Originally Posted by
msc75
Thank you for all the helpful tips posted here. After reading this thread in its entirety and the two below, still confused about something I wasn’t able to find a definitive answer for. Hoping an expert here can enlighten me.
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/miles...-amex-gcs.html
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/miles...ints-then.html
I’m going to try to meet a spending requirement on an Amex CC pretty fast, within the next month or so. Would prefer to do this by getting a money-equivalent gift card because I know I’ll be able to spend it easily in the next 6 months . What I'm unclear about is if Amex could treat the options below as a cash advance and may withhold the bonus points :
1. Amex gift card through BigCrumbs - preferred method due to 1.6% cashback. Posts 536 and 544 indicate this is OK but post 561 reports a problem. Is this a luck of the draw or is there any evidence to Amex changing their criteria lately?
2. Visa gift card bought at local store. (What’s the maximum denomination these come in, and what are related activation fees?)
Even Amex’s fine print on different CC app links have different wording on what’s considered an ‘eligible purchase’ that is not entirely clear to me. Here are two I recently looked at:
“You will not receive Bonus Points for balances transferred from other accounts, purchases of American Express® Travelers Cheques or American Express® Gift Cheques, fees, Interest Charges, Cash Advances and similar means of assessing your Card Account.”
“You will not receive Bonus Points for fees or interest charges, balance transfers, cash advances, purchases of traveler’s checks, purchases or reloading of reloadable prepaid cards,
or purchases of any cash equivalents. “
things are often not what they seem...
firstly, you should have no issue using your CC to buy Amex GCs through big crumbs or other. I would get them thru BC because you get 1.6% CB for doing this. Some, including me, have found, however, that as of late, when you do buy thru BC the codes to waive the Amex GC load fee dont work anymore. But still, the fees are far outweighed by the CB you later get so if you have set up the premium ship plan for $99 and plan to do this stuff enough to essentially wash that out as well, it may not matter in the long run.
I have gotten my business status problem fixed over at Amex--I mean, someone finally called me back and said they fixed it and a big order finally came. I will try another next week.
Secondly, yeah there are a few cards that you may need to be aware of... I heard US BANK cards and Citi AMEX cards will process the purchases of Amex GCs as a CA. So avoid that.
If you have a HH or SPG Amex or even the DL Gold, you should be good.
If you do many of these, amex may give you a Financial Review (The Spanish Inquisition) and you can find many things in here about FRs how crappy the can be to wait out. Good luck on that. Cant tell ya why we never got em, what, with all the coins and GCs ordered on our Amex's for so long.
Once you have your GCs, well cashing them out can be interesting but at least you made spend.
One way to cash em out--if you have the United MoM promo, is to use a amex GC as your form of payment for those multiple HomeDepot giftcards I have spoken about above. Then again, if CCs often put temp stops when they see multiple little transactions and you have to call fraud team to get the card Okd for use again, I would hate to have to go through that with Amex GC CSRs. They are all overseas underlings and everything takes for ever. Auths that are held or dropped on Amex GCs can take your money for a week!
Visa and MC GCs can be bought outright at some stores and it will look like a store purchase... I know Krogers has em and so do some supermarkets and pharmacies elsewhere. There are fees but it still may be worth it.
I used to advocate the purchasing of Amex GCs thru BC, then convert the Amex into Visa GC at stores if they let you, but now the costs are too great and options for cashing out a Visa GC are seemingly as limited as cashing out a AMEX one so it's not nec worth it any longer. Although their are exceptions to all of this but you gotta poke around... and now tell ME if you find any as a trade off of info!
Good luck