I signed up to a new American Express credit card that I wasn't expecting to...

Hey friends,

So I signed up to a new credit card that I wasn’t planning to this week! If you read my newsletter last week you would know that I’ve been hearing that American Express have been rejected applications from credit card churners.

So I was unsure as to what I was going to do with my existing American Express Essential Card.

But, I received an email last week from American Express inviting me to apply for an upgrade to the American Express Platinum Edge Credit Card. With that upgrade I’d also receive 40,000 bonus Membership Reward Points after spending $1,500 in the first 3 months.

I’ve always seen the Platinum Edge Credit Card as a less premium version of the AMEX Explorer. It has similar benefits like the $200 travel credit to offset the $195 annual fee, and you earns 3 AMEX reward points per $ when you pay for your groceries or re-fuel your car with this card (making this the highest earning AMEX reward point credit card). The only downside is that it doesn’t come with a sign-up bonus which offers bonus membership reward points, which is why I’ve never applied for it. But with this upgrade offer, I immediately applied for the upgrade on the spot!

The process to upgrade was also extremely seamless, I didn’t need to provide any new information to American Express and I was informed that any existing balance on my American Express Essential Card would be transferred across and that it would be automatically closed.

Whilst I can’t 100% confirm this, I hypothesize that this would not have resulted in a hard pull on my credit report since it’s technically not a new credit card application but instead an upgrade (I’ll monitor my credit report next month to see if it was impacted in any way)

These upgrade offers by American Express are certainly targeted, but it might also be worthwhile having a chat to them to see if you can request an upgrade to a more premium card if you’re interested.

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