Tore up my first AMEX app...

[Amerikaner83 1,026]

......and it felt GOOD!

I've never been offered a legit AMEX unsolicited before, so imagine my surprise when I see this package from AMEX inviting me to apply for the "Premier Rewards Gold Card". This is a legit AMEX, and I felt great about feeding it to the shredder.

The bennies aren't that great looking, really. at least they're tempered by the $175 annual fee (waived for the first year), but I have to charge up 30 GRAND a year to get a decent amount of bonus points, and just the IDEA of charging 30 grand in one year scares the living daylights out of me.

I think if I get another card soon, itl'l be a CLI on my existing cards.....or another BofA card with a better bennies package (like Squeaker's Alaska Airlines BofA signature Visa)...not anything with AMEX.

[Fairy Enchantress 745]

Yay! Good work Amerikaner83!

I like the way you paid attention to the benifits, annual fee, and having to charge $30,000.00 a year to get a decent amount of bonus points too!

PS.

What did you mean by a legit AMEX?

[Amerikaner83 1,026]

I mean that it's not a BofA card with the AMEX brand. "legit AMEX" in the way I use it means just that.....what some would consider "true amex"...not a major bank backed one.

[jq26 862]

To he** with AmEx. You did the right thing!!!

There are great rewards cards with $0 annual fee. If your credit is good, try Discover Platinum. $0 annual fee, they'll give you $75 to open the account, 1% cash back on all purchases and 5% cash back on a variety of categories of purchases, like gas, hotels, grocery stores, etc. The categories change every few months.

I use it now for all purchases and it has probably generated +$300 in cash back this year. Not too bad for paying them $0 in interest and annual fees. And if you take your rewards bonus in gift cards, they tack on 10-20% onto the gift card amount (ie: if you opt for the Lowe's gift card reward, it'll cost you $45 in rewards to receive a $50 gift card).

[Methuss 10,104]

Amex....Anyone been around long enough knows how I feel about those vampires.

I used the last unsolicited envelope that came from them as target backing at the gun range with some HydraShocks I needed to blow off. Now THAT felt good!

[jq26 862]

I agree Methuss. AmEx ($2,000) and MBNA ($12,000) had given me $14,000 in platinum credit cards when my only job in college was a 15hr per week $5/hour job washing fruit fly excrement out of vials in a genetics lab. My actions were mine, but their "generosity" was likely to have one outcome.

By the time I was 25, my AmEx debt had grown to roughly $8,000. AmEx actually hired a law firm to object to my discharge (not sure why), but my case got botched up and I never had a 341 hearing. And the discharge occurred anyway. Ironically I now use a corporate AmEx with no limit when I travel for business. I don't have a choice in the matter.

AmEx isn't a bad company per se, but aside from why I personally don't appreciate them, their rewards programs are terrible. It took my wife five years to earn the 42,000 points required to earn a GPS probably worth $125. That's pathetic!!!

Edited March 1, 2011 by jq26

[johnwhite 10]

Yeah, the fees is fairly high with amex. Hard to recover it with rewards.

[Chester P. Dexter 177]

My son is 18 now and therefore old enough to get these offers. Most likely because within the last year I helped him obtain his one and only credit card, an unsecured USAA mastercard. Who needs more than that? If I had to start with one company, I'd start with and stay with USAA because I can't imagine needing to do business with another credit card company.

I'm sure it's because of having that card that he was offered an AMEX (not USAA's version, but a real AMEX) recently, and he didn't even entertain the notion. He's cheap/prudent enough (and on a student's budget, which means a shoestring budget) that paying money for an annual fee (although they tried to tempt him, too, with the "first year waived" deal) was an instant deal-breaker.

He was also offered a Paypal Mastercard sometime during the last year and I said, "No, no - stay far, far away from the poison!" AMEX isn't exactly poison and would be a good card to have, but not with an annual fee like that. Totally inappropriate for a college student, too.

[Flyingifr 149]

While telling Amex to go screw themselves sounds good, I have the following comments:

1: An "application to apply" is not an offer of a card. In effect they could have sent that to everybody in the world, living or dead less than a month. A firm Offer of Credit would have been much better.

2: OK, so you tore up their solicitation. So what. History shows that 99.5% of all people who got it did that. You did nothing to communicate your displeasure to them. What I do when I get those things is I take the "application" and write "Go Screw Yourself" in large letters with a Magic marker across it and send it back. At least that way they get to pay the postage on my response. Sometimes I will stuff the envelope with newspapers or other heavy paper to make it weigh as much as possible driving up the postage costs.

It's one thing to simply say "You are a bunch of bastards that I refuse to do business with" to yourself. It is another to tell them all about it and make them pay the postage for you to do it.

Edited April 30, 2011 by Flyingifr

[Chester P. Dexter 177]

That seems a little sociopathic and unbalanced; you might want to channel your energies more positively in another direction instead.

[Dre 305]

That seems a little sociopathic and unbalanced; you might want to channel your energies more positively in another direction instead.

Agreed. I rather use that energy to open a bottle of wine!