Is small scale manufacturing on the Ink ok? What's a good guideline there?

$2k to $3k per month MS seems fine to me, plus cell phone, internet, pay TV., seems reasonable.

all I can say is that nothing's safe once you mix your personal accounts with anything related to MS. That's why you'll read a lot of people keep their personal accounts separate from bank accounts they use exclusively for MS purposes. That way, if their MS accounts are closed for whatever reasons, their personal accounts don't get affected.

You can read experiences of others dealing with Chase and use your best judgment to decide whether it's safe or not. No one else can give you guarantees; it's your relationship with the bank, no one else's.

I've gotten a few PMs about this. Sorry, I wasn't trying to be coy -- the federal watchdog is the CFPB, consumerfinance.gov

My friend cited deceptive business practices because Barclay's says "there's no limit" and they've encouraged buying GCs by offering extra 4x points through Barclay Boost.

I'm not shutdown yet, but I'm redeeming as soon as I can.

Good luck, I hope you report success.

I got the nasty-gram from BofA/Fidelity Amex.

Fine. I know. I've abused them.

But, would you mind telling me which abuse was the straw that broke the camel's back?

NO! We will not! We will pass you person to person until you get a recording that says NO SOUP FOR YOU!

Here's what I've done over the years:

-deposited a ton of MOs at B of A
-used multiple AS debit cards for BS spend
-churned a lot of B of A AS cards

BofA shut me down years ago. I was a little surprised that I even got the Fido card.

Now, I don't really know if it was Fido or BofA who shut me down. And if it was BofA, was it due to my deep dark past? Or was it due to my purchases of Amex GCs? Or was it because I paid every bill with my PayPal debit card?

Well, goodbye 3% cashback. I'll miss ya.

But I won't miss the fugly card!

Nothing to do with Fido who does not manage the card - it was FIA (the MBNA sub) then the operation was transferred to BofA. So it is BofA's action. I doubt it is from the long gone past, more like the activities on the FIA card. The pay out on the FIA card has gone to the level that finally caught BofA's attention (in aggregate, not just your card) so they did a sweep to clean out the high earners.

Your will get a letter simply saying We close the card based on cardholder agreement which of course means either the bank or the cardholder can cancel the account at any time without giving any reason.

Key is, have you had $ left on the table?

Nah - maybe $8. I redeem on all of these cards all the time. Too many horror stories of people losing big bucks.

This has me a bit concerned. I currently have 11 open credit cards/unsecured lines of credit. The average age of my open accounts is a little over 4 years. I have an amex charge card that has been open since 99. I have never used it so it does not appear on my credit report. I was planning to use it once for the sole purpose of having another 16 year old account appear on my credit report and hopefully raise my average account age some. The problem is that the AMEX website shows what appears to me to be an absurdly high credit limit on this charge card. It exceeds the credit limit on the other 11 accounts combined. If this card appears on my credit report it will suddenly more then double my available credit. Is this going to cause any of my credit card companies to freak out and start closing accounts? My overall credit utilization is about 1%. I would be very very upset if I was to lose my citi prestige card before I had the chance to fully exploit it.

Then you are lucky as your closure happened just after your statement date and you haven't made any real spend yet as FIA card reward only become redeemable after statement close, unlike A+ or CapOne that are redeemable as soon as the transaction posted.

That's what happens when AGCs don't make sense any more - I don't use my Fido.

For whatever reason (ugly card, terrible website, disclaimer when paying with debit) I was never really excited about it. For 3%, I should have been, but I just wasn't.

Forgot one fun part of my shutdown. Two days after the letter date, my payment was late. I wasn't paying attention and blew it.

After I called to try to get the reason, I called back and asked for a fee waiver for the late fee and interest. "Mr. Stern, as one of our preferred customers, I am happy . . ."

You are not alone :) all my BofA accounts( two travel rewards, one Fidex AX , one checking account) got axed two months ago. all my spending on the cards were AGC, I was a preferred honors customer, so I got 2.7% CB on the travel rewards cards. What irritated them is that instead of redeeming the reward dollars for the travel expense, I transferred them into My Fidex AX card, which deposited all CB money into my Fidelity investment account.

How do you know it was that?

because I did not anything else on the cards, No MO deposits to the checking account. what else it could be?

The high AGC spend on the CC, maybe? Without more information I'm not sure how you can conclusively state the cause of the shutdown.