Originally Posted by peachfront
I am leery to apply for another Amex card unless I can be re-assured that it is easy to cancel before the second year begins and they try to assess a $85 (yikes!) fee.
When I lived in China for a year, I opened a plain vanilla Amex green (charge card) account for its benefit of letting you cash personal checks overseas. I paid the annual fee once, then cancelled it a year later without ever using the card or the check cashing benefit (it was just a backup way to get cash in case other methods failed). I actually forgot to cancel the card before the second annual fee hit. But when I called and they saw that I hadn't used it in the last couple months, they closed the account no problem refunding the 2nd annual fee.
This was in 2001-2002, btw.