Originally Posted by Steve007NY

My husband and I are currently PMs. This year, we purchased a new house and have some incredibly high expenses and are currently at $150,000 spend on our AMEX platinum. Given all of the changes announced yesterday, I’m not sure and yet able to digest issues for long-term planning so my question is more short term. Assuming we spend some thing like $20,000 for necessary charges on the card for the remainder of the year, does it make sense for us to do things like pre-pay taxes at the 4% AMEX additional charge (so it would cost us some thing like $3000) in order to qualify for Diamond for 2024? We currently have an AMEX business platinum card, and each have Delta platinum business and personal cards. Our goal was to be able to finally have global upgrade certificates. Assuming we have the flexibility of retired folks, do we stand a chance in heck of being able to actually use these for flights to Asia during 2024/25? (We cashed in some thing like 1,400,000 miles for our current tickets to Sydney and Auckland, returning from Bangkok during the winter of 2024.

Certainly won’t be keeping all five AMEX cards… That’s for sure! But it seemed like being able to hit the $250,000 waiver for the first time made sense. Not sure it does anymore. Thanks