The annual fee for holding certain American Express cards is going to increase by $35 to $125, while other card holders might see fees decline. Are these fees really worth the service? American Express would like you to think that being able to hold one of their expensive cards — being accepted into a “club” — is some kind of priviledge. The old days of credit cards being exclusively for the rich are long over.
For those who enjoy AmEx’s rewards program, there are some changes coming there, too. No more “double rewards” for purchases in grocery stores, drug stores, and gas stations.
The only card I use is CitiBank’s Platinum Dividend Select Rewards card, which proves me with hundreds of dollars in cash back every year.
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It’s not clear if this impacts the Costco AmEx TrueEarnings card, which currently has no annual fee, 1% rebate everywhere, 2% on travel expenses, and 3% for restaurants.
We use this card for eating out and for travel, our Chase and Citibank cards for gas and supermarkets, and put everything else on our Amazon card (1% back), which has no rebate limit (but only gives you Amazon gift certificates, not cash) to maximize the rebates.
I also use the CitiBank’s Platinum Dividend Select Rewards card, but started to really check to see if I was getting the 5% back on grocery, drugs and gas and more than 50% of the time I wasn’t. I try to use the gas stations that I know will give me the full 5%, then I use the citibank proffesional card to get 3% back when I eat out and for everything else I’m using fidelity’s 529 card to get 2% back.
I was just very disapointed to find that so many times I thought I was getting 5% back with citicard that I wasn’t. I heard people complain before, but it wasn’t until I went through the numbers myself that I was disapointed.