American Express is often seen as the premium player in points and miles, but between flashy perks, high annual fees, and more than 30 different consumer and business cards, it's hard to know which ones actually make sense for all of us. So today I'm breaking down all 32 Amex cards, reviewing and ranking each one, and calling out the few that absolutely deserve a spot in your wallet.

But that's not all. I'm also going to unpack how membership rewards really works, including how to get the most from your points and share tips on everything from hidden credits to approval rules, to upgrade downgrade strategies, tips for retention offers, and a lot more. I'm Chris Hutchins. If you enjoy this episode, please share with a friend or leave a comment or review.

And if you want to keep upgrading your life, money and travel, click follow or subscribe. So I got my first Amex card since 19 years old, and it's pretty easy to track these things because they have a thing on the front of the card that says member sense, and they have the date.

And I've been accumulating millions of Amex points ever since. In fact, I most certainly have earned more Amex points than any other points program out there. And between my wife and I, we currently have 15 different Amex cards. Now, not all of them are the same. We might have two platinum cards, but we have 15 different individual cards.

And it's a program I've gone really, really deep on. And so today I'm really excited to share a lot more. First, I'm going to run through all of their cards. There's 31 of them. So there's a lot. I will try to be quick. I'm going to include co-brand cards like Hilton and Delta and talk about all the features and benefits, giving my opinion and ranking them on a tier list as I go.

And then I'm going to dive into their points program, membership rewards, and how to get the most out of it, how I like to use it. I'll touch on some of the exciting things available to all Amex card holders, like Amex offers, retention offers, referral offers. And then I'll share some of the nuances of Amex's rules for opening cards, getting bonuses, and a lot more.

Finally, we'll see how an Amex-only card combo stacks up against other issuers. And note that we do have links to all the Amex cards and their offers on our website, allthehacks.com/cards. The offers I'm going to talk about today and the exact amounts are good as of today. I'm recording on June 26, 2025.

However, those links on our website, at least right now are not affiliate links because it turns out Amex affiliate links don't always have the best bonuses. So right now we've transitioned to start sharing referral links from our members because those referral links usually do have the best bonuses. And while we're not making money on those links as a business, our members are getting a bunch of bonus points, but more importantly, those links have the best offers.

So please go ahead and use them, support our members, or if you want to have your referral links in rotation to earn your referral bonus points, you can join the membership at allthehacks.com/join. All right. So let's start with the cards that earn Amex's famous currency membership rewards points. But before that, there's just a few benefits that I'm going to skip for every single card as I run through this episode, because they are consistent across the entire Amex portfolio.

So unless I mentioned otherwise on a card, they all have extended warranty protections and purchase protections. They all have no foreign transaction fees or authorized user fees. Again, I will point out when that's not true. And for all the co-brand cards, the Marriott, Hilton, Delta, they have baggage insurance and secondary rental insurance.

They might also have some of those things with some of the premium cards. But in general, if I don't mention it, all the co-brand cards do have that. So let's jump in to the membership rewards cards. So the first card we're going to talk about is the Amex green card.

It earns membership reward points, has an annual fee of $150. Right now, the signup bonus isn't that exciting. It's 40,000 points on $3,000 of spend in six months. It's been as high as 60 or 50,000 points in the past. Not a lot to love about the signup bonus, but I actually think it's an underrated card that doesn't get talked about nearly enough.

It earns 3x points on travel, transit, and dining worldwide. So that's really awesome, right? There aren't a lot of cards that are hitting all of those categories at a lower annual fee, $150, and then 1x on everything else. Similar card might be the city premier card where you get 3x on flights, hotels, and dining, but you're not getting it on all other travel.

This used to be comparable to the Chase Sapphire Reserve, which now is 4x flights, 4x hotels, but 1x travel in other categories. So 3x travel, 3x transit, 3x dining. I like this card, even though the signup bonus isn't high. It's not a card a lot of people want to add to their portfolio because they've got those places covered.

As for benefits, not a lot. $199 clear plus credit. So if you want to sign up for clear to expedite security, you can do that and get reimbursed. Has trip delay coverage. And like the other green, gold, platinum, centurion business and personal versions, it is a charge card. Which means that at the end of the month, you pay your bill off in full.

It doesn't just automatically accrue interest unless you enroll in Amex pay over time feature, which we'll talk about later. So there is no set fixed limit either. Now, obviously, there is some limit. You can't just get the card and spend $500,000 on it, but there's no specific limit that you're forced to stay under each month.

And so as you spend more and pay off your card more and more, you're able to spend more and more. Now, it seems from people I know that spend a lot with Amex that once you hit the $100,000 balance on all of your charge cards limit, especially on the business side, they might reach out and do a little bit of a financial review or want to review your business statements or tax returns just to make sure that you actually have the money to pay off these cards.

As for the tier list, I'm going to put the green card at the A tier. It is 3x travel, 3x transit, 3x restaurants for $150. Membership rewards points are awesome. Might not have that many awesome perks to offset the annual fee, but very few cards have this much going on for them in terms of earning.

So I really like it. Not an S tier card, right? And you still got to pay the annual fee to get these perks. But especially with the fact that most of the other cards out there don't have anything in the travel category, I think it's pretty interesting. Now, on the flip side, there is a business version of this card.

The business green card has a $95 annual fee, earns 1x points on everything. The only elevated earning is 2x on prepaid travel booked through Amex's travel portal. Not exciting. 15,000 point signup bonus. Not exciting. You can sometimes find 25,000. It does come with baggage insurance as an added benefit that isn't on every Amex card.

But as far as I'm concerned, that's a D tier card, right? It's bottom of the barrel. You're getting 1x points on everything and an annual fee. So many better cards. I don't see any reason anyone should be holding this card. Next, we're going to talk about the Amex gold card.

And that's a personal card, earns 4x on groceries and 4x on restaurants. But the grocery spend has a $25,000 a year cap. The restaurant side has a $50,000 a year cap. And then it earns 3x on flights, 1x on everything else. It does also get 2x on prepaid hotels through Amex travel.

But again, I don't really like booking hotels in the travel portal and especially not for one extra point. So I'll set that aside. But it's a 4x grocery, 4x dining card, 3x flights. I really like this card. This card is one that I keep in my wallet. It is my primary dining and grocery card out there.

I have other cards for more points on flights, but I'm using this a lot. The signup bonus right now as of recording is as high as it has ever been at 100,000 points for $6,000 of spend in six months. However, Amex has this new phrasing where the signup bonus is labeled as high as 100,000 points.

So you might not get the full 100,000 points. And you go through this process where you apply for the card, they tell you what you get, your credit hasn't been hit with a hard inquiry, and then you get to decide how to go forward. It's a real pain that you have to go through all of that to find out your bonus.

So I can't promise what your bonus will be. And I don't know if this is something Amex is going to move to for all of their cards going forward, where they kind of look at your profile and decide whether you're going to get a bonus. There also is a bunch of family language around Amex bonuses.

So I'll talk about that a little more at the end. But at the high level, you know, generally within each group of cards, so membership rewards cards on the personal side, you can't get the bonus for the gold if you've already had a higher tier card. So once you have a platinum, you can't get the bonus for the gold or the green.

So if you're going to try to maximize all the bonuses, you'd want to get the green bonus, then later get the gold bonus, then later get the platinum. Because if you go in reverse, you actually can only get the platinum bonus and none of the others. Right now at 100,000 points, if this is a card you've been interested in, now is the time to get this card.

The perks it comes with, you get $7 a month at Dunkin' Donuts, which is a strange perk for a card like Amex to have. But you can load your Dunkin' app with the $7 each month, and then use it as like a loaded gift card balance later. Even though it's not marketed as such, you could use it at Baskin Robbins.

So if you ever go to Dunkin' Donuts or Baskin Robbins, you can cash it out and you don't have to do it on a monthly basis. You get $50 every six months at Resi restaurants. And similar, if you find restaurants that are on Resi that use the toast platform for their point of sale system, you can usually buy gift cards for those restaurants.

And you can do that online and use them later. So you can optimize if you're not going to be at a restaurant in the January to June range. But there are a ton of great restaurants on Resi. So that one's pretty easy to get use out of. There's a $10 a month credit for dining at Grubhub, Cheesecake Factory, Goldbelly, Wine.com, and Five Guys.

It's a strange mix of venues. Grubhub for pickup seems to be the easiest one for me to get use out of. I haven't really ever used it at any of the other locations, but we do carry out at least probably once or twice a month. And so we use the Grubhub credit and get pretty good value.

Now last, there is a $10 a month Uber credit, which gets automatically added to your Uber account. If you didn't know this, you can use one Uber account. And if you and your partner have multiple Amexes, you can add all of those Amexes to one account and then share that login across multiple phones and multiple people.

And that way, you can pool all that Uber credit in one place. So you are able to stack your Uber credit from multiple golds or platinums for multiple people in one account and use it. So if you add all those up, I think it makes up for the $250 annual fee if you're able to use it well, especially if you factor in that you're getting 4x on groceries, 4x on restaurants.

And obviously, if you're spending way more than $50,000 on restaurants or $25,000 on groceries, maybe that's not as good of a deal as it is for other people. But for me, this is my primary card that I keep in my wallet because dining spend seems to be one of the few things that sometimes you need a physical card.

So it's a primary bias for why I have it in my wallet, but I use it all the time. It's an S tier card for me. And you know, I'm really happy with it. All right. So the business version of the gold card, higher annual fee at $375. You get 4x points on two categories, but it's the top two categories of all of your spending.

And that could be advertising, electronics or software, restaurants, gas, transit, and phone. But that's only up to $150,000 a year on those two combined categories. Otherwise, it's a 1x on everything card. The signup bonus right now, if you're on the website looks like it is only 100,000 points. But on the business cards, you can actually sometimes find much better signup bonuses.

So it's 100,000 points on 15,000 spend in the first three months. And you get a 0% APR for six months. So it's an intro APR. And when I say you can find better offers, sometimes if you find a referral offer, and you open that referral offer in a new browser, or you change your VPN location, you sometimes find out that the offer isn't 100.

Maybe it's 150. Maybe it's all the way up to 200,000. And so you could search around, I would say using those referral offers is sometimes the best starting point. But opening them in different browsers, opening them in private browsing, incognito, trying a different VPN location, sometimes you'll end up pulling a higher offer.

Now, I'm not sure how that will play out. Right now, the super high version offers on the business platinum card have been announced that they're going to end at the end of June. I don't know if the same is true of the business gold, it's possible that all the offers are shifting to this as high as system, instead of whatever the offer says when you land on the page.

So I don't know what the future holds, I'll give an update when I find out. But as of right now, the offer you would get of 100,000 points certainly isn't the best offer. Getting an offer somewhere else that is 150 to 200,000 points is great. And I'll remind everyone that sometimes you get these offers in the mail that are targeted mailers that say, hey, we want you to sign up for this card.

And if you read through the language, the language that says you can't get this bonus if you've already had it is not in those mailers. So we've gotten these cards multiple times. And so that's really helped us rack up a lot of Amex points. But as for perks, you get a $20 a month credit for FedEx, Grubhub or office supply stores.

A lot of office supply stores sell a lot of great things that you can use to resell and kind of recoup that you get free Walmart plus I should probably mention this above you get three x points on amextravel.com if you book flights and prepaid hotels, but you've got to book them in the portal.

So I kind of view that as a side perk, not a primary earning thing. You get access to Amex's hotel collection, you get baggage insurance, trip delay insurance and cell phone protection. Overall, I think if you are spending a ton of money, but not more than $150,000 in some of those categories, it's hard to find a business card that's going to give you 4x points.

