Category: Credit Cards

Update 2025-01-03. This worked again this year. I repeated the same thing again as I did below. Amex just emailed me and let me know I’ll be getting a $50 credit.

Originally posted 2024-12-14:

So yesterday I learned from a Profitable Content article that Amex is now giving Amex Business Platinum (ABP) credit card holders a lovely $50 quarterly statement credit on Hilton purchases. (This now makes the ABP truly a free card to have from a frugal minded non-traveler perspective.)

I immediately wondered if I could somehow buy a gift card with it the $50 credit and asked a friend about it on discord. He said he had already very recently done this, purchasing a $50 Hilton gift card with his ABP just the other day.

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Below is my plan for Q1 2025 using my custom cashback strategy as described in my article: Introducing My 5%+ Custom Cashback Strategy. (Some has changed since I wrote the aforementioned article, like I product changed my Citi Custom Cash for Citi Double Cash recently, as I am getting a lot of use out of several 2% cashback cards lately; but the article should still be useful I think especially the phone wallpaper idea.)

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The Citi Shop Your Way (SYW) card along with Discover It Miles (DIM) are my top two favorite cards right now — go figure! Which I think is very cool since I am starting to become elderly and remember Sears ever since the late 1970’s. I have the classic Dawn of Discover design on the DIM card so both cards have yellows and reds in them which I think so cool — popular Earthy colors from the 70’s:

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As I mentioned the other day, the first card I applied for in my sixteen card App-O-Rama (AOR) was the Citi Shop Your Way (SYW) card. Again, it’s a card I have been wanting a while and figured then was the opportunity to finally get it.

I received this card just two months ago and was expecting at some point I’d eventually get some stacking offers via email. Well I just got my first offer today and it blew my socks off. First off, I wasn’t expecting an offer so soon and not as good as the following:

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So a couple months ago I sat at 6/24 Chase Status, having already acquired the four Ink cards I had wanted. I didn’t really need many more Chase cards but did need many 1.5% to 2% cashback cards for various reasons — IYKYK. Rather than wait over a year to start trickling them in, I just decided to go all out and apply for ALL of them in an AOR and revisit Chase cards in two years. Must have them all NOW! 😺

I share in this article which cards I applied for, my reasoning and which cards I actually got along with my future plans.

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Update 12/14/2024. Amex is now offering $200 in Hilton statement credits, at $50 per quarter. This credit currently can be used to buy Hilton gift cards which I am now doing. I value this $200 in credits at 65% making the total value to me $130. This makes having the ABP effectively free to own indefinitely — assuming Dell credits remain but I imagine they likely will not (we’ll see).

The Wednesday Morning Weekly — September 4, 2024

I am frugal and I don’t travel much. The last time I flew in a plane was in 1992 for a work related convention — a round trip between Los Angeles and Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). It was also the first time I had ever flown in a plane. Of all my credit cards, the primary travel benefit I make use of is the World of Hyatt transfer partner with Chase allowing us to get $150 rooms w/ free breakfast for effectively $50 per night. We do also make use of the Amex Business Platinum (ABP) $200 annual credit to fly my boyfriend’s mother out to visit every year or so, via a Southwest flight.

Many people believe the only reason to retain any Amex metal card, is primarily for the travel benefits. Now I perhaps agree with this with respect to the personal metal cards, but not so much with respect to the business metal cards. The effective annual fee for me on both the Amex Business Gold (ABG) and Amex Business Platinum (ABP) are around $100 each. Even with this one might ask me, “Why are they worth even that if you are not a traveler?”

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