I Canceled 5 Amex Cards (Fully Explained)

My Amex credit card strategy is in need of some clean up. I canceled 5 cards this year for a variety of reasons. Learn why and how it fits into my broader credit card strategy of keeping things simple. Click “Show More” to see Ad Disclosure.

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American Express makes some of the best credit cards on the market. Whether you choose their cash back credit cards or travel credit cards, there’s likely a product that will fit your wants and needs. However, many of their cards carry high annual fees, some of which offer credits to earn back some of those fees throughout the year. Even still, you’ll want to make sure you’re getting enough value from the cards you have each year in order to win.

As someone who has a variety of Amex credit cards, it was time to do some cleaning up. Here are the 5 cards I canceled:

1. Amex Blue Business Cash: I originally applied for this card for the $500 welcome offer, 2% cash back on up to $50K spend per year, and the $0 annual fee. I canceled the card because I preferred to earn 2X Amex Membership Rewards points, I didn’t like how it automatically redeemed my cash back every month, and I wanted to free up room to add another Amex card in the future.

2. Amex Business Gold Card #1: I got this card for 2 main reasons, (a) for the welcome offer and (b) to earn 4X Amex Membership Rewards points on U.S. advertising spend. At the time, I was spending around $2K+ per month on advertising for another company, so it was a great way to earn points on that spend. However, now that I’m no longer working with that company and I don’t currently have ad spend of my own, I was unable to justify the $295 annual fee. So, I closed the account.

3. Amex Business Gold Card #2: I applied for this card for the welcome offer in Year 1 as it was an Amex No Lifetime Language offer. Similar to the first one I got, I was not able to make sense of the $295 annual fee going forward, so I closed it.

4. Amex Business Platinum Card: My reason for getting this card was for the 150K offer and several credits I could use throughout the year (e.g. $200 Air Incidental Fee credit, $200 Dell credit). However, the annual fee increased from $595 to $695 and additional credits were added that I didn’t value, so I let this card go.

5. Amex Platinum Card (personal version): This card was actually an upgrade from the Amex Gold Card. American Express offered me 50K points after spending $3K in 3 months as part of the offer, so I took it as it covered the $550 annual fee at the time and all of the other credits / benefits (e.g. $200 Air Incidental Fee credit, $200 Uber Cash, $100 Shop Saks with Platinum) would be profit. However, the annual fee increased to $695 and new credits were added that didn’t fit in with my spending habits. For that reason, I chose to cancel the card.

All that said, I’ve been with Amex since 2013 and I still have a handful of cards open with them that I find great value in. Each year, it’s a wise decision to look over the credit cards you have open across all issuers and determine whether you should keep, downgrade, or cancel each one.

That said, be sure to keep all American Express cards open for at least 1 year to avoid signup bonus clawbacks and other potential penalties.

Disclosure: This site is part of an affiliate sales network and receives compensation for sending traffic to partner sites, such as CreditCards.com. This compensation may impact how and where links appear on this site. This site does not include all financial companies or all available financial offers. The content in this video is accurate as of the posting date. Some of the offers mentioned may no longer be available. Mark Reese is not a financial advisor.

#creditcards #amex #americanexpress