So if you spend a ton of money on ads prior to the launch of the Chase Sapphire Reserve card for business, which has 3x uncapped on ads, being able to get 4x on ads, 4x on gas, 4x on restaurants for a business card or electronics or software, which a lot of different recurring subscriptions kind of code in that camp.

This is a great card, right? I think if you're a business owner, and you spend a lot in those categories, the Amex business gold card is an S tier card. But if you are not, then I'd move it way down the list. So I think it has the ability to be an incredible card, because the ability to earn a ton of points, the ability to take advantage if you have a lot of employees of some of the Amex employee offers, which I'll talk about a little later, make this a really awesome card.

So I think for that use case, it's great. If you're not someone who's going to spend a ton of money on your business card, then this card is not that interesting. And so I would not for that person call it an S tier card. So let's talk about the platinum cards.

There are four variations. On the personal side, there are three and on the business side, there's one. And I think the platinum card is really interesting because it has a lot of historical brand recognition. Oh, it's a platinum card. It's super fancy. But from an earning potential, it's actually not that exciting.

So let's talk about why you might want it. I have one, but I would say it's primarily for the perks, not for the spend. And I'll also flag that after the launch of the new Chase Sapphire Reserve, Amex has come out and said this year, they're going to refresh and update the platinum and the business platinum.

So I'm gonna try to keep this quick, because if these cards are going to get completely refreshed, this is going to be a little out of date. But I at least want to give you an overview now because who knows what that refresh might look like. So all these cards right now have the same annual fee of $695.

All right, so the personal version of this card, the standard consumer platinum card is 5x points on flights up to $500,000 a year, and then 5x on prepaid hotels and on Amex travel. Now that's flights can be booked with Amex travel or can be booked directly with the airline.

So you can book straight on the airline websites. So that's a primary use case I have for this card, because it's 1x points on everything else. So whenever I see someone using their Amex platinum, anywhere out and about other than buying flights, all I can think about is why are you spending your money like that?

A couple reasons that I do like this card and why I have this card, and it's not only because I spend a ton of money on flights. One, the signup bonuses have historically been good, but they've never been as good as they are right now. So right now you can get a signup bonus as high as 175,000 membership rewards points after spending $8,000 in six months.

That's the highest one that's ever been out there. I've never seen a higher bonus. I've looked historically nothing better. Obviously, it says as high as so I don't know what the success rate will be for most people. But you can find out whether you're going to get that 175k without having to accept it.

So it's worth doing if that's interesting does have an authorized user fee. And we'll talk about which of the perks carry over to that. But that's $195. The big benefit of this card is access to Amex's lounge collection. Now, one of those lounges is priority pass, which you can get lots of other ways.

But some of the other lounges you have access to are a lot harder to get. So you get the Amex Centurion lounge, which you can only get with the Amex Platinum or the Amex Black card, the Centurion card. It used to include free guests, but now you can only bring free guests if you spend $75,000 a year on the card.

You also get access to the Delta Sky Club when traveling on Delta. Again, you don't get guests, so it's just for the primary cardholder. And then there are a couple other lounges like the Escape lounges, which there are about 15 around the country, I think. But there's one at the Oakland Airport that we frequent quite a bit.

Lufthansa Airport lounges, Plaza Premium lounges, there's a few edge case lounges. But the primary thing that you get here are you get access to Amex's Centurion lounges, which is about 25 around the country, Delta Sky Clubs when flying Delta and Escape lounges. That's a pretty big perk for someone who travels a lot and wants access to those lounges.

The other big perk is that you can offset a lot of the annual fee with a lot of the credits and bonuses you get from this card. Now, some people might not like playing that game, in which case I would say this card is definitely not for you. It's a bit of a coupon book.

But you do get a $200 airline credit. So you have to select one airline for the year and you can spend up to $200 on incidentals, so not airline flights. Now, there are sometimes other things that count towards those incidentals. There's a bunch of posts on Flyer Talk if you want to go deep on what counts for each airline.

So that's $200. You get $20 a month towards entertainment, which includes Disney+, ESPN+, Hulu, New York Times, Peacock, and Wall Street Journal. So if you're already spending money on one of those, you could probably recoup most of that value. You get $15 a month on Uber and then $35 a month in December for $200 a year.

So if you take Uber regularly, that's an easy one. Also works for Uber Eats. There's a $50 every six months credit to Saks Fifth Avenue, which used to be a lot easier to use. And lately, we've been struggling to find anything that we want that by the time you add on the cost of shipping and the extreme prices of buying things from Saks, it's pretty tough to use.

If you have a Saks locally, sometimes you can go in and just buy a $50 gift card and maybe you can stack a few of those over time. But this has become, for me, harder and harder to use. So I probably wouldn't value it much more for me than like $30 or $40 a year.

You get $199 towards Clear+. So if you use Clear+, that's great. You get a credit towards TSA Pre and Global Entry every four years. So if you don't have a card that has it, that's awesome. We have a ton of cards that have the TSA Pre credit. You get Hilton and Bonvoy Gold Status.

You also get a $300 a year credit at Equinox. And so if you regularly use the Equinox gyms, that's great. That'll pay for maybe one month of your Equinox membership. However, if you don't, you can sign up for Equinox at home, which is like an online fitness class. If you don't use Equinox or have a friend that uses Equinox, it's really hard to get almost any value out of this.

I would describe that value very, very low. But if you do pay for Equinox, then that's a huge value of having the Platinum card. You get Walmart Plus. You get premium status on a bunch of car rental programs. Now, for some reason, they stopped saying specifically which ones they are.

But the last I look, I think you get it in Hertz, National, maybe even Avis. But you might want to look that up because for some reason they stopped marketing that. But I know on Hertz, they have an Amex Platinum corporate code that not only gets you a discount, but the one unique feature is it gives you a four-hour grace period.

So if you have a car, you could effectively rent it for 28 hours for the price of a one-day rental. And there are a couple times where we've done airport rentals where because of our flight times, we might need to pick it up at one o'clock and drop it off at four o'clock.

And by using the Amex code, we only had to pay for one day. But any other way, we would have had to pay for two days. Now, obviously, we didn't say we were going to drop it off at four o'clock. We'd rent it from one to one and drop it off three hours late.

And that would be covered. You also get a trip delay, cancel and interruption insurance, cell phone protection, return protection on purchases. And then a few other things you get access to. You get Resi's Global Dining Access, which is supposed to give you more restaurant table availability for certain restaurants in their special program.

Haven't been able to get a lot of value there. And then there's this international airline program. Now, it used to be something where you'd get two for one on full fare business class international flights. Now, it's just kind of discounts on international airfare. And those discounts are real. They're typically greater for international business and first class, but they're not like 50% off.

It might be like five to 10% off on certain airlines. So if you're regularly paying for international business and first class travel, that might be a really big perk. But if you're using points and miles, you know, that perk is worth nothing. And then finally, Amex has their Fine Hotels and Resorts program, which is like their elevated tier of hotels that you can book through them and get access to perks like free breakfast, upgrade on availability, property credit, that kind of stuff.

Now, you don't need a platinum card to get access to those. If you go to allthehacks.com slash upgrade, we have the same program. It's also self-serve. You can use it without having any special card. But if you do have a platinum card, you get $200 a year of credit towards a Fine Hotels and Resorts stay.

And that stay doesn't even have to be in your name. But the person who's checking in and staying there does need to have an Amex card, but it doesn't have to be a platinum card. So you can also use it on a broader selection of hotels. They call the hotel collection.

But on those days, they need to be a minimum of two night stays. Now, that's a platinum card. I do like having the platinum card. I use it for 5x flights. I think the coupons, if you will, can offset most of the annual fee for people that use it in that way.

But I really think it's missing a little something to be an S tier card. But if you use those coupons effectively and make it a no annual fee card, then you're getting 5x on flights and a lot of lounge access. So for me, that's an A tier card, especially if you factor in the signup bonus.

But if you are not someone who wants to use coupon books, then I don't see a world where you'd be very excited about this card. Now, let's talk about the other variations. The two primary personal variations are a Schwab version and a Morgan Stanley version. They are very similar to the personal platinum card with a couple subtle differences.

On the Schwab side, the signup bonus right now is way lower. It's 80,000 points after 8k spend in six months. Recently, it was as high as 125,000. So not the best time to get it. Again, there's these family rules. So once you get one platinum bonus, you can't get another.

So keep in mind that unless you have a targeted mailer with special language, you can't go getting all of these different bonuses. The two unique perks that you get with the Schwab card is that one, you can use Schwab's platinum card to liquidate your membership rewards points at 1.1 cents up to a million points a year, then it drops to 0.8 cents.

Now, if you're someone like me who likes to use those points to transfer to airlines and hotel groups and book flights, then I think you have a lot better options. If you have an Amex business platinum, we'll talk about how that card lets you redeem your points at about 1.54 cents booking travel in the portal.

So I'm not interested in liquidating my points at 1.1 cents. However, if you're someone like I was talking to Tim Ferriss in his podcast recently, that just has so many points and doesn't know what to do with them. And it's a lot of hassle. If you were going to try to cash them out and you wanted a way to do that, you could cash out a million of them a year at 1.1 cents.

That's better than a lot of other options. It's better than statement credit or Amazon. But for the most part, it's not something that's exciting to me. The only other difference is depending on your balance at Schwab, you get an annual credit towards the card. So if you have $250,000 at Schwab, you get $100.

If you have a million dollars with Schwab, you get $200. And if you have 10 million with Schwab, you get $1,000. Otherwise, perks, benefits, fees, it's almost exactly the same as the personal platinum card. You still get the 5x flights, 1x and everything else. And that's the same for the Morgan Stanley card.

The difference there, similarly, different bonus. Right now, its bonus is also 80,000 points. After 8,000 spend in six months, it has been as high as 150,000 points. The one unique thing you get differently at Morgan Stanley is your first authorized user is free. So the platinum cards, the authorized users I mentioned are $195.

The bonus is those authorized users get access to Centurion lounges, Sky Club, Hilton Marriott status, and a global entry credit every four years. So you can have a way to give other people access to those lounges without having to spend $75,000. And I would argue the opportunity cost of putting $75,000 on another card is probably much greater than $195.

So if you really want to get someone else access to those lounges, it might make a lot more sense to use the $195 to get an authorized user card and spend that money somewhere else. Or if you're looking to get a platinum card, and you can get a Morgan Stanley version of the card, why not do that where your first authorized user is free?

Now you can also liquidate your membership rewards points, transferring them to your brokerage account at Morgan Stanley. It's uncapped here. So you get one cent per point at as many points as you want versus Schwab. It was 1.1 cents on the first million, 0.8 cents after that. If you do spend $100,000 on the card, you get $500 back, which adds about half a percent return to your spend.

So that maybe makes it a 1.5x card on everything. And then if you have a cash plus account with Morgan Stanley, which is $15 a month, which also gets waived if you have $2,500 a month of deposits, or a $10,000 balance in your cash plus account and an investment account, it's a little bit complicated, you'll have to go read all the nuance.

But for a reasonable amount of money stored in your cash plus Morgan Stanley account, you have no annual fee on the card. So I think if you're looking for a platinum card, and I kind of regret not doing this myself, the Morgan Stanley card is pretty interesting. You get your authorized user free.

If you decided to spend a ton of money on this card, for some reason, you'd at least get a higher return. And you could probably get that annual fee waived without putting too much money at Morgan Stanley. So those are the two kind of off versions of the card.

