nick? So my wife and I, between the two of us, have a bunch of different cards with Uber credits. So we each have a gold card. We've got a couple of platinum cards.

And so what we've done is we share one Uber Eats account on both of our phones, and we've added all of the credit cards that have Uber credits to the same Uber Eats account. And that way, they're all stacked together. So you can use them all together on a single meal still. And so we just make it a point once a month to make sure we use Uber Eats. If we get to like the last week of the month, and we haven't used it, then we make

plans to make sure we do a pickup order somewhere or delivery order somewhere. But we usually travel enough that naturally, at least once a month, and sometimes more, we have a need where we're like, oh, well, we need delivery. And so Uber Eats will be our primary go-to for that, for delivery. Now, it's worth noting for me, I can't use this at home. A lot of people can use it for delivery to their house, but there is no Uber Eats where I live. So we do need to be somewhat intentional about it, but we're going to eat out anyway, at least once a month in another place that's larger than the town we live in. So it's usually easy enough for us to use this. We've cut it a little close a couple of times, and I at least once or twice have ordered as a gift for somebody else.

I've ordered for delivery to somebody else's house once or twice before just to use it up before it expires. But for the most part, we're usually able to use this easily enough. Right. Cool, cool. Yeah, and for me, we do have Uber Eats in Ann Arbor. And so we order in not that often, but enough that it's so easy to use up the credits that way. And I do ride Uber a fair amount. And so my problem,

even with combining all of the cards that have uber credits onto one account my problem is not having enough uber credits to cover all the needs i have not you know i don't have any problem using it every month that's that's always been except actually sometimes in december because the platinum cards this isn't true with the gold card but the platinum cards offer extra credits in December. And so you got to be more intentional then, or at least I do. One kind of neat thing with Uber is if you had a ride at the end of last month and now you get your credit, you could actually go back in time and change how you paid for that ride. I assume that works with Uber Eats as well. I haven't looked into that, but I know it works with Uber rides. So that's another way you could use our credits is for

stuff that happened recently in the past. There you go. Great tip there. All right. There's also these dining partner coupons. So you get $10 a month that you can use at one of the following. So $10 statement credit for purchases at one of the following, GoldBelly, Wine.com, Five Guys, Seamless or Grubhub, and the Cheesecake Factory. How do you use that one? So I use this every single month, like clockwork. What I do is I get onto GoldBelly.com and I order myself a $10 e-gift card from Gold Belly. And I keep them all in a special folder in my inbox. So that like maybe once a year, you know, it doesn't really matter how often,

but let's say I'm getting someone a present. I'll check out Gold Belly if they have something that looks good. I have it delivered and Gold Belly lets me, or at least has in the past, let me stack as many of these $10 gift cards as I wanted to one order. Yeah. Yeah.

So we started doing the same. My wife has a notebook and the first of every month, she has like a checklist of credits to use up. And so there's a bunch of different cards to use. And so this is one of the ones she does. And we also have been using Goldbelly. We do eat at Five Guys almost once a month because that's one of the few places both of my kids will eat something. But because they have a grilled cheese sandwich there, believe it or not. I have one kid

who doesn't eat any meat, and they have a grilled cheese sandwich, and he'll eat that. So yeah, great. So that helps. Anyway, but we just to make sure that we use it first of every month, she goes through and buys the Gold Belly gift card. We've got a bunch of extended family members where the holiday gift, the standard holiday gift for years and years, has been some sort of a food item. They always send us something. We always send them something. And so that was perfect. This year, we sent a bunch of extended family members Gold Belly gifts because it was stuff we would have bought them anyway.

We might have bought it through a different platform or something, but it was stuff we were going to buy anyway, so it worked out really well. Yeah, nice. All right, last and least, we have a $7 monthly Dunkin' credit. Do you use that? Same thing. This is in my wife's notebook that she does at the beginning of every month. She's taking that on and loves that, and I love that she loves loves it because now I don't have to dedicate any brain space to it. So yeah, you can load your Dunkin account with $7 at a time each month. And that triggers the credit.

So you just go into the app and you load it right in the Dunkin app. And again, we share the same Dunkin app on both of our phones. That way it's all in one place. We don't need separate Dunkin accounts. So we just share a Dunkin' account and continue adding the credit to it. Now, I think I heard that they're limiting you to up to $100 in credit in there. And then maybe you need to, I'm not sure what you need to do after that. We haven't hit that point yet. So we've been able to use it periodically that way. But we're able to stack it up and then you don't have to use it that month.

So I think we've got $80 or $90 something in there right now. So maybe I've got to use it before next month. I don't know. Yeah, yeah. Okay, and I just started just this month, actually, doing the app thing. I haven't eaten in Dunkin'. I haven't bought anything from Dunkin' in a long, long, long time. So it didn't really interest me.

But at the same time, I know that you can also use this credit at Baskin Robbins. And I occasionally come across one of those. And I'm just like thinking, well, why not? It's free and easy to load up the credit. So why not do that? So that's added to my monthly, you know, get credits type of thing. So, all right, it sounds like for the most part, except for when like I forget to use my Resi credit, but for the most part, we're using up all of our credits. That's a total of $424 in credits a year if we use every one every month. So does that mean that this card is worth $424 back in exchange for the $325 annual fee? Well, no, of course not. I wouldn't necessarily spend $50 twice a year at a resi restaurant. I mean, actually in our case, I think we probably would, but at least it requires brain space to make sure that we space that out. If whether buying a gift

card or making plans to go to a resi type of restaurant and you know, the same thing goes with everything else. Would I order from Uber Eats versus using DoorDash or Grubhub or something else? I don't know. I'm, my habit is Uber Eats, but my habit is probably Uber Eats because of these credits. So the credits. Yeah. So I don't think. Yeah. And that is what they want.

And, you know, cheers to them. They won. So, no, I don't I don't value it at four hundred and twenty four dollars, but I find it relatively easy to justify the three twenty five anyway, in order to still get the four X at supermarkets and at restaurants. Then, you know, four hundred $424 in credits, even if I only value that at like 75% of face value, we're still over $300 anyway, back in credits, which makes it a pretty cheap card to carry for Forex dining and grocery spend. I mean, if I were willing to pay $100 for a card like that, then between that and these credits, it works out pretty well. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm still on the fence as to whether it actually

makes sense for us to keep the card because of how much we value these credits which is like duncan i value it not at all um you know and then the others it varies how much i i value them um but uh but it's nice to know that at least you know i'm I'm not my my total cost of having the card isn't the full $325 annual fee. It's something substantially less than that, because I do value some of those credits quite a bit. Yeah, yeah. And it's great point. We don't eat at Dunkin very often or drink Dunkin coffee very often either. But now and then it's the only option. You know, you need a coffee. And that's what's there. Because where I obviously it's different depending on where you live. But but so you know, these are the types of things where I say, oh, I wouldn't spend $7 at Dunkin

every month, but I'm going to spend some money at Dunkin at some point eventually. So if I can load that up in the app, great. It's going to save me the money that day. It's someday in the future, so I shouldn't value it at a full seven bucks, but it'll save me something nonetheless. Yeah. And, you know, maybe if you need to get yourself in good with some policemen, you can buy them some Dunkin'. You heard it here first, folks.

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