Upgrade?? To AMEX Everyday Preferred???

[Andypanda]

You can upgrade. Get tge SUB, and when the AF hits tge next year, downgrade back to original card.

[Anonymous]

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@Andypanda wrote:

You can upgrade. Get tge SUB, and when the AF hits tge next year, downgrade back to original card.

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Right, but the issue is meeting the sub

[dk2003]

All,

To be totally clear, meeting the sub isn't the issue. I can! I would use the card more if the limit were higher. The $95 isn't the issue either. If I used the card more then it would make sense to me. Essentially, would it make sense to upgrade i.e. would limits be higher with the it maybe? Other cards have grown with me. This one, and discover are another story.

[Anonymous]

I would get the Amex BCP any day over BCE... The benefits just surpass anything BCE related, even with the AF.

I have a BCP and over the last 2 years, I have enough cash back to pay years of AF's. The 6% on groceries is no joke.

[SouthJamaica]

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@dk2003 wrote:

Some advice please...

So I've had Amex  since 2016. It's one of my 2 lowest limit cards (1k and a $900 discover it). I got am email and it shows on the app that I have an "offer" to upgrade from the Everyday Card to Everyday Preferred. Well... I dont use the card frequently due to the low limit. There's no annual fee but with the preferred there is, $95. I dont see where that makes sense for 50% more more points and 40k bonus points after spending 2k in 3 months (which probably won't happen). 

Help me make sense out of this. The annual fee alone is enough for me to dismiss the idea. If I actually used it, then I could maybe substantiate. 

What to do here??? 

Side note which should have been mentioned first. I got both cards during a spree way back when. Now I have about 22 cards with much higher limits by leaps and bounds (they didn't start out that way but have increased as my income and spending habits have changed). Ive made a few requests for increases on both and have been denied (none recently). 

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I agree that it doesn't make sense to incur an annual fee for a card with a low limit.  So I would skip the upgrade offer.

[sarge12]

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@Anonymous wrote:

I would get the Amex BCP any day over BCE... The benefits just surpass anything BCE related, even with the AF.

I have a BCP and over the last 2 years, I have enough cash back to pay years of AF's. The 6% on groceries is no joke.

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I upgraded to preferred a few years back, but the benefit depends on the amount of groceries bought, and it does have a cap to the 6%. It works out close to the same for me as the BCE, but the switch came with a 200 dollar bribe so....

[sarge12]

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@SouthJamaica wrote:

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@dk2003 wrote:

Some advice please...

So I've had Amex  since 2016. It's one of my 2 lowest limit cards (1k and a $900 discover it). I got am email and it shows on the app that I have an "offer" to upgrade from the Everyday Card to Everyday Preferred. Well... I dont use the card frequently due to the low limit. There's no annual fee but with the preferred there is, $95. I dont see where that makes sense for 50% more more points and 40k bonus points after spending 2k in 3 months (which probably won't happen). 

Help me make sense out of this. The annual fee alone is enough for me to dismiss the idea. If I actually used it, then I could maybe substantiate. 

What to do here??? 

Side note which should have been mentioned first. I got both cards during a spree way back when. Now I have about 22 cards with much higher limits by leaps and bounds (they didn't start out that way but have increased as my income and spending habits have changed). Ive made a few requests for increases on both and have been denied (none recently). 

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I agree that it doesn't make sense to incur an annual fee for a card with a low limit.  So I would skip the upgrade offer.

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You can still charge as much as someone with a 10000 dollar limit by making multiple payments every month even with low limits. The benefits of the preferred over the BCE card really comes down to whether or not the extra 3% in groceries and select streaming services exceeds the 95 dollar annual fee. It comes down to about 3300 dollars a year in supermarket charges to pay the annual fee. That is about 275 dollars a month, but walmart is not considered a supermarket. It really comes down to your groceries and where you buy them. The 6% on groceries is capped at 6000 dollars annually, so if your supermarket spend is between 3300 and 6000 it is a better card than BCE, and it also is 3% on gas. You might also need to consider the price of groceries at the supermarket compared to Walmart, because if the same groceries cost 5% more at the supermarket, that might erode the benefit.

