Top 5 Amex Credit Card Hacks That ACTUALLY Work

so over the past few years of using American Express credit cards I've learned a lot of things including some really valuable and interesting hacks that I'm surprised more people out there don't know about yet these hacks can do things like increase your credit limits earn you more membership Rewards points get you better welcome bonuses and really just overall make your American Express experience even better for your wallet so I've got five hacks that I want to talk about today and as always we're just gonna get right into it here so make sure to go ahead and drop a like And subscribe down below to help support the channel but let's get started with hack number one which is going to be something that's really important to understand when you're applying for a new American Express card and that is getting a higher welcome bonus so welcome bonuses are really the one single way to get the most value out of any credit card because your return on spend with a bonus can be much higher than any normal cashback rate now sometimes with different issuers they'll let you get a certain credit card more than once over the years which means you can earn multiple sign-up bonuses but you might just have to wait maybe 48 months or more to be eligible for that but American Express is a bit unique because they basically have a rule that says your own only able to get one welcome bonus per card in your lifetime so for example you can get one bonus for the AmEx gold card and one bonus for the AmEx platinum card if you can't get a bonus for the AmEx gold today wait 48 months and then sign up again and get another bonus and because of this once per lifetime Rule and the fact that welcome bonuses give us a lot of value we want to try to optimize for this by getting the best offer available that way we're not leaving any value on the table this is actually the mistake that I made when I signed up for my AmEx Gold Card a few years ago I went over to the main Amex website where I signed up for the first offer I saw and got 60 000 membership rewards points after spending four thousand dollars in the first six months now that's not bad for a welcome bonus because if I value those 60 000 points conservatively at one cent per point that means the bonus is worth six hundred dollars and when we do the math it's gonna be a 15 return on spend when I'm working towards that four thousand dollar requirement and 15 back beats any credit card out there earning the standard one to five percent back but pretty soon after I signed up I realized that I should have looked around a bit more because other people were talking about the off offers that they got and those offers were a lot higher now as of the filming of this video in early July of 2022 we have plenty of data points that show American Express is offering some people 75 000 points for the same four thousand dollars of spending in six months or even as high as 90 000 points for those same requirements too that's 75k offer is equal to at least 18.75 return on spend and the 90k offer is like getting at least 22.5 return on spend so it's definitely worth a shot going for these offers if you can so let's quickly go over how people are getting these offers because actually it's a pretty easy hack but again it's an important one for maximizing value now the first way is simply to just do a little bit of research and look around at what offers other people are talking about on YouTube or Reddit or other different credit card blogs then once you see what offers are out there go over to amex's website to see what they're offering for you if your offer is just not what others are getting then what some people like to do is try back again at a different time of the day or maybe try again with a different internet browser until you see something better in other words way is also to use someone else's referral link or an affiliate link to lead you to an Amex signup page so you could use a friend's referral link a referral link from the Credit Community Discord or even an affiliate link from any one of the YouTube channels out there that talk about credit cards and a third way to get better welcome bonus offers for AMEX cards is actually through a site owned by American Express called Rezi now if we go over to Rezi and then click at the top here on exclusive us offers from Amex and then scroll down we can see a bit of a different offer currently available for something like the AmEx gold so right here it says 75 000 points but then they also say you can get 20 back at restaurants for your first year for Max 250 back as a statement credit and that can actually completely offset your 250 annual fee if you use up that entire credit so bottom line don't just jump at the first Amex welcome bonus offer that you see on their public website be patient and look around to see what other types of offers people are getting and then also try searching around and using different links to help you get the most value possible when you sign up for an American Express card all right now for AMEX number two I wanted to talk about another really important hack that can actually help your credit score and increase your spending power at the same time and that is tripling your credit limit now this hack is not going to apply to Amex cards that are more of charge cards without a set credit limit like the AmEx platinum and the MX gold but this is a great tip for those of you that have any normal AmEx credit cards that do have a credit limit so the hack is pretty simple but once your new AMEX card has been open for at least 60 days on the 61st day or later you can request a credit limit increase of up to three times what you were given at first so if you had