“Earn and Burn”. Truer words were never said before. The credit card miles and points game is ever changing as more banks continue to add stricter anti-churning rules. But the more worrying fact is that you could lose your accounts at any time and with it possibly all of your points.
Chase, Citi, and American Express offer the “best” reward programs in the form of Ultimate Rewards (UR), Thank You (TY) and Membership Rewards (MR) points respectively. Everyone who’s into the credit card hobby has hoarded at least one of those points at one point (eh) or another but you probably shouldn’t.
Have you wondered what happens to your TY points when Citi decides to drop a ban hammer on you? Reader Ryan found out the hard way when he realized it was too late to transfer his 250k TY points, which at the bare minimum is worth 2,500 in cash. Now to be clear- with TY points you *might* have roughly a day to transfer (or cash out) your points after you get shutdown. But who logs into their account every day?
The same scenario also applies to Amex MR. You will lose all MR points instantly. Here is an example of a blogger losing 150k MR which at the bare minimum is worth ~$1.9k in cash. You thought Amex shutdown was rare? Well, here is a recent reddit discussion on the most recent wave of Amex shutdown. The parent comment says, “New reports of at least 11 people being shutdown by Amex today for “accounts not used for intended purposes” emails sent at at 7:26pm [October 20, 2020]”.
A letter Amex sent to a recently shutdown reader reads:
We want to let you know that after a review of your American Express account(s), we have cancelled the accounts referenced above because one or more of these accounts, or other accounts to which these accounts are linked, have been identified as not being used for the intended purpose.
I won’t get into why shutdowns happens or why the recent wave of Amex shutdown happened here because that isn’t the point of this blog post. What I would like to do is encourage periodic burning (be it through cash out or transfer) of MR and TY points. If I am not mistaken Chase allows 30 days after shutdown to transfer/cash out points.
