Bank of America widely offering $175 retention bonuses, even on no annual fee cards

If you have any Bank of America credit cards, it might be worth trying to close one or more of them—even if you want to keep them open.

That’s because many cardholders are being offered a retention offer of a $175 statement credit when spending $1,500 within 90 days of receiving the offer. Even better, this can all be done via online chat and so you don’t have to speak to an agent on the phone.

This can be done using the Bank of America app, as well as on desktop. If using the app, you should see a search box at the top when logged in that says “Hi, I’m Erica. May I help?” Type something like ‘close card’ or ‘cancel card’ in there and it should take you through a number of different screens before displaying a retention offer. This is what it looked like when doing this for my Customized Cash card last night (this was something like the fifth screen I eventually got to):

After clicking on ‘Find out more’, it displayed a screen that provided more details about the retention offer requirements:

Getting a $175 statement credit after spending $1,500 is an 11.67% return on top of whatever the normal earning rate is on the card you get the retention offer for. I have online spending set as the 3% category on my Customized Cash card, so I’ll effectively be earning 14.67% cashback on $1,500 of online spend in the next 90 days—an excellent return, particularly considering this is on a card with no annual fee.

If you’d rather not have to download the Bank of America app, you can achieve the same thing on desktop (provided Bank of America is willing to extend a retention offer to you). A commenter on Doctor of Credit shared that you can do this by going to ‘Information & Services’, then click on ‘Close credit card account’ in the ‘Manage Your Account’ section. Nick tested this out last night and confirmed that it worked for him too. The steps might be different if you’re trying this on a business card.

Something important to be aware of is that Bank of America might only extend one retention offer at a time per cardholder. For example, Nick requested a retention offer on one card and received that, but didn’t subsequently get an offer on a different BOA card he has. As a result, it’d be best to pick the card you most want a spending offer on first, then try it out with further cards afterwards if desired.

I was a little nervous when requesting a retention offer as to whether or not it would be completely obvious that BOA would be about to close my account if I wasn’t eligible for a retention bonus. I believe at least one or two of the buttons had stated ‘Confirm’ on them (or perhaps they always said ‘Continue’), so I was a little reticent about proceeding as I wanted my card to stay open. It didn’t end up being an issue for me as I did get the retention offer, but Nick has confirmed that the final step does give you sufficient warning that you have to accept the terms that will close your account. It therefore sounds like so long as you’re paying attention to the wording at each step, there’s not much danger of accidentally closing your card.

I imagine that Bank of America has been getting an influx of people over the past few days using this functionality. It therefore wouldn’t surprise me if they curtail this option in some way in the near future, whether that’s with a less generous retention offer, not allowing it via online chat, or just not providing retention offers at all. I’d therefore suggest taking advantage of this easy option sooner rather than later just in case this avenue does get cut off in the coming days/weeks. Fingers crossed it does stick around in perpetuity though as Doctor of Credit reports that this has been an option for many years.

h/t DDG

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