And when I think about them, they're not enough different about them that I'm going to put them any higher than the A tier, I could probably make a case that Morgan Stanley card might bump up to the S tier. And in fact, I think I'm going to do that only because if you can get the annual fee waived, and you can get the authorized users, and you can get all the perks, that would be amazing.

So I'll bump that one up as I'm doing this in real time. But the other two, I'll leave at the A tier. Now on the business platinum side, it's a little bit different. You don't get the 5x on flights, but you do get one and a half points on all spend over $5,000, as well as on construction materials and supplies, electronic goods, software, cloud systems and shipping.

Now, one and a half points on your spend is not that exciting all around in general, right? There's plenty of 2x everything cards. So this doesn't make sense for me as a place to spend money. It's a 1x on everything else card. And then you get 5x on flights and prepaid hotels, but only in Amex travel.

So I can't make a strong case for spending a lot of money on your business platinum card, unless you have a lot of employees. And I'll get to that in a little bit. However, the signup bonus on this card makes it an easy card for many people with a business to justify having.

And that's because depending on when you get it, and depending on what browser you're in, I've seen offers and I've taken advantage of offers myself as high as 250,000 points, after spending $20,000 in three months. Now, obviously, you need to have $20,000 of spend to make this work. But 250,000 points, especially if you can cash them out at let's call, at least you could get one and a half cents of value.

That's almost $4,000 of benefit for the card. And at a $695 annual fee, that makes a lot of sense. So if I get a flyer in the mail, offering me a 250,000 point offer on this card, even though I already have one, I'm signing up again, if they want to give me that bonus again.

So the website right now has 150,000 point on $20,000 spend in three month offer. They also are going to give you $500 credit after you spend $2,500 on flights, we could book those flights directly with airlines. So if you're going to spend $2,500 on flights in the next three months, you could bump that bonus up even more.

And I think that $500 credit on flights applies to those $250,000 offers as well. Now they have announced that those $250,000 offers are going away on June 30. So four days after recording before this episode will come out, who knows what they will be in the future. But I just want to flag that the really exciting thing about the business platinum card, similar to the Amex personal platinum is the lounge access.

But it's also the fact that you get really, really wild welcome bonuses. And the business platinum specifically has a feature where when you book flights in their Amex travel portal, you can actually get a rebate of 35% of the points you use. What that effectively means is if you had a flight that cost 100,000 points, because it was $1,000 flight, you'd get back 35,000 of those points, which means it only actually cost you 65,000 points, which means your points are being worth 1.54 cents.

Now, I had this fun conversation on Tim Ferriss's podcast, where I helped him figure out how to burn his 15 million points that he's accumulated and never used. And my message to him was the easiest way for you as someone who doesn't have a lot of flexibility is just book your flights with Amex travel on your business platinum card, and get that 35% rebate and cash out all your points effectively at about 1.54 cents.

However, one thing to note, you only get that 35% rebate on a million points rebated a year, which is about 2.8 million points redeemed in total. So in that case of Tavares trying to liquidate 15 million, it would take him somewhere around five and a half, six years to get through all of them because there is a cap on that 35% rebate.

Now, recently, they made one change, which is a little bit disappointing, which is that you're no longer going to be able to do that on any international airline flying business class. You're only able to do it on the airline you've selected each year. So if you're someone who flies the same airline a lot, and most of those airlines have to be US airlines.

So if you're flying United or Delta or American a lot, you can use your business platinum card and get 1.54 cents on your Amex points. Now, obviously, I think you could transfer them to airlines and get a much better value than you would get there. But I think it's a really compelling option if you're trying to cash out your points.

Now, almost all of the benefits and perks of the personal platinum apply here, except some of those credits. And so I'm just going to go through the credits here because they're different. And so perks wise, you still get the lounge access, you still get fine hotels and resorts, you still get the global entry, you still get Hilton and Marriott status, you get the car rental statuses, you get their trip delay and cancellation insurance.

The things that are different is you get a $10 a month wireless credit for paying your wireless bill, you also get cell phone protection, you get a $90 a quarter Indeed credit, which I've never used in any way, shape or form, you get $150 a year credit with Adobe Creative Cloud, I've never used ever on any of my cards.

So I value that at zero, you used to get $200 every six months at Dell. Now you get $150 a year plus another 1000 if you spend 5000. So if you're someone who for your company is buying computers at Dell, then getting 1000 off 5000 plus $150 that's going to pay for the annual fee on its own.

So that's pretty amazing. So the other credits you get, you get $50 a quarter at Hilton, you do also get that airline credit of $200 and the $199 clear credit. So you're not getting the Saks, Uber and entertainment and fine hotels and resorts credits. But I think you're getting everything else.

Oh, and you're not getting the Equinox credit. So I think that sums up the business platinum card. When it comes to how I would rank this on the list, I would have to put the business platinum at the B tier. And the primary reason I put it below the personal, yes, you still get the lounge access.

Yes, you get a lot of things. However, there's just no compelling reason to spend on this card. With the personal platinum, you can spend 5x on flights. I think that's really, really compelling. I think that the perks and the benefits are a little more interesting to the average person.

I think it's pretty hard to get value from the Indeed credit or the Adobe credit, or maybe even the Dell credit. So the credits are a little less valuable, the spending bonuses are a little less valuable, but you still get that lounge access and huge welcome bonuses. So that's why I put it at B tier.

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So three more cards in the membership rewards family. The two Centurion cards, the black cards. I will just briefly run over them because I think it's interesting to understand what they have. But I'm not going to spend a lot of time because I actually don't think they're that compelling.

So the interesting thing about them, I'll kind of go over them together, is that they both have a $10,000 initiation fee, plus a $5,000 a year annual fee, plus another $5,000 per authorized user fee. From what I understand, you need to be spending over $250,000 a year with Amex to even be invited.

But I know lots of people who have spent that much and not been invited. The primary thing you get from this, aside from, you know, supposedly a much better concierge and much better travel advisors, I've only probably known two or three people that have ever had the card or had a close friend with the card.

They haven't really been using those things as much because at that level of spend and at that level of income, you probably have an assistant that can do a lot of that. What you do get is you do get Delta Platinum status, which has a lot of value if you are flying Delta, not enough to earn the status, but enough to value it.

You get Hilton Diamond, which you can get for free with a Hilton Aspire card. You get IHG Platinum, which you can get free with a Chase Sapphire Reserve. You get Marriott Gold status, which isn't worth that much. You used to get Hertz Platinum status. TBD, if you still do, which is this kind of like super hidden secret status that I've heard is actually really awesome.

You also get Avis President's Club, which is not that exciting. You get $250 a quarter at Saks, which just sounds like more money to not be able to spend efficiently. You get $369 at Clear, which is enough to cover multiple people. And then you actually get your full Equinox membership covered.

That's $300 a month. Now the Equinox membership is not part of the business card, but it is part of the personal card. But otherwise, I think most of the perks are similar between business and personal. Obviously, they're not on the website. So I can't kind of answer that perfectly clearly because they don't have a published list of all these benefits.

You do get access to the Centurion lounges and you don't have to have any fees or spending amounts for your guests. So you get free guest access. If you're flying Lufthansa, you get access to their first class lounges, which are really nice. You get a PS membership, which is like a private terminal in LA and Atlanta.

And I think now Dallas, but you still have to pay to use the private terminal, but the membership fee that goes before the usage fee is covered. And the other big things, I think on the personal side, you get a 20% rebate in Travel Portal, which makes your points worth 1.25 cents.

On the business side, you actually get a 50% rebate, which means your points are worth 2 cents, which is really, really awesome. So I don't know if you had millions of points to burn and you got an invite to the black card and you wanted to burn them all up.

This would probably be a compelling reason to get this card. It's capped at 3 million points a year. I think that's redeemed. So it's probably 6 million points a year spent. So that's one reason to get the business version of this card. But gosh, really not much other reason.

Obviously, it has great purchase protections and travel protections and all those kinds of things. But I'm not excited about this card. If I got invited to this card, I don't think I would accept the invitation because the costs and the fees are too much. If you want to really burn your Amex points, if that is your MO, then the business version of the Centurion card would totally be worth being an A tier because it's just there's no way to get 2 cents of value from your Amex points.

As for earning, it's one and a half points on purchases over $5,000, 1x on everything else. As for the tier list, I think it's pretty hard for me to put the personal version of this card any higher than the C tier. It's just so egregiously expensive. The perks don't necessarily make up for it.

Maybe if you're already spending $300 a month on your Equinox membership, that's one of the only arguments that I could make that this would be interesting. That's not me. It's not most people. And it's hard to imagine spending $10,000 to sign up for a card and then $5,000 a year.

And if you wanted your partner to have it, another $5,000 a year. The business card, I'll put a B tier only because of that ability to cash out your Amex points at 2 cents. Obviously, if you have this card, you're probably earning those points really inefficiently, but to at least be able to cash them out that efficiently is pretty cool.

The only other card that earns membership rewards points is the Blue Business Plus card. And it's a business card. It has no annual fee and it gets 2x on all your spending. However, there's a 50,000 cap on that 2x and then it just becomes a 1x card. The signup bonus is pretty weak.

15,000 points on $3,000 spend in three months. You do sometimes get a 0% intro APR right now. At least you do for 12 months. There have been targeted offers for this card. So you can sometimes get targeted for it and you'll find out that you're being offered as much as 50,000 points.

And so that is really interesting to me. 50,000 points for a no annual fee card that will keep your membership rewards points alive. Keep in mind that if you cancel any of these cards and you have no more membership rewards earning cards, your points now go away. So if you have a ton of Amex points, but you don't want to be paying annual fees, the Blue Business Plus is an option.

Unlike all the other cards, it does have a 2.7% foreign transaction fee. So I wouldn't be using it overseas. But if you want a 2x card on Amex, up to 50,000 of spend with no annual fee, that'll keep your points alive. As for the tier list, I'm going to put it at a B tier.

I like that it earns 2x points, right? 2x points, no annual fee in a very valuable currency is interesting. The cap of $50,000 makes it a lot lower. The foreign transaction fees makes it a lot lower. So I'm going to put that at B tier. Okay, so that's all the membership rewards points earning cards.

I think that's the bulk of what people are excited about when they think about American Express. So I'm going to try to speed up through the rest of the cards. I'll focus on some of the really interesting ones, but some of them just aren't that exciting to me. And I don't think they're going to be that exciting to others.

So I'll try to be pretty quick. They also don't have as many coupon books and things to run through. So let's first start with cashback cards. The first cashback card is the blue cash everyday card. It's a zero annual fee card. It earns 3% back on groceries, 3% back on online retail, and 3% back on gas.

Each of those individual categories is only on the first $6,000 a year. And then after that, it is a 1% card. The signup bonus right now is $200 on 2000 spend in six months. There's a 0% intro APR for 12 months. That signup bonus hasn't been higher since 2022.

And there aren't a lot of perks on this card $7 a month towards your Disney bundle. And it also has a 2.7% foreign transaction fee. Given that there are cards out there that like the Robin Hood card that are 3% on everything, and there are plenty of cards that are going to reward you 3x points or 3% back or more on groceries and gas, and the online retail category is only up to $6,000 a year, so are the others.

This card is not that exciting to me. Yes, it's a no annual fee card, but you're not getting access to membership rewards. You're not earning that much. This card for me, I'm going to put in the C tier. It's just not something that I'm going to be excited to be using on any regular basis.

So that one's C tier for me. Next card is the Blue Cash preferred card. It's the premium version of the Blue Cash series. It's $95 annual fee, though right now they're waiving it for the first year. You get 6% back on groceries, but only up to $6,000 a year.

