My wife has both a BCP and a BCE. Her $95 renewal for the BCP hits tomorrow and we have already maxed out the grocery category for that card this year. I think I've convinced her to downgrade it to BCE and then upgrade it back to BCP in a year, but that would mean she would have 2 BCE cards at the same time.
My question is will AmEx allow this? Would she potentially get and upgrade offer on her current BCE card to upgrade it to BCP right away? Just want to make sure we are playing this game correctly.
Well, the answer is YES, you can in fact have 2 BCE cards at once. Wifey downgraded her BCP to avoid the AF and now we wait a year before upgrading one of them. She asked the CSR about having two of the same cards and the rep said "you can do whatever you want, they are your cards." Hopefully she gets a good upgrade offer. I got the $75 one a few months ago and went with it.
@Vinjints wrote:Are you waiting a year or is that what AmEx said? Or does your BCP come into play?
Just our choice. She maxed her BCP out this year and I just upgraded mine. We plan to use mine the rest of this year and the first half of next year and then downgrade mine at which point we will upgrade hers and use it the second half of the year and the first half of the next. And so on and so on. We didn't really plan it this way, but it actually is working out well. We can basically get 2 years of 6% maxed categories by utilizing the January 1 reset and upgrading/downgrading in the middle of the year. And since we have two cards playing the game, we only have to do the upgrade or downgrade every other year. Pretty nice, actually.
You can have as many of them (up to 5-6) as you want. There's no restriction.