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Around eight weeks ago, American Express published a number of spending offers for holders of its business cards and I was fortunate enough to be one of the targeted card holders.
As the offer had a high spending requirement and as the last time a deal like this one appeared Amex improved my offer when, after a few weeks of it going live, I still hadn’t saved it to my targered card, I decided to hold off and wait to see what would happen if, again, I didn’t save the offer to my card.
Sure enough, at some point in the past couple of days, my offer was changed.
The change in offers
The offer that I was originally targeted for at the end of June was giving me 14,000 bonus points for spending $9,500 or more on my targeted card (up to 3 times).
At TFM, we value Membership Rewards Points at 1.5 cents each (based on the value that we know that we can get out of them with relative ease) so effectively, Amex was offering me an added incentive worth $210 to put $9,500 of spending on my Blue Business® Plus Credit Card from American Express (up to 3 times).
That wasn’t too bad (effectively, I could earn up to 3.47 points/dollar when using my Blue Business Plus card – terms apply), but $9,500 of spending is a lot and I would have had to redirect spending from other cards to make sure that I triggered this offer and I didnt really want to do that.
Now, however, this is the offer that appears on the same card with the original offer nowhere to be seen:
The bonus being offered has been cut to 8,000 points, but the spending required to trigger that bonus has been cut to $5,500 and that makes this a slightly more interesting proposition.
Thoughts
I could view this new offer as an incentive of $120 for $5,500 of spending (~2.2%) or I could view it as an opportunity to earn 3.45 points/dollar on $5,500 of spending (up to 3 times) when sing my Blue Business Plus card (the Blue Business® Plus Credit Card from American Express ordinarily earns cardholders 2 points/dollar on up to $50,000 of eligible spending per year – terms apply).
Looking at this offer in terms of the effective cash bonus makes it look a little dull, but in terms of potential earnings on what would otherwise be unbonused spending, I quite like the idea of earning 3.45 Membership Rewards Points per dollar if I only have to spend $5,500 and not $9,500.
Obviously, the earning rate would remain at 2 points per dollar for all spending under $5,500, but as long as I can be sure that I’ll hit the $5,500 target within the 90-day window that the offer gives me, that shouldn’t be an issue.
The question I’m left with is do I add this offer to my card now? Or, given that this offer doesn’t have to be saved until the end of the year, do I wait to see if Amex offers me yet another alternative?
As I type this, I’m not sure what I’ll end up doing.
Bottom line
As I thought may happen, Amex has replaced a targeted spending offer that has been sitting in my account for 8 weeks with an offer with a considerably lower spending requirement.
The new offer is a lot more interesting than the last one (even though the expected returns are very similar), but I’m tempted to wait and see if Amex will change the offer again if I continue not to add it to my targeted card.
What would you do?