6% on streaming, 3% on transit, 3% gas, 1x everything else. Those other categories are not capped. Signup bonus right now is $250 on 3k spend in six months. You've got a 0% intro APR for 12 months. That signup bonus has been as high as $300 or $400 in the past, but not higher this year.

Similar $7 a month credit towards Disney, 2.7% foreign transaction fee. You've got return protection as a bonus on this card. At the surface, I think I like this card because I'm like 6% on groceries really high, 6,000 is a lot of spend. But if you compare it to the Blue Cash everyday card where you're getting 3%, that extra 3% on groceries is worth only $180 a year.

Meaning that extra 3% on $6,000 is only $180. Now, if you spend a ton on streaming, maybe this is interesting. If you spend a ton on transit and gas, you know, those categories are uncapped. But compared to other cards where you're going to probably get 3% on everything or 3x on all these categories, this card is going to maybe add an extra $180 of value a year.

Now for a lot of people, $180 extra dollars a year for a $95 annual fee card, that's great. But keep in mind that $95 is half of that incremental amount. So you're actually going to be getting less than $100 of incremental value. And the intro offer on this card isn't that compelling, right?

If you compare other cards where you might get 100,000 points worth $1,000, you can more than make up for, I don't know, 5 to 10 years of the bonus you're going to get on the 6% on groceries on this card. So I do think this card offers more value than the Blue Cash Everyday card, but not that much more.

I'll probably put it at B tier. I know some people are going to be disappointed by that because they love this card. They love getting 6%. That's a real amount of value. However, paying $95 to get at most $180 over another card that there are lots of cards that offer 3% on groceries.

So for me, that's just not going to cut it for being too much higher on that list. On the business side, there is a Blue Business Cash card similar to the Blue Business Plus. It's 2% back on everything instead of 2x points, has a $50,000 cap, then it goes to 1%.

You get $250 signup bonus right now on 3k spend in three months, 0% intro APR for a year. That signup bonus has been as high as $500 back in 2023, but nothing better since. It also has a 2.7% foreign transaction fee. I'm not stoked about this card. I feel like on one argument, I should put it at B tier because it's similar to the other card, right?

It's both 2x cap to 50k. But the other card is 2x points. And I can get a lot more value out of my Amex points than I can out of cashback. And if I'm looking at 2% cashback cards, there's just so many of them on the market. So there aren't as many 2x points cards as there are 2% cashback cards.

I'm going to put this at D tier. I don't see any reason to get a no annual fee 2% cashback card that has a cap when there are so many cards out there with uncapped 2% back. And the welcome bonus just isn't there to make up for it. Last cashback card is the plum card.

It's a strange one. It's a $250 annual fee card that earns no points on spending. However, if you pay the card off within 10 days of your statement close, you get one and a half percent back. So it is a one and a half percent back card on all your spending if you pay it within 10 days.

The interesting thing is the marketing behind this card that I believe kind of resonates most with some business owners is that you actually get 60 days to pay off the card. So unlike a lot of cards where you are owing your balance within 25 days of the statement close, here I think you get 60 days to pay off the card.

And so depending on your business, having 60 days to pay off your card might be incredibly valuable, more valuable than any type of points out there. And so I can see a use case for the right business owner that they would rather get a kind of 60 day loan every single month on all of their spending over getting any amount of points.

But for the average person who's paying off their balance each month and not running a business on their cards, this card, whether it was a personal or business version, it obviously happens to be a business version. I just don't see any use case. So I'm going to put it at the C tier because it does have a unique feature that no other cards have and then you get 60 days to pay it off.

But you're not earning a single thing on that card unless you pay it off in 10 days, in which case it would be a D tier card if you were doing that. So for the right business, I can see where this might have a little more than no value, but for the average person, it won't.

Next, we're going to talk about the co-brand cards, Delta, Hilton, Marriott, and Amazon. And let's start with Delta. So first off, all Delta cards are going to get you 20% back on in-flight purchases. Then all the cards except the blue card, you're going to get a few things. You'll get zone five boarding, first bag free for up to nine people on your record.

And a big perk of having a Delta card is 15% off award travel. That means all flights booked with points use 15% less points when you're a holder of any of the Delta cards, except the blue card. You also, as of today, June 26, 2025, you get a free Uber one membership, meaning that 999 fee is going to be reimbursed for 12 months.

If you have either of the platinum or reserve cards and six months, if you have one of the gold cards. Now, the way it's worded is it's a 12 or six month perk. It's not an ongoing perk. So whenever you activate it by spending on that card sometime in the next year, it'll work for 12 or six months.

I asked someone to try to clarify that because I got an email from Delta announcing it and I haven't heard back yet, but I assume it is a one-time promo that may get extended beyond that. So let's run through the cards. So first is the Delta blue. It's a $0 annual fee card.

You get two X points on Delta, two X points on restaurants, one X on everything else. That's not exciting on its own. The welcome bonus hasn't been higher in the last five years than it is now, which is just 10,000 points on 1000 spend in six months. The only reason I see to have this card is if you had one of the other Delta cards and you don't want to pay an annual fee, but you want to continue to have this card hitting your credit, you could downgrade to the blue card with no annual fee and keep that card helping your credit and the history because you've had it for a long time.

Otherwise, I see no real reason to have this card. As far as the tier list goes, I would put it at the very bottom. It is a D tier card. There's no real reason to use it. If you're spending a lot of money on Delta, you could earn a lot more Delta points.

By the way, you'd earn a lot more Delta points on a Amex platinum card than any of the Delta cards and Amex points transfer to Delta. So none of these cards are that great for even earning Delta miles. So the reason to have them is primarily that you're going to be able to earn medallion qualifying dollars, which is how you earn status with Delta with some of these cards.

And many of the cards also give you a head start towards that status. So the primary reason to have a Delta card is that you either fly Delta a lot and want some of the perks or you want to help boost your way towards status. That is why you would get a Delta card, not because it's going to be an amazing ROI card on your spend.

Or I guess the other reason, which is why I have a Delta card is that the 15% off is worth having. So I've racked up a few hundred thousand Delta miles over the years, and now I will get 15% discount on all my redemptions of those miles. And I think the perks make up for the annual fee.

I chose to get a business card. So that means that it's not really going to affect my credit because it's not going to show up on my credit report. So for me, that made sense. But let's run through them. So we've got the Delta gold card, $150 annual fee, 2x on Delta, 2x on restaurants, 2x on grocery, 1x on everything else.

Right now you've got an 80,000 point signup bonus. Hasn't been higher since 2021. It's not that unique. It's been 80,000 a lot and that's on 3,000 spend in six months. You get a $200 Delta credit after you spend $10,000 in a year and you get $100 credit towards Delta stays, which is their hotel portal.

On the business side, kind of similar. $150 annual fee, 2x Delta, 2x restaurants. Instead of groceries, you get ads and shipping as a 2x category up to $50,000 each. The signup bonus is about 10,000 points higher. So 90,000 on 6k spend in six months. Hasn't ever been higher, but it's not really a unique thing.

You also get $200 Delta credit after $10,000 spend. And instead of $100 Delta stays credit, you get $150. So in summary, the gold version of this card, whether it's personal or business is primarily beneficial, not for someone who's chasing status because the Platinum and Reserves are going to really help with that.

But for someone who flies just enough Delta that they're going to value checked bags or maybe Zone 5 boarding or has enough Delta miles that they want to get 15% off award travel. However, that's not that many people because it's not too hard to get the base tier of status on Delta if you're flying Delta a lot.

So it has to be someone that knows they're going to fly Delta a couple times a year and they're going to check bags for that to really make sense. That said, the signup bonus of this is pretty high, 80 or 90,000 Delta miles. So that could be another reason to get the cards.

They do have similar family language on Delta cards. If you want to rack up a lot of Delta miles opening Delta cards, you're going to want to start low and go gold, then platinum, then reserve, because you can't go the reverse direction. Once you've had the reserve, you're ineligible for the bonuses on the lower tier cards.

As for ranking these, I'm going to put them both at the C tier because I just don't think there's enough value other than the free check bags and the award discount. So they might be a good place to downgrade, but I think the perks you're going to get from the higher fee cards are going to give you a better ROI.

So if you look at the Delta platinum card, you similarly get 2x on restaurants and 2x on groceries, just like you did on the gold, but you get 3x on Delta and 3x on hotels, 1x on everything else. Signup bonus is a little higher, 90,000 points on 4,000 spend in six months, instead of 80,000, but you get a lot more credits.

And obviously those credits can be for many people a pain to track. But here's why I think this is going to be more valuable. You get $10 a month at Resi, which if you live in a major city, it's not too difficult to find a Resi restaurant. Or if you don't want to dine out every single month, get a $10 gift card at one of those Resi restaurants for four or five months and then go spend $50.

You also get a $10 a month rideshare credit, Lyft, Uber, whatever rideshare program you're using. And then you also get an annual companion certificate. This one doesn't come until after your first year, but for travel in the US, Mexico, Caribbean, and Central America in main cabin, you get a buy one, get one free other than taxes and fees.

If you add up those credits, two $10 a month credits plus an annual companion certificate, but you're only paying an extra $200 for the card, I think it's worth the upgrade. On top of that, if you're chasing Delta status, the platinum card gives you a 2500 MQD head start towards status.

I won't dive into the Delta program because you probably only care about this if you know about Delta. So this will give you a head start towards status. In fact, getting to silver status, the lowest tier of status at Delta is only 5000 MQD. So this gets you halfway there.

So that's pretty generous. And you can have multiple Delta cards that combine towards multiple MQD head starts. So if you had the platinum and the platinum business, you'd be all the way at silver status already. So the Delta platinum business, same annual fee, same 3x on Delta and hotels, instead of 2x on restaurants and grocery, you get 1.5x on transit and shipping and purchases over $5,000.

And that's on a cap of $100,000 a year on those categories. The signup bonus is $100,000 on 8,000 spend in six months, hasn't been higher, similar. Actually, all of these bonuses are at the highest they've ever been, but not necessarily rare and unique. They've been this high before. You also get the same credits, $10 resi, $10 ride share, annual companion cert.

The only real difference is you get $200 at Delta stays instead of on the regular personal platinum, you get 150. And then on both of those cards, you get Hertz five-star status, trip delay insurance, and a TSA pre and global entry credit every four years. And you'll be put on the upgrade list.

Now I don't fly Delta that often, but I can pretty much say that if you're getting on the upgrade list from a credit card, you're probably never going to clear over all of the other people that have status. So I wouldn't think of that as a major perk. So like I said, you get $2,500 head start on the medallion qualifying dollars you need.

And then for every $20 you spend, you get another medallion qualifying dollar. Now that doesn't really sound like that much, and it really isn't, right? If you wanted to get to gold status, you need 10,000 medallion qualifying dollars. Having this card will get you 2,500 of the way there.

So you need 7,500, which means you need to spend $150,000. And that's just a gold, the second tier of status. So now it's hard to spend your way to status on the platinum tier of Delta cards because you're getting one MQD for every $20. When you get to the reserve level, you're getting one MQD for every $10.

So if you're really trying to use your spend to get Delta status, getting multiple Delta cards to get multiple head starts and then spending on the reserve cards is going to be your best way to do it. But I would push back and say, at some point, if you're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a Delta card to try to get Delta status, you got to ask yourself what the opportunity cost of that spend is.

And I went through an email exchange with someone who was asking me about this. And it turns out that by not using, let's say, a 2.625% cashback card, they were effectively spending $4,000 on Delta status each year to try to get all the way to Delta diamond. Now, if you think that that's worth it, and you understand the benefits and the perks, awesome.

