mh1361

Fair enough. My wife makes the big bucks in our relationship so I'm not sure my approval record would be as good without her income included. And I imagine providing what you file for taxes would be a good objective summary of your income.

mh1361

Here's my churning history with this card for those interested:

Me:
Nov 2013 - Approved for A+(my 1st)
Feb 2015 - Closed A+(my 1st)
June 2015 - Approved for A+(my 2nd)
Jan 2016 - Will probably close my 2nd in the next couple weeks

Wife:
June 2014 - Approved for A+(Wife's 1st)
July 2015 - Closed A+(Wife's 1st)
Jan 2016 - Approved for A+(Wife's 2nd)

I'll probably continue with this rough schedule until barclays denies an app.

nfpa70e

I have about 82K A+ miles which is worth $820 in travel reimbursement + you get 5% miles after you reimburse towards travel. If I buy a refundable ticket around $900, how soon can I redeem the miles? I would think as soon as it is posted to your account, at the most in 2-3 days. After that, how soon can I refund the ticket? I have heard about negative balance. I don't understand how there would be a negative balance if 5% bonus miles are given after the initial miles are redeemed. If you wait too long, use the bonus miles and then return the ticket, you could have negative balance.

Superorb

If you have a card that already has the new terms you cannot redeem for the AF because the fee is below the new $100 threshold for redemptions.

You can redeem once the purchase posts to your account.

travelfreaks

Anyone else have their available credit reduced to $0 online? All of mine and my wifes are showing $0 available, which is incorrect. I am hoping for a system upgrade here, as this week has been bad enough already.

Phantom707

Nope. My available credit is correct.

travelfreaks

Thanks, just called and yup all mine and wife's were closed by bank. What a wonderful Friday. Thankfully I will be in Philippines next week and all the cute little pinays in AC will take my mind off of all these shutdowns.

tracerit

I had my Barclay card replaced due to suspicious activity about 1.5 months ago. I didn'tg report anything and didn't see anything. Then yesterday, along with many others, my Serve account was closed. I've used my Arrival+ card as my main card and also for $1500/mo Serve loads with no problems.

There is one report of someone's Barclay's brand cards being closed shortly after his Serve account was shutdown. Now I'm concerned Barclay with shutdown my Arrival+ card and lose my $1300 worth of points.

Are there any tips to use those points up quick? I purchased a United flight ticket for $700 and will use that to redeem against. But now I have $600 left of points to use up :/

I will probably fly Southwest Airlines often later next year, maybe buy some miles to stcock up on?

lyst

What reason did they give you? Were you doing a lot of ms on it?

chener

Speaking of Arrival Plus accounts being closed, has anyone's accounts been flagged/closed for funding too many checking accounts?

stupidzbu

I did... all they ask for AU on the website is a first & last name.. no SSN needed.. have the card and everything

stupidzbu

Last year I MSed $6,200 worth of A+ credit

This year I'm up to $315 so far.. may slow it down due to Serve closures, we shall see

Andy2

To help a little with the previous questions, my Barclay Arrival Card was recently closed and I had to really fight for the unredeemed points.

For the guy worried about his unredeemed balance, don't forget that buying a refundable Southwest Airlines ticket, redeeming the points, and cancelling the ticket just before the flight to get a refund of the amount paid for the ticket is a viable strategy to quickly redeem points.

I am not sure which of the many possible reasons caused the account closure. As one of the non-bitter posters said in the AMEX Blue thread, hey I was the poster child for account closure. After my unlimited AMEX Blue was closed, the Barclays Arrival was my only viable MS card, so I greatly increased the volume. Other than my $50K capped Amex Blue and the 10K on Club Carlson to get the free night, I am out of the MS game unless I get the Bank of America travel card rate up to 2.5%. If everyone else can make the numbers work, more power to you, but I find my redemption costs to be 1.25% or so for prepaid cards when I throw in gas, so it is just not the same as it was at 5% redemption rates. MS is of course perfect to meet minimum spends and great bonus offers, but new cards are hard to come by after churning for years and there are just not the great 75K -100K offers any more for getting new cards, anyway.

Anyway, for analysis, I was doing about 30K a month of spending, almost all MS, on a 35K credit line. I paid the account balance down constantly, so I never had a balance of more than 10K at any time and never carried a balance on which I paid interest. Of course I screwed up a time or two and did 40K spend, but it was usually 30K. Before the old AMEX Blue closure, I had one 10K or so a month on this Arrival card, so the 30K a month on the Arrival Card probably went on for a little over a year before closure.

Of the 30K a month, probably 28K-29K was MS. 10K - 15K was for the purchase of 1-year CDs at the one bank that still allows this (unfortunately it is limited to $500 per CD, so it was a lot of purchases). The rest of the MS was purchases of $500 cards, generally involving the purchase of two of these cards at a time with the purchase of normal consumable items for a charge slightly exceeding $1,000. The prepaid cards were either loaded to Bluebird or turned into money orders between $999.30 - $1,000 each (slightly different amount for each money order). The money orders were mailed to Barclaycard to pay the credit card balance, with one money order in each envelope.

A long time ago, I was able to redeem all of the points for legitimate travel, but a combination of less paid travel and the restriction on redemptions by Barclay meant that in the last few months before closure, 50-75% of the redemption amounts were on refundable Southwest Airlines tickets with no actual flight taken. Fortunately, I had redeemed all but about $600 of reward points, when the card was rejected at CVS and when I logged in, my available credit was $0. I called and the automated voice said, "This card has been closed".

I requested my $600, and the nice telephone agents put in a special redemption request even though I had no more eligible travel costs. The not-so-nice folks in Redemption said no to that, and no to a half-price redemption as a statement credit.

I wrote a sob story to CFPB and said it was unfair that Barclays got to earn fees for the charges but did not allow me to redeem my points. A few days ago I received a very nice letter from Barclaycard with a check for the full $600 (plus the pro-rated annual fee that I also requested) with the language in the letter stating that they owed me nothing but they were doing this as a courtesy.

None of us have the same set of facts, so data points are not overly useful, but there are so many recent questions that I thought this might be useful. CFPB is great, so don't hesitate to use this service. It gets matters sent up the chain at the credit card company.

bar19900

Strangely (same exact timing 1.5 mos ago) I had my card and not my wife's AU card replaced without any notice. It happened a few days after I funded a bank account with a large dollar amount. I also mail in MO's on a very consistent basis to pay off this card. Still alive though....

waylook

Is there any way to transfer A+ accumulated points to another card account? I would earn the points with purely business expenses and do not want to mix our personal travel expenses on there.