AMEX BlueCash Everyday

The American Express BlueCash card was the third and final new credit card I got in June. And when I say June, I mean late at night on June 30th.

June was an eventful month for me in the world of credit cards. I upgraded my AMEX Premier Rewards Gold card to the Platinum card. Additionally, I applied for (and got) the Chase Amazon Rewards Visa. I was well into the process of becoming a credit card rewards geek and already planning future applications a few months ahead. Something was missing, though. Something I didn't want to go without: grocery store rewards.

I was thrilled with the Premier Rewards Gold card, and I needed something to replace my extra points on grocery store purchases. Granted, this card is not a Membership Rewards card, but cash back is not a bad deal. With the PRG card, I earned 2X Membership Rewards on grocery and gas purchases. I get gas purchase rewards on a couple of other cards, but nothing else in my wallet gave earnings multiples on grocery stores. Enter the BlueCash card, which gives three points per dollar on grocery purchases. The full multiples listing is below:

-3% cash back on groceries
-2% on gas stations and department stores
-1% everything else
-2.7% foreign transaction fee (clearly not a card to use overseas)
-Redeem for cash back or statement credit any time for $25 or more

I gave careful consideration to the BlueCash Preferred card, which offers a whopping 6% cash back on grocery purchases. It has an annual fee of $75, while the Everyday version I got has no annual fee. I did the math, and it would be worth the annual fee to double grocery rewards from 3% to 6% for me. Nevertheless, I opted for the Everyday version. I'm getting married next year and just could not justify paying an annual fee, even though it would be worth it. However, I am planning to upgrade to the Preferred version of the card next year.

A note about that...I discovered after applying that you CANNOT upgrade this card if you've had it less than a year. It's not AMEX; it's a consumer protection law that has an unexpected side effect. You can read about that here.

The wild card here is department stores. That is not a benefit I've seen offered on other cards, and I'm not sure how much it will benefit me. Nevertheless, it's not a bad thing to have. 1% cash back on everything else is not great, and is really the bare minimum you should be earning. Now that I've met the $1,000 spend requirement for the $100 signup bonus, this card will get only grocery and some gas purchases unless the department store category turns out to be useful.

Activity Can't Save Old SouthWest Credits

This may not be news to anyone, but I have confirmed that there is nothing you can do to keep your old SouthWest credits from expiring short of purchasing a reward ticket with them. I only had four credits, so it didn't make sense for me to purchase the balance needed to get to a new ticket. That new ticket would only have been valid for a year anyway, and SouthWest is not a main airline for me.

As background, SouthWest introduced a new rewards system last year that replaced credits with points.  Under the new system, points don't expire as long as you have activity within 24 months. The old credits expired in two years no matter what you did. I was hoping that after the transition, posting some activity would keep the old credits active, so I used the SouthWest mall shopping portal to buy some new headphones from Apple for in-store pickup.

Alas, no such luck. The points for the purchase had no effect on the expiration date of my old credits. That's okay; I was not upset. The old credits were always supposed to expire. I just figured there would be no harm in trying to keep them active. I pinged SouthWest about it, and they responded in less than a day with a friendly boilerplate explanation. I say friendly because it was worded much better than most of the "copy and paste" replies I've received from companies.

If you need to convert your old credits and buy a ticket, this blog has a great overview of the process.

Chase Amazon Rewards VISA

I just finished my first month with the Amazon Rewards VISA from Chase, and it works as advertised. This card is a perfect fit for me because I am a heavy Amazon user, but I fell into it sideways. Okay, heavy user is probably an understatement. I pay the the $79 per year fee for Amazon Prime, and I get more than my money's worth from that. I placed 60 orders in 2010, 76 orders in 2011, and 38 orders through the first 7 months of 2012. I'm on pace for 65 orders, in line with the last couple of years and averaging 1.25 orders per week. It may even go beyond that due to holiday transactions near the end of the year.

I was in the market for a new card due to my decision to upgrade from the American Express Premium Rewards Gold Card to the Platinum Card, which I will discuss in another post. Suffice it to say that while the Platinum Card is great for the benefits of having the card, the 1X points earnings leave something to be desired. Previously I had just put all my spending on the Gold card; with this change, it became more advantageous to diversify.

