Rob and I recently scored 90,000 American Express Membership Rewards points when I referred him to apply for the American Express Gold Card. I earned 30,000 points on the referral and he earned 60,000 points when he took advantage of the current limited time offer of earning 60,000 Membership Rewards BONUS POINTS offer after you spend $4,000 in the first 3 months. The standard offer is 35,000, although people are frequently targeted for 50,000 bonus offers.
When I say that “we’ earned, I want to remind you that unlike Chase and Cap One’s liberal transfer policies, and Citi ThankYou’s somewhat limited transfer policy, Amex does not let u transfer Membership Rewards between spouses, so the 30K must sit in my account and the 60K in Rob’s. However, Amex does allow you to transfer points to additional cardholders who have been additional cardholders for at least 90 days. So we can transfer the points freely to each others loyalty accounts as we are additional cardholders on each others cards. Or maybe I will just use the points to book flights (remember, flights and a few other redemptions are the most valuable to book with Amex points in terms of redemption rate) out of each of our accounts and just link the reservations if necessary. This is all TBD.
I also think that I will ultimately cancel my Gold card when the fee comes due as we really don’t need 2, but I will wait until I finish taking advantage of an offer where I am earning 3x additional Amex points (on top of what I already earn) for referring my mother to the Gold card too. Also, know that canceling my Gold card would not really affect my credit score as the Amex Gold is a charge card and not a credit card. There is no credit limit that I would be losing if I canceled the card (a pretty big factor in the calculation of credit score via my utilization ratio).
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