Preacher7 is not looking for the AMEX Plat card, hence it is 500 Air Miles sign-up bonus.

Preacher7 is looking for "no annual fee" card and not "First Year Free" card.

Preacher7, here are my suggestions:

VISA - open a "TD All-Inclusive Banking" account and put $5000 in it. Then you can get a TD First Class Travel Visa Infinite Card with no annual fee forever (or until TD cancel this feature). There are a number of other benefits too (TD USD VISA, TD USD Account, $60 off toward a Safety Deposit Box, etc...)

MC - Target / PC Financial World. Depending where you shop your stuff the most, or just get them all. I do price match at Target and get 5% off, and the rest price match at other Loblaws family of store to get 2% rebate in PC Points.

AMEX - SimplyCash (not the Preferred one) and get 5% for 1st 6 months and 1.25% afterward.

Goodluck

Amex seems to be tightening up their offerings quite a bit. Going on 8 months without a SPG offer, recent cancellation of the Holt Renfrew card, losing Costco, and not much in the way of above-average bonuses on the other cards.

If it's a long term hold, the signup bonus shouldn't matter.

The Amazon.ca Visa is the best no annual fee Visa card, because of the no forex fees. People who have annual fee cards still end up using this card while traveling instead of putting it away in a sock drawer, so there's value in it.

The Amex Blue Sky gives 10k points upon 500 in spending (worth $100 travel credit, referral available if you have friends/family with it), or the Simply Cash regular gives 6 months 5% cashback on gas/groceries/restaurants which may beat the Blue Sky at higher spending levels.

The Amazon.ca VISA is the one card I'd recommend everyone just holds onto. If someone just turned 18, and they're searching for their first credit card (which they should always keep), I'd recommend the Amazon.ca VISA.

Thanks a lot to all of you for your help, I really appreciate it!

Preacher, I know you're also an Airmiles casual collector, so in addition to the Amex Airmiles no fee regular card, there's also the BMO Airmiles MC with 400 welcome points.

I know you want those as keeper cards to build up credit history, and you probably don't want to spend much with them, but I would make sure you also spend time to keep those accounts active with the odd purchase every month or two...For eg., in the case of BMO, they monitored my lack of usage and lowered the limit without any warning. With MBNA, they closed up one of my wife's accounts when she had no activity for 12 months, never got any notification that it was going to be canceled.

Thx, JJJ! The no-activity reminder is a good one. Some of our Choice cards haven't had activity on them since the summer. I'd hate to have them shut down without warning.

I don't know if this was already discussed in here, but apparently RFD is offering $85 cashback with the TD Aeroplan card.

Info here:
http://www.redflagdeals.com/deal/cre...an-miles-more/

The page has disappeared completely now. Funny, wasn't the whole point to maximize signups to raise money for UHN? They could have smashed their projections by allowing signups through this week ;)

This was a pretty awesome deal... usually I avoid the proprietary Aventura/Avion type arrangements because even if FYF, it takes me longer than just one year to get enough points to make a redemption worthwhile. But at 3 years free, well, now we're talking.

it's now $70 after Dec 8th 1 pm


and the BMO $400 credit offer is DEAD also, now that it has gone "public"

I applied just this afternoon for the RFD deal... I hope I even get any amount of cashback at this point. I applied online only for them to create the application over the phone. I wonder if them just adding the RFD code will link it back to the same tracking id on RFD?

Re: BMO

There are currently posts on RFD, from senior posters, that say they've spoken with a supervisor at BMO and they will be honouring. Again, just a third-party anecdote, but it looks good, and BMO might be doing a great good by donating a huge amount of $ to the Toronto Hospital system!

I was approved for the card today. A rep called, asked a few questions about my income, verified my dob and address, andand said I can expect the card in 10 business days. Sure hope all the benefits are included.

I was referred for my Amex business gold and have just fulfilled the $5000 spending requirement within 3 months. I am quite happy to see 30,000 points bonus posted in my account right after I spent over $5000. Anyone knows when they will post the remaining 10,000 points bonus (30k non referral vs 40k via referral) ? Maybe I am too early to worry about it..

After I hit the $5,000 min spend requirement, my 40k points posted on the next statement - it wasn't split into 30,000 / 10,000 increments. It might be worth sending an email through secure message to double check.