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As far as the hype of Amex goes, it’s just nice to keep one of their decent cards around. They have good transfer partners. I’ve made use of their ticket pre-sales before which saved me more than my AF in one transaction.
But out whether or not it becomes your every day spending card is just personal preference. There are a lot of good options these days.
@paulesport wrote:
For my first AmEx, I app'd for the BonVoy Brilliant with a Ex 696 and got approved for SL $8K. I had seen the "Hey (your name), you're pre-approved... get a decision in 30 seconds, etc etc". I saw it again 2 months later and decided to pull the trigger for Delta Reserve but was denied. I then tried for Delta Plat and got approved but only SL $1.4K. SP only thankfully. Moved $1K over from my BonVoy Brilliant, and asked for CLI on it to $14K and was approved. So moral of the story is, wait or get a lower SL.
I got this card a month or so back and was only approved for a 1K SL though my scores are higher than yours. But i got the 50K points bonus by applying incognito and just received the 50K bonus today before even statement generation. My offer was 50K for 1K spend.
If you work for a large corporation, I think Amex will approve you if your company tells them to. My company tells Amex to check credit, and, my company sets limits on the card for users with bad scores. I know because I am one of them. This is part of what shocked me into my credit-build phase this year. My corporate Amex has some spend limits (such as $100 retail) because my company told Amex to set those limits. I don't remember the overall limit but I remember it's enough for any travel I'd do. I don't know what your company's policies may be. From the Amex side, I think they don't care about your personal credit since your company will pay anyway. That is, assuming your company pays and it's not a reimbursement scenario.
My credit was really bad when I was approved (500s with a paid charge-off and nothing positive on it, or maybe one secured card, not sure exact date). Without knowing differences between our companies' policies, my guess is that you'd be approved with room to spare. For context, I was denied for Discover secured after being approved (with spending limits) for a corporate Amex.
Given that the issue would be with your company and not with Amex, I don't think a personal Amex will matter beyond whatever effect it would have on your credit overall.
JMO, good luck!
@Harmony12 wrote:Okay, I'm going to try to answer many of the questions. It is the Amex Corporate Green card with a very large global company. I have seen people denied an Amex corporate card and I have also seen some get approved but with very low limits.
How large! I worked at a Fortune 20, and my memory is more in line with what RichHowe says, and I don't remember anyone being denied. (Caveat: it is JUST possible that once someone was denied, their first thought wasn't "I MUST tell LTL that I was denied!")
And if possible just confirm the policy. My company had the rules:
1) You MUST use the Amex card for all business travel
2) If you don't have an Amex card, you can use your personal card and get reimbursed
with no apparent concern about the lack of consistency. (And from time to time I "forgot" to use the corporate card for some expense and used my own, and there was no problem). But of course your company might be stricter.
So my scores slightly increased today. I checked the Amex site again to see if my pre-qualification changed. Well, it changed to a higher SUB and it actually gave me approximate SL. It looks like I will only get up to $1k SL which is small like you all have said. My EX score is now 653 compared to 649 when I originally got pre-qualified.
I would be very careful about Amex. They will give today and take the next day. I use to have 3 of their cards. They can do crappy buiness.