But if you're actually thinking, wow, I don't fly Delta that often. If I just took that $4,000 and just paid for comfort plus or paid for business class, I'd probably be a lot happier. And maybe I wouldn't even fly Delta all the time. That said, when it comes to the tier list, I'm going to put both the platinum cards at the B tier.

I think they are better cards than the gold cards, because I think all those perks and the companion certificate make them more valuable than the increase in annual fee. And so I don't really see a strong reason to get the gold card. So now let's go on to the last tier, the reserve cards.

On the personal reserve, you get 3x on Delta and 1x on everything else. So you lose all the bonus categories of spend, which is a bummer. You do get a higher signup bonus, 100,000 miles on 6,000 spend in six months. It used to be 125,000 a lot up until 2023.

And then it hasn't really ever crossed 100,000. What you do get on this card is access to lounges. And that's why the annual fee is so much higher. It's $650. You get 15 visits to the Delta Sky Club. You get four guest passes. And you don't get any guests other than those guest passes unless you spend $75,000.

Now, similar to the fact that on an Amex platinum card, you get access to Delta Sky Clubs. On the Delta Sky Club, you get access to the Centurion Lounge when you're flying Delta. So you can go to those Amex lounges, but you can't bring your guests in like the Amex card works on Delta.

You also get instead of a 10, you get a $20 a month credit towards Resi. You get an annual companion certificate, just like the platinum card, except this one works in any class of the plane. You also get that $10 a month rideshare credit. You get a $250 Delta stays credit and you get Hertz president circle status.

You get the TSA pre and global entry. You get trip delay, cancellation, interruption insurance. You do also get on the upgrade list, which I said probably doesn't matter, but you do get priority over other similar people. So if you had two Delta platinum flyers and one of them was going to be decided whether they got an upgrade, the person who has the Delta reserve card is going to be higher than the person who doesn't.

Now, chances are both of them have it, and that's not going to be the deal breaker, but just something to keep in mind. Like the platinum cards, you get $2,500 MQD Head Start. Like I mentioned, you get one MQD for every $10. So spending your way to gold status instead of $150,000 on the platinum card would be $75,000 on the reserve cards.

Again, I think it's a very expensive proposition to spend your way to status. But if you have a business and you're spending tons of money, maybe that's fine. You also get return protection and cell phone protection on the Delta reserve. The Delta reserve business, almost the same card, a couple of subtle differences.

You get one and a half X on office supply and transit, And you get one and a half X on all your spend after $150,000 a year of spend. Spending $150,000 a year on this card again comes at a real cost. If you're not spending it on Delta, office supplies or transit, you're earning one Delta mile.

And that one Delta mile, I think most people value at like 1.3 cents. So you're earning 1.3% on a card. Now, any other card out there is probably going to earn you at least 2%. So every dollar you spend on the Delta card, you're getting less value than other cards.

So just keep that in mind because I know a lot of people really want status. So they spend a lot of towards it and they realize, Oh wow, if I had done that spending on another card, I would have been much better off. Now the Delta reserve business has the highest signup bonus of all the cards, 110,000 Delta miles for 12K spend in six months.

Again, it's never been higher than that, that I found, but it's at this level quite a bit. Same other benefits as the personal card, other than you get a $250 Delta stays credit. Now, these are two cards where there is a fee for authorized users and that fee is $175.

And the reason that fee is high is because those authorized users also get access to the Delta sky club also get access to the Centurion lounge when they're traveling on Delta. Now there is for both the Delta reserve cards and authorized user fee of $175 a year. And the reason that's so high is that those authorized users do also get access to the lounges.

So that's a reason to have this card, but I would say if you really want access to Delta lounges and that's it, maybe find someone with the reserve card and see if they'd add you as an authorized user so that you don't have to spend the full 650, but that companion certificate, $20 a month on resi, $10 a month on rideshare, maybe value the Delta stays credit at something like there is value here.

And so I think if you travel enough on Delta that you want access to the sky club, then I would say this is a valuable card to have. Note the limited number of visits, right? If you're flying Delta hundreds of times, you need to spend money on this card to be able to get access to those sky clubs.

So I'm going to put the business version of the card a little higher. I'm going to call it an A tier card because it's the best way to spend your way towards Delta status. You get into Delta lounges, you get into Amex lounges, you've got companion certificates and $30 a month of credits that I think are pretty easy to use.

And so I think it's a pretty good card. The signup bonus at 110,000 points, the fact that it doesn't show up on your personal credit report is great. I'll put the personal one with a same card, but lower signup bonus counts towards 524 shows up on your credit report down at the B tier, but they're pretty similar cards.

And there's probably just a slight edge to the business version of the card. That is why I moved it up next. Let's talk Hilton. This is one where I know a lot more because we've had a couple different versions of the Hilton card and keep in mind when you're looking within these co-brand cards, you can move around them.

So if you have the Delta reserve, you can downgrade to the platinum. If you have the Hilton surpassed, you can upgrade to the aspire and you can kind of move around as you see fit. As long as you're not upgrading within the first year of having the the card that you have to wait one year because of some nuanced legislation about changing the annual fees in the first year.

So on the Hilton side, there are four cards. Okay. On the standard Hilton card, $0 annual fee, 7x points on Hilton, 5x on gas, grocery and restaurants, 3x and everything else. Now it's important to understand that Hilton points in general are much less valuable than airline miles or transferable membership rewards points.

You can often buy them for as little as half a cent. So when I hear 3x everything, that's, oh, wow, there aren't a lot of 3x everything cards. But when it comes to Hilton points, I think you should view that as a one and a half x everything card at the maximum.

So 7x Hilton sounds like a lot, but it's probably the equivalent of three and a half percent back on Hilton. If you value Hilton points at half a cent. Now, can you get higher value? Yes. But if you could just buy them at half a cent, it would be hard to value them at much higher than that.

Sign up bonuses are also pretty generous in terms of number of points. But keep in mind, the points are less valuable than many other points. So on the standard card, you've got 100,000 points plus $100 statement credit after spending $2,000 in six months. It has been as high as 150,000 points once.

Otherwise, 100,000 is pretty much as high as it goes. There's not a ton of perks on this card. You get Hilton silver status. And unlike almost every other card, you don't even get your extended warranty or any baggage coverage on this card. Not a huge fan of the standard Hilton card.

I'd probably put it in D tier if it didn't have 100,000 point signup bonus. So I'll put it at C tier. But it's not a card I'm really excited to have unless you stay at Hilton a lot and want to earn seven points on Hilton. I could probably make an argument to put it down in D tier.

But I do think that being able to earn 7x on Hilton for a zero annual fee card is not terrible. And actually getting 5x gas grocery restaurants, if you're really into the Hilton ecosystem is like a two and a half on all of those categories. So that probably makes it slightly better than a D tier card.

But there's not a lot to love about it. However, I do like the next two cards. So you've got the Hilton surpass, which is $150 annual fee card, you get 12x points on Hilton. So a lot more 6x on gas grocery restaurants, 4x on online retail and 3x on everything else.

Now again, Hilton points aren't worth as much as a lot of other points. So it's hard to kind of reset your brain. I view this more as, you know, 6% back on Hilton, 3% back on gas grocery restaurants, 2% back on online retail and one and a half on everything else.

That's not a bad lineup of earnings. The signup bonus is pretty generous right now. It's 130,000 points on 3k spend in six months, it has been as high as 150,000 points. And it's also been the same amount at 130,000, but also included a free night certificate, which I find really valuable.

So I would say, maybe hold off for the opportunity to get a free night certificate, if you're really interested in this card. You do get Hilton gold status, which is a daily food and beverage credit or continental breakfast, but you don't get diamond status unless you spend $40,000 on the card.

You also get a $50 a quarter Hilton credit. So if you stay at Hilton's four times a year, it pays for the annual fee. And then if you spend $15,000 a year on the card, you get a free night certificate. And that free night certificate can be super valuable.

We're about to go to the Waldorf Astoria in Costa Rica. We're going to use six of them on stays that would have normally cost over a thousand dollars a night. But I could have used 120,000 points on each of those stays. And so if I could buy those points at half a cent, it's hard to value those certificates at more than $600.

But even if you're getting a $600 certificate on $15,000 to spend, that's like 4% back on top of all the other points you're earning. So if you're earning 4x points on online retail or 2% in Hilton value, and then you're also getting another 4% towards that free night certificate, that's like a 6% back on online retail card, which is pretty interesting.

And that goes to 7% on gas, grocery, and restaurants. So spending $15,000 on this card to get that free night certificate is a no-brainer. You also get national executive status, which is cool. So I like this card. We've held this card multiple years in the past. So I'm going to put it at the A tier.

I really like the surpass card. Definitely great for getting access to Hilton free night certificates, but you do have to spend to get it. Let's talk next about the Hilton Aspire card. And this is a great card. It's one of my favorites. We hold two of them right now.

It has a higher annual fee at $550, but I think it makes up for it every year. You get 14x on Hilton, 7x on flights, rental cars, and restaurants, and 3x on everything else. A huge signup bonus. It's never actually been higher of 175,000 points on 6k spend in six months.

You get free Hilton diamond status, which gets you access to executive lounges, daily food and beverage, or continental breakfast. You get $200 resort credit every six months. So we're actually timing our stay for the end of June and the beginning of July. So we're going to actually get that $400 credit all in one stay.

You get an annual free night certificate, then you get another free night certificate at $30,000 spend, and then another free night certificate at $60,000 spend. So if you figure you're that free night is worth at least $600. Now, because you could have bought those points, that means that you're getting an extra 2% back on this card on that free night certificate.

So already, I really like this card. You also get $50 a quarter booking flights, just any flights on any airline. It's just credited back. You get a clear credit of $199 a year. And then one perk that I don't ever use that I don't think is valuable, you get $100 property credit at Waldorf and Conrad.

But you have to do a two nights day, you have to book it through their site. And I just don't think the rates and the deals are as compelling. So that one I write off at nothing. Beyond that, you get national executive status, return protection, trip delay, cancellation, interruption, and cell phone protection.

So a lot more purchase and travel protections than the average Amex card has. So I love this card, because if you figure you're getting an annual free night certificate, and you're getting a bunch of resort credit that you can use on the stay, that you're probably using that free night certificate credit.

Now keep in mind, it's only Hilton Resort, so it's not every hotel, plus $50 a quarter of flights. So when I look at this, I'm getting at least $200 on the flight credit, because I just can either buy a flight or buy travel credit on an airline I fly.

So $200 there, at least $600 of value from the free night certificate, and $400 on the resort credit. Let's say you only use that once a year. So it's only $200. You're still getting over $1,000 of value on a card that you're paying $550 for. And that's valuing the clear credit at nothing.

That's not including the fact that if you were to spend $30,000 on this card, you get another free night certificate. So I love the Hilton Aspire card. Oh, and also, you're getting Hilton Diamond status, their top tier of status. So I think the Hilton Aspire card's an S tier card.

It's one of my favorite cards. I don't think we'll ever not have this card. Now, one advanced strategy is you could downgrade and upgrade between these cards. If you search online, you'll find a few articles of people that detail how it works. And I think that doing that is a even further way to optimize your Hilton cards.

So love the Hilton Aspire. Last one's a Hilton business card. It's $195 annual fee. You get 12x on Hilton, 5x on everything else, no other bonuses. It does have a really high signup bonus right now, 150,000 points after spending 8k in six months, plus another 25k if you spend 2000 more in six months.

So that's 175k total. In the past, there has been 150k plus a free night certificate, which I would prefer. So in general, anytime these cards all offer a bonus free night certificate for signing up, that's a great time to get them. It comes with Hilton gold status or diamond.

