@ryanbush wrote:
@jake619 wrote:
Don't give it a second thought. My hunch is they expect certain behaviors when a minimum spend is involved. Hard to hold spending against you when they're dangling perks in front of you.
the financial review is really over discussed, unless you are lying about your income you really don't have anything to worry about.... and they wouldn't have gave you a card if they didn't trust you at all. just use it normally, don't charge over your credit line and make large payments towards the balance every month and you will be fine.
My father had been a AMEX customer since 1986, at times things were tough and he paid little on his credit cards and at times things were good and he charged large ammounts and PIF. There have been times when i'm sure he paid late but it i've seen him charge in excess of 75k a month when his annual reported income is only about double that and they have never even questioned him.
he has been a customer of these for 26 years and never once has been asked to provide any financial documents or even been questioned about a charge, and the only people i have ever noticed were concerned about a financial review were ones that didn't report their income properly, if you do that you have nothing to worry about
I agree that it is over discussed here, the vast majority of Amex users have probably never heard of it, and aren't impacted by it, one of the unfortunate things about forums like this is that guesses/statistically insignificant stuff become gospel, repeated over and over and become one of the first thing that new users see (Barclays AA being one other current one).
But as has been discussed in many other threads, it's not just the "guilty" who worry about, once selected for whatever reason it can be very inconvenient and hostile. You are generalizing in the other direction, your father didn't have one so there is nothing to be concerned about.
But for the OP, one thing to keep in mind is that FRs are not free to Amex either (and I assume they are aware that people who pass might cancel anyway, so there is a cost there as well), so I would expect that, in general, they will only initiate FRs against people whose a) behavior seems suspect according to whatever algorithm they use, and b) shows enough potential for loss to be worried about.
In this case, assuming your auto insurance isn't in the hundreds of thousands(!), this is in Amex terms a small charge on a small CL, so I really wouldn't be concerned.