[dogmeat]

It seems there is some confusion on this thread about Amex Cashback cards vs MR Points cards (the latter being that which the OP is considering upgrading). 

MR points are not cashback. You'll have to educate yourself on the MR points system, including travel partners, to extract maximum value. And while there are some people who are happy redeeming MR points for cash, I generally would not advise anyone enter into the MR ecosystem if they do not travel.

If you do travel, this is basically free travel money being offered to you, assuming you take the time to learn the system. Free because as stated previously, the dollar value of the upgrade points exceeds a 1-year annual fee, and you can downgrade to the no annual fee card in one year, only pay one annual fee, and keep the upgrade points.

As an aside, I respect that everyone has their own philosophy about which cards are worth using. I'll share mine, which is that I use the card with the best rewards for the category of purchase I am making, irrespective of credit limit. As an extreme (and currently unachievable) example, If I had a $500 CL card that gave me a 10% return on everything I bought, I'd figure out every possible loophole I could (prepayment, multiple pay-offs per month, schmoozing online chat attendants, etc) to put every purchase on that card. I do have some loyalty to some issuers, but my primary goal is to make cards work for me, and I achieve that in my terms by maximizing rewards.

[dk2003]

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@dogmeat wrote:

It seems there is some confusion on this thread about Amex Cashback cards vs MR Points cards (the latter being that which the OP is considering upgrading). 

MR points are not cashback. You'll have to educate yourself on the MR points system, including travel partners, to extract maximum value. And while there are some people who are happy redeeming MR points for cash, I generally would not advise anyone enter into the MR ecosystem if they do not travel.

If you do travel, this is basically free travel money being offered to you, assuming you take the time to learn the system. Free because as stated previously, the dollar value of the upgrade points exceeds a 1-year annual fee, and you can downgrade to the no annual fee card in one year, only pay one annual fee, and keep the upgrade points.

As an aside, I respect that everyone has their own philosophy about which cards are worth using. I'll share mine, which is that I use the card with the best rewards for the category of purchase I am making, irrespective of credit limit. As an extreme (and currently unachievable) example, If I had a $500 CL card that gave me a 10% return on everything I bought, I'd figure out every possible loophole I could (prepayment, multiple pay-offs per month, schmoozing online chat attendants, etc) to put every purchase on that card. I do have some loyalty to some issuers, but my primary goal is to make cards work for me, and I achieve that in my terms by maximizing rewards.

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Duly noted... I think this is what I was looking for!

[sarge12]

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@dogmeat wrote:

It seems there is some confusion on this thread about Amex Cashback cards vs MR Points cards (the latter being that which the OP is considering upgrading). 

MR points are not cashback. You'll have to educate yourself on the MR points system, including travel partners, to extract maximum value. And while there are some people who are happy redeeming MR points for cash, I generally would not advise anyone enter into the MR ecosystem if they do not travel.

If you do travel, this is basically free travel money being offered to you, assuming you take the time to learn the system. Free because as stated previously, the dollar value of the upgrade points exceeds a 1-year annual fee, and you can downgrade to the no annual fee card in one year, only pay one annual fee, and keep the upgrade points.

As an aside, I respect that everyone has their own philosophy about which cards are worth using. I'll share mine, which is that I use the card with the best rewards for the category of purchase I am making, irrespective of credit limit. As an extreme (and currently unachievable) example, If I had a $500 CL card that gave me a 10% return on everything I bought, I'd figure out every possible loophole I could (prepayment, multiple pay-offs per month, schmoozing online chat attendants, etc) to put every purchase on that card. I do have some loyalty to some issuers, but my primary goal is to make cards work for me, and I achieve that in my terms by maximizing rewards.

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But Blue Cash Preferred and Blue Cash Everyday are both cashback cards. I do think the cashback might be converted to MR points if you have a travel type American Express though. EDIT::: Further check after this post revealed that AE everyday card is not the same ad Blue Cash everyday....Why in the heck would they make the names so similar. I do not travel, and had no idea those were different cards, so all my posts about supermarkets were on different cards. I thought he was referring to BCP and BCE.