American Express just announced their latest Membership Rewards earning product this week and I wanted to take a day to digest it before recommending it to my readers.
The card is called the Blue Business Plus and is a credit card – not a charge product like the Green/Gold/Platinum/Centurion.
The initial signup offer is 20,000 Membership Rewards points when you spend $3k in 3 months.
(Note: the signup bonus has been pulled but as of today, June 24, the link above is still working for the 20k bonus. Please let me know if you notice it no longer is.)
It has one primary feature. You earn 2x Membership Rewards points on ALL purchases up to $50,000 in spend. And there is no annual fee.
This makes it a great card for earning Membership Rewards points since you can use it for all purchases that don’t fit into any bonus categories on any of your other cards. Another great thing about this card is that the Membership Rewards points earned seem to be normal and fully transferable. So if you have a Gold or Platinum card you’d like to close because you aren’t getting value from the annual fee, you could open this and keep your points after closing the charge product.
So, in short, there’s not a ton to say about this card except that it’s a solid new choice for your everyday (non-bonus category) spend.
Also, it is worth noting that (per Doctor of Credit) you’ll need to have less than 4-5 Amex cards in your wallet to get approved for a new one. I actually have 4 so let’s see what happens….
Dave – I have a couple of interesting data points. It seems that DOC is incorrect about the number of Amex cards one can have. I had five before I applied for the SPG personal, and I called Amex to see if I needed to drop one. The csr stated that there was no reason that I would have to do that, and that there was no reason that I would be denied the new SPG card, so I applied and got it. Now I have a total of six Amex cards. I also was having a problem referring my wife for an Amex Delta 50K/$1K spend offer, so she called the csr on her platinum card. During that conversation, the csr stated that there was N O limit to how many Amex cards you can have. This blows the “card limit” theory for Amex away. At the very least, you know that six is possible.
Great to know – thanks for the data point! Also discussing in the group:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/MilesTalk/