I'd been reading up on rewards in terms of frequent flyer points, cash back, and whatever else I could find. I turned up the Amazon card in a google search, which is funny because I must have seen it advertised on Amazon a hundred times. Now that I was in the market, it appealed to me instantly. It's a "cashback" card, so the points translate to cash at $1 per $100 points. It earns points with the following multipliers:

-3 points per dollar at amazon.com
-2 points per dollar at Gas Stations, Restaurants and Drugstores

-1 point per dollar everywhere else

The signing bonus is not exciting at $30 currently, but it posts instantly and the spending rewards appear as soon as your statement month is over. I was able to get a $50 instant credit (it functions like a gift card) for Amazon.com when I signed up. Right now, the best deal I can see is only $30 though. I am not certain if it was available publicly the day I signed up or if it was a targeted offer because I was signed into my amazon account while viewing the details. If you want this card and already have an Amazon account, then better safe than sorry: make sure you are logged in before you apply!

Neither $30 nor $50 is an especially exciting signup bonus, but this is a card you buy to put spending on rather than for that perk. The only card I have seen with better Amazon rewards is the Citi Forward card which yields 5X points on bookstores, which currently includes Amazon. However, I worry that this classification will change in the future. The Chase Freedom card also gave 5% cash back on Amazon purchases several months ago, but those rewards rotate by quarter and were only good for the first quarter of 2012.

I get gas station rewards from another card, but this card will be my go-to for Amazon and drug store purchases. It will also get most of my restaurant spending for now, although that may change if I apply for the Chase Sapphire Preferred card. Speaking of which, I have heard that Chase is rather stingy with credit card applications relative to other issuers. This is my first Chase card, so I can't speak to that, but I did go into this card applications thinking it would be a good move to start a relationship with Chase so I'd have some history to back me up for future applications for more elite cards.

I don't have any affiliation with Amazon or Chase beyond being a customer, so I don't get anything if you sign up for either.

Just Saved a Legacy Card, My Macy's AMEX

I got a Macy's VISA in 2006. As I recall, opening that account took about $100 off my purchase, which is why I did it. I was in law school at the time, and I purchased a couple of suits on sale. This was a huge purchase for me at the time. It would still be a big purchase today, but at that point while I was earning very little, it was as big as things got for me.

Fast forward a few years: I've graduated, moved, and basically forgotten about my Macy's card. It lived in a box with some other old cards and my student ID. I started becoming a credit card / travel rewards geek slowly, but hit critical mass just this year. I applied for my first AMEX in 2010, another in 2011, and then just recently made several moves in terms of applying for new cards and upgrading my old ones.

It was while checking my credit report for this geekery that I noticed the forgotten Macy's card (or at least, what I deduced to be that card). 

This was on my current credit report:
DSNB AMERICAN EXPRESS

Reported since 2009, but opened in 2006.

A quick google search indicated that DSNB AMEX is related to Macy's accounts. However, I had never had an AMEX before 2010. I looked back to a credit report from 2010 and found this:

DSNB/MACYS
closed in 2009

Unbeknownst to me, Macy's (and Bloomingdale's) credit cards shifted from VISA to AMEX while I was busy not using my Macy's card. When I figured out that I still had an open account (at least, as far as I could tell from the credit report), I immediately called in to try to get a card issued so I could keep the account from being closed. I was told that accounts were normally closed after 3 years of inactivity, but that mine was still open even though I hadn't used it in 4 years. I wouldn't have been heartbroken if this had gone the other way, but it was still a much-needed win in a period of some turmoil.

The Macy's agent really went out of her way to help me. It involved a substantial amount of work on her part since the account had been dormant for so long. Beyond that, I had moved out of state since I'd last used the card, and updating all of that was a challenge. However, she was able to get me a card reissued to my current address. I've since used it, and it works!

They had lowered the credit limit automatically due to disuse (ostensibly a protection in case the card had been stolen, and one that did not bother me). What matters is having an account that's been open for 6 years continue to stay open. The card doesn't give much in the way of rewards, so I don't foresee putting a lot of spending on it. Nevertheless, it will be valuable to keep it open so the average account age on my credit report does not fall.

As a native Floridian, I have fond memories of Burdines. I knew that Federated Department Stores had purchased Burdines and Marshall Fields, but it had espaced my attention that the company changed names from Federated to Macy's in 2007. This didn't have any bearing on anything, but I found it to be interesting trivia discovered as I followed the trail of my former Macy's VISA.

