There's another thing that happened recently, and I get lots of listener questions about it, and that is how to avoid annual fees. My favorite option happened this year when I got my $695 Amex platinum annual fee. I pop open the live chat on the Amex site. I said, Hey, I noticed my annual fee has just posted and it just feels high relative to all the benefits.

I asked if there were any way to get it reduced at all. Took a little bit of back and forth. The agent is always saying, Hey, let me tell you about this. Have you heard about this benefit? Have you heard about this benefit? And ultimately you get an offer.

This year, my offer was 25,000 points. If I can put $3,000 on the card in the next three months, that's over nine points per dollar, so that's worth at least $400 to me, and so I said, yes, I moved on and I'm going to cut my annual fee down by more than 50%.

It took less than five minutes and I was able to do it on live chat. So I was also able to get some work done at the same time. Highly recommend anyone with a high annual fee on a card. You'd like to keep just going and asking.