a four thousand dollar limit you can go ahead and request a limit of twelve thousand dollars by just logging into your American Express account and requesting it over there and the cool thing is there won't be any hard credit pull either so there's really no downside to doing this now the two main reasons why this hack can actually be useful for many people is because number one with a higher credit limit you're gonna have more spending power so maybe you need to make a bigger one-time purchase for some furniture or for a computer and you only have a smaller credit limit then getting that increase is gonna help out big time and number two to having a higher credit limit helps out a lot with credit utilization because as long as your average spending and your balance on your card remains relatively consistent a higher limit is going to equal a lower utilization than what you would have had before and a lower utilization can actually have a positive effect on your credit score over time now there are going to be some certain limitations in place that you'll want to look into for this hack so for example if you already have a twenty thousand dollar credit limit you probably won't get approved for something like a sixty thousand dollar limit if your income is still the same and you have some other credit cards open anyway but if you use your own judgment then in many cases a credit limit increase of up to three times is very reasonable to expect and pretty easy to get after you've had your AMEX card open for at least 61 days now next here for AMEX hack number three this is sort of gonna be a two-part thing because the first part is something that I know many people already use but the second part has really helped me out a ton lately and it's made this hack way better and that is getting more value from Amex offers so you can find Amex offers when you go ahead and log into your American Express account either on your phone or on your computer these are really a great way to put some extra money or points back into your pocket I've seen offers for getting things like big statement credits at retailers we're getting extra point multipliers for certain spending categories but depending on your spending habits and how much you shop these offers could potentially be worth hundreds of dollars if you take advantage of them all you have to do is just scroll through and then click on add to card but I'll be honest from my own experience looking through and then adding these offers can be a bit time consuming because Amex literally has hundreds of them available at any time and you're actually limited to how many will be shown to you until you add them to your card and plus you also have to remember what offers you have on what cards that then you use the right one when you're going to make a purchase so what I've been doing recently is I've been using an app and an extension called card pointers which really made this the perfect hack to include here in this video now card pointers is meant to help you get organized with your credit cards by telling you what cards to use in different spanning categories to get the most value but one of the coolest free features that I use all the time now actually allows me to log into my AmEx account and then add all those Amex offers instantly with just one click that way now I don't have to spend time finding each one and then adding it manually and then the really cool thing is that these offers sync with the Chrome and the Safari extensions the card pointers has so that anytime I go to shop online I get a little pop-up telling me what card to use depending on what earns me the most points and what offers I've actually added because remember there are literally hundreds of Amex offers out there that I'd have to keep track of without this so basically this just saves me a ton of time and makes everything super organized with all the credit cards and the offers that I have now like I said that feature of adding offers comes free with card pointers but there's also going to be a pro version that has a ton of other useful things that I can't fit into this video but let me know down in the comments below if you want to see a video about the top finance apps that I use because this is definitely gonna be on my list but anyway you can go check out card pointers with the link that I have down below if you want to try out this hack for yourself does not require any account info and I really like what they're doing for the overall credit card Community with this and now next for AMEX hack number four here we're gonna go over one that you can combine with those Amex offers to get even more value and that is to earn membership rewards points with Rakuten now I've talked about this in some other videos before but for anyone not familiar racketan is one of the most popular cashback shopping portals out there because basically they drive traffic to those retail websites by offering a little bit of extra cash back for you when you click on their link to go take you to a website that you want to buy something from you can actually earn an extra 5 10 or even 15 or more for basically no extra effort but the hack here that many American Express customers have started to take advantage of is they can go ahead and choose to earn their racket team cash back in the form of Amex membership rewards points if they opt into that in their account settings so the way this works is your cashback will convert into Mr points at a rate of 1 cent per point so if you clicked on a racket 10 offer to earn 10 back and then you made a 100 purchase normally you'd earn 10 in cash back but with the Mr Point Hack That ten dollars in cash back will be converted into 1000 Amex points which will be deposited