Canceling Business Platinum cards

My wife and I had three American Express Business Platinum cards in which the $695 renewal fees posted in early July.  That meant that we had until early August to cancel these cards in order to avoid paying those annual fees (Amex gives you 30 days from when the renewal fee posts to cancel without penalty).  So, in July we prepared, and yesterday, we went about cancelling all three cards…

Preparing to cancel Business Platinum cards

In early July, when I realized that we had to cancel these cards in August, we prepared as follows:

Don’t lose Membership Rewards points

If you have Membership Rewards points and are looking to cancel any card that earns Membership Rewards, it’s important to make sure that you’ll still have at least one card open that earns those points.  As long as you have one Membership Rewards card open, you won’t lose points even if they were earned with the card you’re about to close.

My wife and I each have several other cards that earn Membership Rewards points, so that wasn’t an issue for us.  If we didn’t, I would look to sign up for a new card before cancelling the old.

Use credits

Business Platinum cards have a few valuable credits that I like to use up before cancelling: Airline Incidental Fee credits; Dell credits; and wireless phone credits.  Here’s how I approached each…

Airline incidental fees

Each Business Platinum card reimburses up to $200 each calendar year on fees charged by your selected airline.  We had selected Delta for all three cards.  My first step was to check for the latest info about what works and what doesn’t here: Amex Airline Fee Reimbursements. What still works?  I saw that booking flights with a combination of cash and miles with miles no longer works to make the ticket look like a fee, but paying a portion of a ticket with airline credit and or gift cards still works.  My wife and I each had some Delta credits in our accounts and so I booked economy flights (but not basic economy since those aren’t freely cancelable!) that were at least $200 above the amount of credit we had each time. I could have alternatively booked award tickets with high fees since that would have worked too, but now that paid flights other than basic economy are freely cancelable, I’m just as happy to buy cash tickets when that makes sense for my needs.

Within four days of each ticket purchase, the fee credits posted to our accounts.

Dell credits

Amex Business Platinum cards offer $200 in Dell credits from January to June each year, and then another $200 from July to December.  I had already used our credits for the first half of the year but now had to hurry to use the new July – Dec credits.

I made most of my purchases while Rakuten was briefly offering 15 points per dollar at Dell.  This way, it almost didn’t matter what I bought — I would still earn valuable rewards.  Unfortunately, my favorite Dell product, Xbox gift cards (which can be used for anything at the Microsoft store) have long been out of stock on most days.  But luckily I was able to get some good stuff.  I bought needed travel chargers and cables, Bose headphones, and several Anker 633 Magnetic Batteries (for the latter, I had at first bought just one, but I liked it so much that I bought a couple more to give as gifts).

Wireless phone credits

Business Platinum cards offer up to $10 back per month on wireless service spend.  Each month, I automatically pay our AT&T wireless bill with one Business Platinum card and then I separately overpay $10 with each of our other Business Platinum cards.  In July, it was business as usual doing this for each of the cards.

Canceling our cards

It’s possible to cancel Amex cards via chat when logged into your Amex account.  We waited until after 9 am on a weekday to do this because it is believed that you’ll only be given retention offers if you do this during business hours.  I didn’t think it was likely but I hoped to get a good offer or two to convince us to keep one or two of the cards for another year.

Long story short: No retention offers for us.

Each chat rep immediately offered to cancel the card after we requested to cancel them.  One chat rep cancelled the wrong card, but a subsequent chat fixed that problem.

Cleaning up

I took each of the cancelled cards out of the binder they live in and moved them to a credit card graveyard binder that I keep just for fun.  I would have cut them up, but they’re made of Unobtainium, or something like that, and are impervious to scissors.

I also marked the cards as cancelled in the Travel Freely app and in a spreadsheet I use to keep track of cards, offers, and credits.

Next steps

If Amex continues to target us with “Expand your membership” Business Platinum offers as they have in the past, I’m hoping to get in on a couple of those deals near the end of the year.  That way, if I play my credit cards correctly, I’ll be able to triple dip some of the cards’ perks before I cancel in January 2025.

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