If you spend 40,000, it comes with national executive status and it comes with a $60 a quarter Hilton credit. So this card is not that exciting to me. I think for the signup bonus, it's kind of somewhat interesting, right? If you can get 150,000 points plus free night certificate for a business card with $195 annual fee, I think the ROI is there.

I think getting 5x on everything in the form of Hilton points is like a two and a half percent back card. So that's not the worst card out there. There are not that many cards that earn that much, but your points are locked up in Hilton versus a lot of other cards where if you were just earning two and a half percent in cash and you use that to buy Hilton if you want it or not, but there's no way to earn free night certificates on this card.

So I would probably call this a C tier card because I just think that if you're going to go all in on Hilton, get the aspire, the surpass, the business card is just not as exciting. So that's a Hilton cards. Let's talk about Marriott cards. So first is the Marriott Bonvoy card.

And you can't apply for this card directly. It was formerly the SPG card. You can product change to it. I actually have it from having the old SPG card. And it's not that exciting of a card. It's a $95 annual fee card. You get 6x points on Bonvoy, 2x on everything else.

You get free silver status. And if you spend $35,000, you get gold status. Now it does include one free night certificate every year on anniversary, but it's only up to 35,000 points. You can use 15,000 other points to top it up. But finding a hotel that you want to stay at for 50,000 points for a big vacation or in a major metro area is really difficult.

If you're going to a smaller town or you're going to a lot of international places, it might be a lot easier. But we've actually struggled to get use out of this. You're not going to find those kinds of things in a major metro area and a really nice hotel or a luxury resort or anything like that.

So I think it's a little tricky to get use out of, but probably easy enough to get $95 of use out of that stay. You also get 15 elite nights that count towards the number of elite nights you need for status with Marriott. So one reason I have this card is to boost you towards your status level on Marriott.

They're not cumulative on the personal side. So if you have a bunch of personal cards on Marriott and they all give you 15 nights, you only get 15. Whereas if you do have a business card, the business 15 and the personal 15 will stack to 30. So if you're going for Marriott status and you want to boost, this is the cheapest card to be able to do it.

But unless you get a lot of value out of one free night a year at a 35 to 50,000 point property, it's a pretty expensive card for a somewhat low ROI on all your spend. So for that reason, I think it's probably a break-even card. You can't even get it as a new card.

There's no signup bonus. I'm not really excited about this card. I'm going to put it at C tier. Next card on the list is the Bonvoy Bevy card. You'll notice that all of the Marriott cards have a B name. So Brilliant and Bevy and Boundless and that kind of stuff.

So a little bit of alliteration. This is a 250 annual fee card. You get 6x on Bonvoy, 4x on grocery and restaurant up to $15,000 a year, and 2x on everything else. I kind of value Marriott points at 0.6 to 0.7 cents, which makes the what is this card really worth math a little trickier.

So it's like 2.8% on grocery and restaurants and 1.4% on everything else. So on a spending basis, not an exciting card. Signup bonus right now is 135,000 points. You get 85,000 on 5,000 spend in six months. Another 50,000 if you spend 2,000 more in six months. Somewhat regularly, it goes up to 155,000 total.

One of the perks here, if you do a lot of stays at Marriott, I guess this could be lucrative. You get an extra 1,000 points for every stay as long as you book that stay directly. You do get Bonvoy gold status, which is not that exciting. And then you get a 50,000 point free night certificate, but only after you spend $15,000.

You get trip delay coverage, which isn't always normal for every card and you get premium internet. For $250, I want more out of a card, right? If I'm getting a hotel card, if I look at the Hilton card and I look at what I'm getting with the surpass, it's just so much more than I'm getting or could get with this Bonvoy bevy card.

And so I'm not excited about this card. I'll put it in the C tier. It's probably better than, you know, the cards I'm putting in the D tier, but I'm not very excited about this card at all. Next is a Bonvoy brilliant card. This is a card I actually have.

It has a really high annual fee at $650. It still earns the same 6x at Bonvoy, but you get 3x flights, 3x restaurants, 2x everything else. So on the earning side, again, if you value Marriott points at 0.7 cents, 2.1 on flights and restaurants, 1.4 on everything else, not an exciting card to spend on.

Sign up bonus right now is 150,000 points. You get 100,000 after you spend 6k in six months, another 50,000 after you spend 2000 more in six months. It has been recently a few times as high as that same 150, but you also get a free night certificate. So if you're looking at this card and you can wait for a free night certificate, that'd probably be a much better offer.

The primary reason you'd get this card and the reason I got this card was that you get free Bonvoy platinum status, which includes the breakfast offering and includes upgrades and the upgrades include standard sweets. So that's one compelling reason. And the other is that the high annual fee can be offset by primarily two of the benefits.

So one, you get a $25 a month dining credit. So that $25 a month is at any restaurant. You just spend $25 or more at a restaurant, you get a credit. So for me, it's pretty easy to spend $25 a month at a restaurant. That's easily worth that $300 a year because we use that credit every month.

I think there was one month we forgot and I just bought a $25 gift card at a restaurant and that credited as well. So that brings the annual fee down to 350. And then you get an annual 85,000 point free night certificate. Now you can also add on up to 15,000 points, making it a 100,000 point stay.

You can't go past that. But at 100,000 points, there are a lot of Marriott Bonvoy properties you can stay at that are really nice, that will probably fit into almost any vacation or trip you're staying at in a major metro area. So that's something that I think is pretty easy to get way more than $300 of value out of.

You're probably not getting $1,000 of value like you would with the Hilton certificates that could be used at any property, but I definitely think you're going to get at least enough value to cover the rest of the annual fee and effectively negate the annual fee. And I haven't gotten my first one for upgrading to this.

The reason that I got this card was actually that you can get to lifetime platinum status with Marriott if you have platinum status for 10 years and I think you need 600 nights at Marriott. Now the elite nights you get on this card count towards that. And so I'm two years away and I just wanted to hit that lifetime platinum status.

It was just a target. I wanted to hit it and be done. And originally when I got this card, I thought I'm going to hit that and I'm going to cancel this card. I'm not going to hold onto it because now I have platinum for life. Who cares? And that might still be the case.

But as I was thinking about it, the $25 a month dining credit, there's a little overhead to having to do it, but it's pretty easy to get that value out of. And that free night certificate, I'm fairly certain I'm going to be getting more than $350 of value because 100,000 Marriott points is probably worth $500 plus in terms of the stays that I would regularly book with it.

So maybe I'll keep this card for a long time. I haven't hit that free night yet. So let's see how I'm able to use it. But all the other benefits aren't that exciting to me. If you spend 60,000 points, you get an earned choice award, which is five night upgrade certificates, another 85,000 point free night certificate, 50,000 points or $1,000 off a bed, which I hope no one's choosing.

You get $100 property credit, but like that Hilton deal, you have to book it through their link. And it's only at St. Regis and Ritz Carlton properties. I don't think I'll ever use that. You get your TSA pre global entry credit covered, which I have so many of those credits.

It's not really much value to me. 25 elite nights. So if you're gunning for Marriott titanium or ambassador status, this is going to be the most helpful way to get you a headstart than all the other personal cards. You also get premium internet return protection, cell phone protection, trip delay, cancellation, interruption.

So pretty good travel benefits on this card. So that's a Bomboy Brilliant card. I'm actually going to put this card up at A tier. Having gone through this process of evaluating it, I think if you stay at Bomboy properties enough, you've got a card with a high signup bonus.

You got a card that will reward your Bomboy stays. You get free platinum status. That's breakfast on your stays. If you're going to do a five night stay at the St. Regis and Bora Bora, which we've done, having platinum status saved us hundreds of dollars, being able to get free breakfast every single day.

On top of that, being able to offset the high annual fee with the dining credit and the free night certificates is pretty easy compared to some other high annual fee cards. So I'm going to put this at an A tier and I'm probably not going to cancel it. So the last card is the Bomboy business card.

I have this card and I'm not quite sure why. And so we'll talk about that as I go through this. It's $125 annual fee. You get 6X on Bomboy, 4X restaurants, gas, telecom, shipping, 2X everything else. Right now, the offer is three free night certificates up to 50,000 points after you spend 6K in six months.

It has been as high as five nights as a free night certificates, which is a really awesome bonus. If you add on points to get that to 65,000 points as a free night certificate, I think you can find a lot more properties than at that 35,000 point level I talked about.

They do give you a Bomboy business rate of 7% off. I've never tested that. You do get 15 elite nights. And unlike all the personal cards that don't stack, the business ones do. So if you had that Bomboy brilliant and you had the Bomboy business, you'd get 40 nights towards status.

So obviously you wouldn't care about platinum because you already have it from the card. But if you're going for titanium status, you'd be 40 of the 75 nights you need to get there, which is pretty great. You also get the anniversary free night certificate here for 35,000 point stay.

I think you can get a couple hundred dollars of value of that, but it's kind of a pain, at least for our travel style. If you spend another 60,000 points, you get a second one. This is definitely not as compelling as the Hilton cards where spending 60,000 gets you a free night at any property versus here, you're getting a free night at any property up to 35,000 points.

You get Bomboy gold, you get premium Wi-Fi, and that's about it. So Bomboy business card, way less compelling than a lot of the cards here. So the saving grace here, which is why I'm going to put it at B tier, which is a little bit surprising how I described it, is that one, if you can get it when it's a five free night certificate signup bonus, that is massive.

I genuinely think those free night certificates could probably be worth, let's say, $300 to $500. And so five of them is worth $1,500 to $2,500. So awesome signup bonus. So awesome signup bonus. Forex Bomboy points on restaurants, gas, telecom shipping, probably worth around 2.8% back in Marriott points. Not that exciting.

But getting a bonus 15 elite nights, if you're someone going for Marriott status, if you're going for titanium, which ends up also getting you silver on United. So you get free check bags there. I think it also maybe gets you some Air Canada status. I can't quite remember. There's definitely some value to having a business card because you can stack those elite nights.

And I do think you can get more than $125 of value from the anniversary free night certificate. So net net, I think it's a worthwhile card, but I'm not extremely excited to have it. So like I said, I'm going to put it at the B tier. So that's almost every card on Amex that we're going to run through.

There are a few cards that you'll notice I missed and I didn't include both the everyday and the everyday preferred card. They're not available to new customers anymore, and you can't product change to them. So I'm excluding those. I'm also excluding some of the third party cards that aren't ones you would necessarily get from American Express.

So the Coinbase card that's coming out, which by now I will have talked about briefly. And then there's a Schwab investor card that you don't get from Amex. So I'm excluding those cards. So last two are the Amazon cards. There's the Amazon business, Amazon business prime. If you don't have an Amazon prime, you're getting 3% on Amazon, 2% on gas, restaurants, and phone, and $100 signup bonus.

This is not exciting to me at all in any way, shape, or form D tier card. Now, if you have Amazon prime and you get the Amazon business prime card, you're getting 5% on Amazon, and then the same 2% on gas, restaurants, and phone with a $125 signup bonus.

So $125 over $100, no one's getting this card for the signup bonus. That's not really exciting to me at all. However, the reason to get this card is if you spend a lot for your business on Amazon, you're getting 5% back. And so where this card falls on the spectrum really depends on how much you spend on Amazon.

If you're a business that spends a ton of money on Amazon, this is an A tier card. And I'll probably put it on A tier because 5% back on a place you can buy an extremely large quantity of stuff for no annual fee is interesting. But $125 signup bonus, no extra benefits or perks makes it really hard to move it up to the S tier in any way.