I think the take away from this is to take advantage of each and every free credit report to which you are entitled. That means 1 a year from each of the three agencies through the real free annualcreditreport.com (beware of impostors). Some good advice that I've heard (don't remember where) is to pull one from a different agency every 4 months rather than doing them all at once to give you the best picture you can have without paying for a monitoring service.

Speaking of which, I recently signed up for Citi IdentityMonitor; that link will get you the service for $4.95/month (it's normally about 3 times that). Thanks to @MommyPoints for the link. I don't know that I'll keep the service forever, but right now while I've been applying for cards and contemplating refinancing, it's proving its worth with instant notifications. 

Mountain Lion Fixes "Include Networked Devices" for Scanners in Preview

I upgraded my Mac Mini to Mountain Lion yesterday (release day), and today I was happily surprised to find that my only OSX pet peeve has been fixed. Previously, when using my Epson network scanner from Preview, I had to click through the menus twice:

1. File, Import from Scanner, Include Networked Devices
2. File, Import from Scanner, EPSON model xxx

Preview in Mountain Lion shows the scanner directly from the File menu:

Those extra clicks didn't take long, but they sure were annoying. Well done, Apple. This didn't make anyone's list of new features, but now I know what people mean when they say this OS is more "polished" than previous releases.


There was a script available to work around this issue, but the issue never bothered me quite enough to make me mess with it. Nevertheless, I am quite happy to see it fixed.

Installing Mountain Lion and Pining for an SSD

I just finished installing OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion, and boy was it slow. This is my own fault. I bought my first Mac this year, and I went with the base Mac Mini. I did upgrade the RAM from 2GB to 8GB, but I stuck with the base 500GB 5,400 rpm drive over a faster drive or a solid state drive. I don't regret it, and I would make the same decision again. Nevertheless, the OSX upgrade really drove home the point that the bottleneck in my system is the hard drive.

A friend of mine started the upgrade after I did and finished 20 minutes before me. Mine took almost an hour, but he was done in under 30 minutes. He has a MacBook Air with a slower processor than mine but does have an SSD. Due to his faster drive, he lapped me. For business, I always recommend at least a 7,200 rpm drive if not SSD. 10,000 rpm drives are great, but these days I think it's better to pay more for solid state and smaller capacity rather than pay for larger traditional hard driver. Either way though, your performance investment will pay off.


Think of your billable time. My computer was out of commission for 30 minutes longer than it "needed" to be because of my hardware choices. It's not my only computer, so I had zero down time, but that is not the typical scenario. Most users have one computer at the desk, and if it's down for updates, that is lost productivity and therefore lost money. This is something many law offices fail to understand. Investing in your hardware is just as important as investing in your people.

Let me stress that in day-to-day usage, I am not waiting for my computer. Most of the things I do are not disc-intensive, and the Mac is downright snappy doing them. Even things like file copies and software installations go pretty quickly but are not blazingly fast. That is all fully in line with my expectations; something is always going to be the bottleneck, and in most systems, it's the hard drive. One other critical piece of the puzzle for me is that I do most of my work on a terminal server, so the specifications of my local PC are barely a factor there.

I actually went from a 7,200 rpm drive in my last Windows PC to the 5,400 drive on the Mac, and I did it with my eyes wide open. I wasn't willing to pay a 25% premium to get a 750GB 7,200 rpm drive over the stock 500GB 5,400 rpm drive. There was not even an option to put a smaller 7,200 rpm drive in, which would have been my preference. However, this is probably not the right choice for most people. I'm still happy with my decision, but today served as a huge reminder that the decision had tradeoffs.

Upgrading Legacy Credit Cards

Legacy cards can be annoying: you don't use them often because they're not as good as your primary card(s), bit you still have to use them some to keep the accounts open for the sake of average account age. Make the best of it and upgrade them to the best available cards from those banks. Just make sure you confirm that your actual account will remain unchanged, even if you get a new credit card number!


I've had my Capital One MasterCard since pretty much the beginning of time, and for that reason, I should never cancel it. Average account age plays a substantial role in your credit score, so closing your oldest accounts is generally not a good idea. However, you also should not just leave the card in a drawer, because if you go long enough without using it, then the bank will close the account on its own. I lost a Discover card account that I'd opened in 2000 to this phenomenon several years ago. I think I had a notion that the account would get closed if I didn't use it, but I didn't realize that 12 years later, I would really want another account that had been open the whole time for the beneficial effect on my credit score.


