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@drboxing wrote:
AMEX POT has been around for ever, but they called it something else, I can't recall the name though
Has it? I don't remember ever hearing of it or anything similar before they added it to my cards around 2005, and Amex hadn't even had revolving products available for that much longer. It's been Pay Over Time since at least 2005, though - even when the particular flavor of it was Select & Pay Later.
@drboxing wrote:
It used to be called sign and travel. And though AMEX had to be paid in full, travel related charges like plane tickets etc could be paid over time.
Ahh, this is clearer now. So Amex had options in the 90s for Sign & Travel for those charges and also Optima Link for Platinum cardholders that would allow you to move charges from Platinum to Optima (the original card, not the current "second chance" card) to revolve the balance. Looks like they had some major accounting issues with it, like a full balance payment being applied to Sign & Travel balance only and a check being issued for the "overpayment" instead of to the regular balance. Yikes.
So it seems that was discontinued at some point and reintroduced with the similar Pay Over Time, which was only a select charges over $100 to pay later which later got changed to the Select & Pay Later option on POT. (I got my first Amex charge cards in 2002, so it appears that was after they stopped offering Sign & Travel and before POT was introduced). Then to complicate matters even further, maybe 5 years ago they introduced a new POT option called Sign & Travel which automatically adds all Travel purchases regardless of dollar amount to the POT balance. (The third option is POT Direct which is my default where all charges over $100 automatically go to POT.)
2 Sign & Travels, 2 Optimas, 3 POT options - I'm glad Amex never makes things confusing. 😂