into your linked Amex account once per quarter and after those 1000 points are in your Amex account you can take them and then redeem them for greater than one cent per point in value by using Transfer Partners so maybe now you get closer to two cents per point or even more in a scenario like that the initial 10 back that you earn from racketon goes from being worth ten dollars in cash back into twenty dollars worth of points towards travel which means that it's really like you got 20 back on your purchase through racketon in the first place now what I like to do and what many other credit card optimizers do is they sort of double or triple dip this cash back to get some really crazy earnings rates so here's how the earnings would stack up for a 50 Purchase made on underarmour.com using everything at our disposal if we added an offer to our Amex Platinum Card we'd get 10 back by going through racketon which is equal to five dollars back normally but since we're earning Amex Mr points that five dollars back is going to convert into 500 Mr points then we'd get a base 1X points per dollar under the everything else category on the AmEx Platinum which would give us an additional 50 Mr points and finally since we actually added an Amex offers using card pointers from our last hack we can see that on the pop-up here it tells us we're gonna get a 10 dollar statement credit back for this purchase of fifty dollars so all in all that fifty dollar purchase goes down to forty dollars with that credit and if we value those 550 Mr points that we earned at two cents per point that would be an additional 11 back and that brings our net cost down to just 29 which means that we save 21 and 21 bucks divided by that initial 50 purchase is effectively an insane 42 back now that example is assuming a few things including that your Mr points are worth two cents per point which I've explained in other videos is not always the case but the point here is that with all these things combined you can save a lot of money especially around the holidays when you might be doing more shopping than usual and the racketan rates are even higher and also even if you're using an American Express credit card that doesn't earn Mr points you should still be using racketon to earn some normal cash back because that can still boost your overall credit card earnings okay but what if you're using credit cards that earn you Mr points and you want to turn those points into cash back instead now normally American Express does not have the best cash out options because Mr points are only be worth 0.6 cents per point for a statement credit so you're losing value because we always want to be getting at least one cent per point but luckily there's a popular strategy to help get around this that I plan to take advantage of in the future which is the fifth hack for this video and that is getting a higher Cash Out rate on the Charles Schwab Amex platinum card now getting this card assumes that the AmEx Platinum is a card that makes Financial sense for you to get which is just not going to be the case for everyone because the Platinum Card does have a 695 annual fee but if you have the option to go for the Schwab version of this card I think there's a really good argument to have it first of all the Schwab Platinum is pretty much the exact same thing as the regular vanilla Amex platinum card but the one key difference is that the Schwab version allows you to essentially cash out your Amex membership rewards points over to your Schwab brokerage account at a value of 1.1 cents per point that means that if you got a 100 000 Point welcome bonus on the Schwab Platinum card instead of it being worth only 600 by cashing it out on the regular Platinum for a statement credit the schwa Platinum makes those same 100 000 points worth eleven hundred dollars so this serves as a good option where if you have all those Mr Point earning cards and you're saving up those points but just aren't traveling that much anytime soon now at least you have a decent option for cashing out where you can even put those points to use by investing after you cash them out or you can just cash out the points by moving those points from your Amex account into your Schwab brokerage and then moving that out to any other bank account basically this is a nice fallback option to have and it guarantees you a higher floor value for your Amex points at that 1.1 Center Point rate so I plan to eventually transition over from my regular Amex platinum card to the schwa version at some point maybe next year because I just got a retention offer bonus on my regular platinum card this year but I think this is something that other people can look into as well there's not much else to it and I think that if you have any Amex cards that earn membership rewards points you really want to make sure you're getting as much value as possible so next make sure to go check out this video over here about how to redeem Amex points if you haven't seen it already because it explains a lot of important things but I hope that these hacks and these tips in this video were useful so as always thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Daniel Braun

Views: 123,489

Keywords: Amex gold, amex gold card, american express, american express gold, american express gold card, credit cards, credit card, amex gold review, amex gold card review, amex gold benefits, amex gold uber, amex gold 2022, amex gold card 2022, american express gold 2022, american express gold card 2022, amex gold worth it, amex gold card worth it, american express credit cards, best credit cards, best credit cards 2022, daniel braun

Id: RqLoTG83dJg

Length: 13min 4sec (784 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 07 2022