My Capital One card started life as a Plain Jane ("standard") MasterCard with a $1,000 credit limit some time late in high school. Over the years, it moved up the spectrum to a Platinum card with a larger limit (I requested the Platinum upgrade; the credit limit decisions were all the bank's and happened without me asking). I was smart enough to realize the Platinum card offered some benefits I didn't receive with the regular card, but it still took me a while to realize that I should be using a rewards card.


That led me first to the Discover Card, then later to the MBNA Platinum Plus VISA with WorldPoints (which then became a Bank of America card). Discover was not accepted at enough places to be my primary card, and in college I wasn't interested in juggling cards. I liked the Discover card, but it just didn't meet my needs at the time. I wanted one card that I could use everywhere and earn rewards.


The WorldPoints card earned one point per dollar spent, which is not bad. However, the redemptions were terrible: you have to redeem 25,000 points to get 1 cent per point of value in a $250 check. You can only redeem in 2,500 point increments. Worse, if you redeem a smaller amount of points like 2,500 points, you get just $12.50 or half a cent per point. My strategy was just to wait until I had accumulated 25,000 points and cash out for $250, but that took a long time, and the maximum of one cent per point is really the minimum anyone should be getting now for rewards or cash back value. Nevertheless, it was a good choice at the time, and I used it until two years ago as my primary card.


My fiancée had been touting American Express for years (she's been a fan since 2001), and in 2010, I got a Zync card. I've since moved up the AMEX food chain, but I'll cover that in another post. I mention it here because that was what caused me to put my Bank of America card in a drawer along with the Capital One card. I now had two legacy cards that I didn't actually want to use for spending because that would have given me poor value relative to my newer points-earning card. However, I couldn't leave  them entirely disused because then my two oldest accounts would get closed.


For the last two years, I used them enough to keep them open (my goal to use each card at least every other month) but not beyond that. It bothered me that I wasn't earning useful rewards on either card, but not enough to make me do anything about it. I was too busy with life and too excited about the other points-earning cards I had found to pay much attention to my legacy cards. However, in June, as I was upgrading to a new AMEX card, I realized I should look into upgrading my legacy cards. It was a smart move, but one I should have made much earlier.


I would have been happy moving to anything better than what I had, but the cards to which I was able to upgrade are actually pretty good, at least for some kinds of spending. It was also surprisingly easy to do. I spoke with competent, friendly reps at both Capital One and Bank of America. I was particularly surprised at how good the CSRs at Capital One were, as they have been terrible in my previous experiences with them. I have never experienced the deceptive practices for which they were just fined by the CFPB, but I know people who have been pressured alone those lines. Nevertheless, the reps from both companies were great with me for these upgrades.


Since neither Capital One nor Bank of America offers a card that would be part of my (admittedly evolving) long-term points earning strategy, I decided to go for cash rewards. Since these are never going to be cards that get a large chunk of my spending, flexible cash rewards made the most sense. I was able to upgrade my existing cards to a Capital One Cash Rewards World MasterCard and a BankAmericard WWF Cash Rewards Visa Signature.


The new MasterCard will give me 1% back on all purchases across the board, with a 50% bonus on all rewards earned that is paid out once a year on the card anniversary date. That makes the effective rewards rate 1.5%, with no annual fee or foreign transaction fee. That is good enough to be a contender for spending that would earn 1X on my primary cards, and it will be my go-to card for any foreign purchases that do not accept AMEX.


The new VISA earns 3% at gas stations, 2% on groceries, and 1% on everything else. That beats the 2% I get at gas stations with my BlueCash Everyday and Amazon Visa, and will earn my gas spending as soon as I meet the signup bonus minimum spend on the BlueCash. There are cards that earn more on gas, but none that I have right now. It also donates .25% of all purchases to World Wildlife Fund. It does not have an annual fee, but it does have a 3% foreign transaction fee so this is not a card I will use overseas.


There you have it - I was able to take two cards that were useful only for average account age and make them not only better, but sufficiently useful to contend for some of my regular spending.


I have no relationship with any credit card company beyond just being a card customer. The links above are all public links, and I receive no commission from them.