Good afternoon everyone, I hope your week is going well. Since I have several credit cards and only use a few on a daily basis, I put small recurring charges on some of my cards so that the credit card statements are generated every month. I do this for a 3 main reasons:
- If you do not use no annual fee credit cards for several months, the bank may decide that you do not need that credit card and may close it automatically for you.
- I have 2 Bank of America Better Balance Rewards Credit Cards (no longer available) where I get a quarterly bonus of $30 per card (I have a linked BofA checking account) for making a purchase and paying my bill on time. I don’t want to manually make a purchase or risk forgetting to make a monthly purchase on those cards. It’s an easy $30 bonus x 4 quarters x 2 cards = $240 cash.
- I have credit card referral links on my blog and if a reader signs up for the card using my referral link, I get a referral bonus (airline miles or hotel points). The bonus points do not automatically transfer to the airline or hotel account if a credit card statement is not generated.
For those reasons, I use Amazon Allowance to automatically charge $5 to several cards every month. The funds are automatically added to my Amazon gift card balance and I usually receive several of the below emails on the 15th of the month. But unfortunately, for some reason, I only received 2 emails, instead of the usual 8. I did some digging and it looks like only 2 of my Amazon Allowances processed correctly and the 8 other allowances were skipped. If you have allowances set up, I recommend checking your Amazon account to see if they processed correctly.
As you can see by the above email image, the email came in at 7:47am PT on April 15. My allowances are usually all processed in the morning within an hour span. When I checked my Amazon account in the evening of April 15, it still said the allowances were scheduled for that day.
When I checked back this morning (April 16), the allowance dates were changed to May 15.
I went to my Amazon Gift Card Balance page and saw only 2 allowances for April 15. Since I did not want to set up 6 new allowances, I manually did 6 $5 Amazon gift card reloads so the credit card statements would get generated.
This may seem like a silly process, but if you are managing several credit cards and don’t want to manually make a charge on those cards every month, the Amazon allowances are extremely handy. You can schedule allowances for any amount you want, but the minimum amount is $5. If you have any questions about Amazon allowances, please leave a comment below. Have a great day everyone!
Very nifty, I never would have thought of this. Thanks!
Happy to help. Amazon allowances have been around for a few years but don’t get talked about very frequently.
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minimum is $5… not any amount
Got it, thank you for confirming. No wonder I picked $5 for my allowances. I will update the post.
used to be $0.50, but yeah.
Was it 50 cents for the allowance, gift card balance reloads and for normal eGCs?
Yeah, Amazon Allowances are not really set and forget. I’ve had Amazon change the payment source for the Allowance to another CC if you accidentally set a new card as default across all of Amazon, which doesn’t seem that consequential when you do it.
For this reason I set a calendar reminder monthly to check Amazon and the account the $5 should have pulled from. Having missed out on a few $30 quarterly payments, this bit of double-checking gives me peace of mind.
I do have a Google calendar reminder on the 15th of the month, but this is the first time I’ve had this issue occur. I will keep checking the next few months to make sure everything runs smoothly for my allowances.
Found that one may want to check out backup payments settings as this has bit me a few times. (Disabled all backup payments as they seem to randomly pull from whatever payment source/s you may have saved) Also, never check make this payment default across AMZ when adding new cards. https://www.amazon.com/cpe/yourpayments/settings/managebackuppaymentmethods
Good tip, thank you.
Grant, I too have the BBR cards from BofA and also do Amazon allowances for them. I have 5 cards, get $600 a year, so really fortunate. A number of times I didn’t get the $30 bonus/card because my Amazon allowance didn’t happen. For me it was because of the expiration dates on the cards. Amazon could care less about notifiying me that they are expiring and I wasn’t paying attention. Got that corrected.
Dang, that’s annoying that Amazon did not alert you about expired CCs. You would think they would notify customers especially for members who are essentially giving Amazon money to hold in their GC balance. Go figure.
PS I’m jealous of your 5 BBR CCs. I think Rapid Travel Chai has at least 10, if my memory serves me right.