But that 5% on Amazon, we have an Amazon prime card, we have the personal one, and we use it for all of our Amazon spend. Now that it's pretty tough to get Amazon gift cards for any less than that. So that is all the Amex cards. I'm going to put a link to the photo of the tier list I made in case you want to take a look at it and see where everything's stacked up.

Hopefully that was really helpful. Let's talk about the nuances of Amex and some of the perks and the benefits. And then let's talk about membership rewards, wrap up with some of the application rules and how Amex stacks up against other earning platforms. So first off, a few other things about the Amex platform that I really love that I want to talk about.

So first off is Amex offers. So every single one of these Amex cards we've talked about has the ability to enroll in offers. And how this works, we've talked about card linked offers before. I think Amex has some of the best. So you can go in and you can look at all of these offers with different brands and add them to your cards.

And I looked and amongst all the Amex cards I've had over the lifetime of those cards, I've earned over $2,000 in Amex offer rewards. And on one card, the card I've held almost the longest, it's been almost $1,000, $979. Things like earning $45 at Mint Mobile, earning $25 at Love Every, $100 at Home Depot, $100 at Best Buy, $100 at Dell, $60 at Marriott, $60 at Delta, and so on and so on.

A ton of great offers. I love adding Amex offers and seeing what's in there because every time I look, it feels like there's at least one thing that I might be spending money on. Now it's a lot of overhead to keep track of them. And once you add one of the offers to one card, even though you might see it on multiple cards, it typically goes away from those other cards, unless you add it on all cards at the same time.

That's something really hard to do manually on your own. But if you use the Card Pointers app and you have Card Pointers Pro and you use their browser extension, every time you log into Amex, it's going to add all the offers from all the cards at the same time so you can get them as many times as you want.

That means that if you had a $50 off $200 Home Depot credit, you could use that on all of the Amex cards you have and get it multiple times. So that's probably why I've been able to get so much value because sometimes there's an offer and it might be $100 at Best Buy and I can put it on three different cards.

And that's amazing. So I love Amex offers, but I really love Amex offers paired with Card Pointers. If you haven't checked out Card Pointers, go to allthehacks.com/cardpointers. You get 30% off. You also get 50% off if you're an All The Hacks member. So that's allthehacks.com/join. So I love Amex offers.

Definitely check them out. This episode is brought to you by Built Rewards, which is an amazing points program with so many ways to earn, including on your rent where you don't even need to check with your landlord. So let me explain. First, there's no cost to join Built. And as a member, you'll earn valuable points on rent and on your everyday spending.

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This episode is brought to you by NetSuite. What does the future hold for business? Ask nine experts and you'll get 10 answers. Bull market, bear market, inflation up or down. It would be amazing if we had a crystal ball. But until then, over 38,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, all into one fluid platform.

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Speaking of opportunity, you can download the NetSuite CFO's guide to AI and machine learning at chrishutchins.com/netsuite. The guide is free. You can go to chrishutchins.com/netsuite or click the link in the description. A couple other few things that I like about Amex. You get a free credit score and it's a FICO score from Experian.

So that's awesome. If you're applying for cards, almost every single card, they have this safe to apply feature where you can basically enter all of your information and they will tell you whether you're going to be approved before they do a hard pull on your credit. And if you have an Amex card already, they often don't even do a hard pull for a new application anyways.

So I've found that if my credit is completely locked, I can still apply for a new Amex card and get approved without ever needing to unlock my credit. Never get the hard inquiry. Love that about Amex. A few other things. For some cards, you get an instant card number.

I've gotten it recently on the business gold and I think a business platinum card. Those new card numbers do have a $10,000 limit, but allows you to spend that money instantly. So if you see one of those awesome signup bonuses and you have an opportunity to spend at the same time, getting an Amex business platinum and being able to spend right away is a really great way to start working towards that bonus.

I mentioned before that all the membership rewards cards except the Blue Business Plus are charge cards and so they don't have a set limit and you have to pay them off in full at the end of the month. Well, Amex also has a program called Pay Over Time. While I don't love the idea of paying a high interest fee to pay a card over time, there have been times where Amex targets you for a, hey, if you enroll in pay over time, you can get 10 to 30,000 membership rewards points.

So I've enrolled in pay over time as many times as I can to get the points, but I've never used it because I have no interest in paying really high interest rates on my credit cards. A couple other awesome things. Amex does offer retention offers. So if you have a credit card and has a high annual fee and you're not sure you want to keep it, you can live chat or call in with Amex and ask them, are there any retention offers right now?

And I've in the past gotten annual fees, even as high as the platinum card waived. I've gotten offers to spend a certain amount of money and get 10, 20, 40, 50, 60,000 bonus points, all kinds of stuff like that. So if you have a card with an annual fee coming up and once it hits, you want to call or chat and see if their retention offers, it can be a great way to boost your points balance or maybe reduce that annual fee for that year.

A couple other great things. If you have a membership rewards card and you use Rakuten, the online shopping portal, you can link your Rakuten and Amex account. So instead of earning 10% back on Rakuten, you'll earn 10x Amex points. And because I've consistently been able to get one and a half to two or more cents of value for my Amex points, it means that everything I'm earning on Rakuten is one and a half to two times more valuable than it's being marketed, which is amazing.

Amex also has a referral program. So you can go to refer a friend at the bottom of the page and see which cards you're eligible to refer from. And then you can share those links with people. And if they sign up for cards, you earn membership rewards points. Or if you're referring cards in the Hilton or Marriott or Delta portfolio, you might earn points and miles in those programs.

And it doesn't have to be that someone signs up for the exact card you have. I know if you look at my Hilton referral link, it actually shows all the Hilton cards. And sometimes someone could go from that page and even navigate over to another Amex card and you'll get that bonus.

So I will say look at what the bonus is on each link. If you had a gold card bonus that was 10,000 points and a platinum card bonus that was 20,000 points, even if someone was going to apply for a gold card through your link, maybe send them the platinum card bonus so that they click through the gold card from that link and you get the 20,000 points instead of the 10.

So definitely go read through those terms. But those referral links are often better than some of the affiliate links on a lot of blogs. And so that's why for all the Hacks members, we've been collecting Amex referral links so that when you go to all the hacks.com/cards, you're actually seeing the best offers out there, but they're not affiliate links where we make money.

They're all of our member referral links. So if you want to get some of those deals, or if you want to join the membership so you can share your referral links, go to all the hacks.com/join. Just know that as you earn membership rewards or points and miles from Amex with referrals, you should expect to get a 1099 at the year.

Those bonus points are going to be taxable income for you. Let's see on the business cards. One of the other things I really like about Amex is they sometimes offer bonuses for adding employees to your cards. So let's say you have three employees. They might say if you add an employee card and they spend $4,000 on the card, you might get 7,000 membership rewards points.

So this is only going to show up on your business cards. It's not always an offer. It just comes from time to time and it's usually only for the first five employees. But if you have a business with lots of employees and you can get some extra bonus points issuing those cards in their name, you can do that.

And for a lot of the cards with annual fees, they will give you the option to add an authorized user or employee card with an annual fee, but they'll also give you an option to add a zero annual fee card. It won't have any of the perks and benefits, but it will count towards those bonuses.

One other thing, which maybe isn't a thing to love, but it's a thing to know is that because Amex cards do not come with primary rental car coverage, Amex has created this premium rental car protection program where if you enroll almost every Amex card in it, you do get primary coverage for up to 42 days on any of your rental cars.

However, you pay $20 to $25 per rental and you can't selectively enable it. So once you enable it for a card, anytime there's an Avis charge, anytime there's a Hertz charge, you're going to get charged that $25 or $20 and it's going to activate for that rental. So keep that in mind.

I don't ever use this except for a couple of reasons. There are a few vehicle types. Maybe it's a truck that might not be covered by your other rental car coverage. So maybe this could make sense. It's never been a thing for me, but throwing that out there. And then also, if you have a really generous Amex offer, let's say you've got $100 off a Hertz rental and you have a $300 rental, well, you're going to save $100 booking through Amex and paying for that card on your Amex versus paying for a car with primary rental car coverage.

I would absolutely rather get a hundred free dollars and pay $20 for the rental coverage than get no free hundred dollars and get free rental car coverage. But I would enable the rental car protection, use it for that rental, and then I would turn it off before the next time I rent a car.

One last thing. On credit limits, when you have a charge card, there is no limit. But for the cards where you do have a credit limit, you can go online and reallocate credit between those cards. You can do it between a Delta and a Marriott and a Hilton card because those are all credit line cards that have credit limits, but you can't do it from business to personal.

So you can do it within personal cards, within business cards, across co-brands, but you can't do it to your charge cards, your gold, platinum, green cards, because they are not cards with credit limits. Okay, so that's all some of the nuances and things I like about Amex. Let's talk membership rewards.

So membership rewards is probably the longest standing transferable points currency. It is awesome. I have tons of them. I'm very happy I have them. There are some terrible ways that you can use to redeem them, but for the most part, the best value is going to be transferring them to airlines and hotels.

But let's knock some out of the way that are not great. Gift cards, Amazon, statement credit are all going to give you 0.6 to 0.7 cents. Terrible use. Booking travel through Amex travel is going to give you one cent. Now, if you do have the business platinum card, you'll get 35% of those points back, which makes it 1.54 cents, but only if you're booking travel on the airline you've selected.

And it's the airline you've selected for your $200 a year travel credit. So great way to redeem points if you don't want the hassle of transferring, but you want to get a higher value than one cent. If you have the business centurion, you can go up to two cents.

I'm guessing most people listening to this do not. I've only seen maybe one in the wild ever. If you have a Morgan Stanley or Charles Schwab card, like I mentioned, you can transfer your points to your brokerage account. Charles Schwab, you get 1.1 cent of value up to a million points.

Then it goes down to 0.8. And Morgan Stanley, you get one cent of value unlimited. So that's a great option. Or if you have an Amex business checking account, and you have the Amex business platinum card, you can transfer from your Amex membership rewards balance to your checking account balance, and you can get one cent per point up to a million points.

And then it also drops down to 0.8 cents like the Charles Schwab one does. And on the business checking account, they have often had signup bonuses for opening a new business checking account, get up to 70,000 points for doing it. So that's a pretty cool offer to earn some extra membership rewards points.

Just keep in mind, never close that account. I thought maybe I would want to have one again after having had one in the past, because I thought, wow, if I ever need to cash out my Amex points, it's nice to have another option. However, they have some rule where once you've had it, the same business can never have it again.

If it's been close, they have no way to get you a new one. So you have to go create a new business to be able to get one. So not something that I have found a way to work around yet. I guess I just need to start a new business or set it up as a sole proprietor.

But one of the other features of the business checking account is that you can earn one membership reward point per $2 spent on a debit card. So 0.5 X points. Now, that's not compelling if you could otherwise spend money on a credit card. But if there are places where you can spend money on a debit card that doesn't otherwise take a credit card or has really high fees, that is a way to earn membership rewards points.

I have been told it does not work for tax payments, but I have not done a lot of testing. And I would encourage you to search around on fire talk or Reddit to see if you can find some more reports, but could be an interesting opportunity to earn points on things that you might not otherwise be able to earn points on.

So there are three ways to kind of cash out your points without having to book travel at way better rates than statement credits or gift cards or Amazon. That said, the way I like to get the most value out of my Amex points is by transferring them to different airlines and hotel groups.

Amex has 19 airlines, three hotels. I think they either have or are tied for the most number of transfer partners out there with Capital One, but tons of great options. I already recorded an episode about the best transfer partners, so I don't want to go down a deep rabbit hole of every single transfer partner I love.

Some of the highlights from Amex are Avios, whether that's British Airways or any of their other Avios partners, Air France flying blue, especially for families. Virgin Atlantic has some great sweet spots, but you got to be careful of the fees that come with those bookings. Air Canada Aeroplan is probably one that I've used more than any other one because they just have so many partners and access to so many different Star Alliance airlines.

I've used them a ton, especially flying United flights to Europe and Asia. I haven't used a lot of Singapore and Avianca miles, but sometimes they have some good options. So that's something to keep in mind. They can also transfer to Delta, which I don't think you get a ton of value from, but it is an option out there on the hotel side.

I don't really like transferring to choice or Marriott, even though they have them as options. Maybe if they have a transfer bonus, it could be worth it. The one that makes the most sense on the hotel side is probably Hilton. And I still don't love transferring to Hilton at a one to two ratio because Hilton points typically are worth about half a cent.

And so that's really not getting more than a cent of value from your Amex points. However, when they do have a transfer bonus, I think Hilton can be a compelling destination for your points. Transfer bonuses are pretty common with Amex. They do about 17 to 25 of them every single year.

And pretty consistently for the past few years, they've done every year one to Hilton, Avianca, Marriott, Air France, Virgin, Cathay Pacific, and Avios. So a lot of ways to get your points transferred out. We've talked a ton about why transferring your points is really valuable. So I won't cover that here, but Amex gives you so many options.

And if you want a free award search tool, and if you're not familiar with the word search tools, I'll link to an episode in the show notes, but basically a way to search for flights using your points and miles. As an Amex cardholder, you get access to point.me for free.

Now it is a limited version of point.me that only shows you results from Amex transfer partners. However, if you have a bunch of Amex points and you want a free search tool to go see how you can get the most value from those points, you can get access to a free tool without having to pay any fees.

So I'll link to the Amex point.me link in the show notes. I think it's a great option. As for moving points, Amex is unfortunately one of the most restrictive programs. If you and your partner both have membership rewards accounts, you cannot move membership rewards points between people. So both of you, as long as you have membership rewards points that you don't want to lose, will need to keep at least one membership rewards point earning card.

However, if you have an authorized user on one of your cards, or you have an employee card, and they've been active for 90 days, you can transfer those points, not between Amex accounts, but to the loyalty programs of those authorized users. So I could transfer to my wife's Aeroplan account and not mine.

So if we wanted to combine our points, we couldn't combine Amex points, but we could combine them at the destination of the airliner hotel program. So that's how you move points with Amex. So coming up on the end, I want to talk about the rules for opening up Amex cards.

So obviously, I mentioned earlier, you can check to see if you're approved without impacting your personal credit score. So that's great. I talked a little bit about the lifetime rules where you can't get the signup bonus more than once, unless you've gotten kind of a targeted offer that has this no lifetime language.

So if you get those targeted offers, take a look, read them, see if they have that language. If not, which they usually don't, that's great. Otherwise, you're probably not going to get a bonus if you've already had the card. And Amex is pretty nice. They do a little pop up that says, "Hey, you're about to apply for this.

You're not going to get the bonus. Are you sure you want to continue?" And so keep that in mind when you're applying. In case you do want the card, you might still want it even if you're not going to get the bonus. It seems like Amex forgets that you've had a card card after maybe seven years-ish.

So maybe the lifetime rule is the seven-year rule, but with technology going forward, that rule might not be the same. When it comes to charge cards, you can only have 10 of them. So that's the green, gold, platinum, centurion, I guess the plum card. But we have not come close to hitting the 10 charge card max limit.

On the credit card side, that is cards with limits. You can only have five. And so if you had maybe two Delta cards, two Hilton cards, and we're going for two Bonvoy cards, nope, you can't have any more. Like I mentioned, there are family rules. So it's a little bit confusing, but in a lot of the families, you can't get a bonus on a cheaper card if you've already had a more premium version of the card.

So if you've had the platinum, you can't get the gold bonus. If you've had the Delta Reserve, you can't get the Delta gold bonus. And so you kind of run through that language. You can search around to look for Amex family rules. I'll put a link in the show notes to the Marriott rules because they're super confusing.

But keep in mind the sequencing of opening cards if you're looking for bonuses. As for other rules, Amex has a one in five rule. It doesn't affect charge cards, but if you're applying for credit cards, you can only get approved for one in five days. So you could apply for a charge and a credit card on the same day.

But do keep in mind that you have to hit those minimum spends. So make sure you can do that before getting more than one card in a day. But also keep in mind, it doesn't usually have a big impact on your credit score because once you have one Amex card, they typically only do soft pulls after that.

So that's a great feature of Amex. The other one is a two in 90 rule. You can only get approved for two credit cards every 90 days. That means that if you apply for a third card within a 90 day window, you'll automatically be rejected. So keep that in mind.

Again, that's only credit cards and not charge cards. So you can get as many charge cards as you want in that 90 day window. However, you typically can't get the same card within a 90 day window. So if you applied for a business platinum card and got approved, and then you got one of those mailers and you wanted to do another one, you'd get declined If you try to do that within 90 days.

Finally, when it comes to product changing, Amex does allow you to move around cards. So if you had a gold card, you could move it up to a platinum. Sometimes you'll even get an upgrade offer. And so we've definitely seen upgrade offers going from business gold to business platinum, gold to platinum, sometimes Hilton surpassed to aspire, that kind of thing.

So you can move around, you can't upgrade within the first year. And I think that's a rule across all cards and you can't cross over. So you can't go from membership rewards to cash back or to Hilton or to Marriott, but within each co brand you can. So you can change within the Delta cards, the Marriott cards within the Hilton cards, but you can't change within business and personal.

So I think that's all the rules to summarize reasons. I love Amex. Awesome customer service. The lounge network is something that if you have a platinum or business platinum card is really unique. I guess also if you have a Delta card and you get access to Centurion lounges, we use those Amex Centurion and the escape lounges pretty regularly, multiple times a year, along with that great customer service, really strong purchase and travel protection.

I've never had a challenge with a claim that we've made and we've done a few of them. So that's awesome. A lot of people like the Amex fine hotels and resorts program to get access to some perks at luxury hotels. I will say, I think they have 2200 hotels, the all the hacks upgrade program, I think has every one of those 2200 plus another 1800 for about 4000 total.

So all the hacks.com/upgrade. I think that's a better option, but I'm a little biased. Amex offers, they could be so lucrative. I've gotten $2,000 of value from Amex offers and probably a few hundred in the last year. So pairing that with card pointers can be really great. You also get a pop up.

If you're on a website and you use the card pointers extension, it'll say, Hey, wait, you've got an Amex offer at this website. Make sure to use this card. And sometimes I don't even realize that, you know, we were on the Chewy website to order something for our dog.

And it was like, Hey, wait, go use this card because you've got a $15 card linked offer. Diversification versus other programs. Really solid, massive transfer partner list. But a lot of the unique programs that are only available to Amex are a little lacking, right? Up until three days from now, or four days from now, they've had Hawaiian, which can backdoor into Alaska.

That's going away. They have ANA, which is unique and has some really good value, but the transfer times to ANA are long and the ANA points expire. So I'd say you really want to be a pro in using ANA before you transfer there. And then Delta, not a lot of reason to transfer to Delta because their points just don't have the same value that many other programs are.

If there's a bonus on Hilton, I think that could be good. Maybe that's a unique, great option. So really solid list of partners, but none of them stand out as, wow, get Amex for this specific partner. More get Amex because there are a lot of partners. And maybe with the loss of Hawaiian, we'll see Amex add something else.

I could imagine in the same way they're going to launch a new business and personal platinum card to compete with the CSR. Newsflash, right now, once you lose Hawaiian, Amex will not have the most number of transfer partners. So I could see them wanting to have the most number and add one just to make sure that they're one step ahead, Capital One.

Less exciting is that they don't have a personal card with no annual fee that you can use to maintain your membership rewards points. And maybe more so internationally, Amex is not accepted everywhere. I don't think I've ever had an issue trying to use an Amex and have it not be accepted.

But I just saw a post of someone talking about cards to use overseas in our membership. And they were saying, well, they live in Spain and sometimes it's a little bit challenging to use an Amex card. But either way, it could be challenging sometimes. And so finally, what I want to look at is the other least exciting thing about Amex is it's hard to make a case for Amex as your only platform for points.

So if you just want to earn points in one program, I feel like that's where Amex doesn't shine. So I looked at all the programs. And if you look at Capital One, Wells Fargo City, if you have two cards with them, and by the way, those two cards total an annual fee of $0 to $95 in all three of those programs, for the typical household spending, and I use Bureau of Labor Statistics data to come up with this number, you're going to earn 2.26 to 2.33 points on all your spending.

When I use my own spending, it's about 2.11 to 2.35x points. So that's me. And that's kind of general American population that I think has a 100,000 household income. I use the upper end of that spending data. So you're going to earn 2.26, 2.33. Let's round it off, say 2.3 points per dollar.

If you just focus on Capital One, Wells Fargo, or City. If you just focus on Amex, the two card combo that you'd probably want that will maximize your earnings on the personal side is the Amex green and the Amex gold, you're going to have $400 of annual fees. So four times the annual fees, and you're only going to end up with about 1.96x points.

For my spending profile, it was actually 1.85. So meaningfully less points. So for me personally, that'd be 20% less points. So don't love that. If you do add the blue business plus card, where you get 2x points on everything up to $50,000, and you pair that with the Amex gold or the Amex green, depending on your spending profile, and you don't spend that much, right?

If you're only spending, let's call it $75,000 a year, that number does go up to about 2.37x. But keep in mind, you only have $50,000 of spend at that 2x. So it depends how much money you spend. So while I do love the Amex platform, I don't think I could make an argument that is the only place you should be accruing points.

Now, it's still better than Chase, right? Now, if you look at my favorite Chase combo, which is the Chase Sapphire Reserve and the Freedom Unlimited, you've now got a $795 annual fee. And with the Bureau of Labor Statistics data, you're earning 1.87 points on average. And with my data, you're earning 1.75.

So Chase is the worst program to have just two cards at, if you're really trying to optimize. Obviously, you could go for the Chase Sapphire Preferred instead of the Chase Sapphire Reserve. You'd go an annual fee down to $95 for those two cards. And that would probably end you up at about 1.8x points, which is still not as good as Amex, but lower than Capital One, Wells Fargo and City.

So I still think the best option for everyday spending is to make sure you have a 2x everything card to pair with all of your bonus spending. And the reason why Capital One, Wells Fargo and City are such better performers is that all three of them have a 2x points card.

Some of them, you do have to have other cards to get 2x points. So the City Double Cash earns 2% back. But if you have the City Premier, you can transfer those into points. Capital One, you could go venture venture X without having to worry about another card and have a 2x everything card.

So all that said, Amex signup bonuses are better than all of the others. Where else can you get 200 to 250,000 points for a new card? And that's at least on the business side. But right now on the personal side, 100 to 175,000 points on personal cards. That is incredible.

It's another reason to love Amex. And on top of the signup bonuses, when you start to layer in everything else, Amex offers, employee card offers, retention card offers, you add it all together. There's a reason I have more Amex cards than anything else. Especially if you're a business spending on categories like those 4x business categories, it can be really, really compelling.

So I love Amex. I'm a huge fan. There's a reason we have all the cards. There's a reason we have all the points. But I think that it's hard to make a case to just accumulate Amex points. So I hope this episode was helpful. It was definitely a long one.

We went through so much. And that is it for this week. Podcast at allthehacks.com if you want to get in touch. I will see you next week.