Good afternoon everyone.  I’m a big fan of good AMEX Offers and Chase Offers, but I have received a ton of bad offers lately, so I wanted to share my loading strategy and thoughts.  I will also briefly cover Bank of America BankAmeriDeals at the end of this post.  Let’s get started with AMEX Offers.  I created this chart to divide up AMEX Offers into 4 separate buckets:

• Good offers on all cards
• Good offers on 1 card
• Bad offers on all cards
• Bad offers on 1 card

Unfortunately, most of the recent AMEX Offers fall into the “Bad offers on all cards” and “Bad offers on 1 card” buckets.  You will have to decide for yourself what you consider a good AMEX Offer vs. a bad AMEX Offer.  A good AMEX Offer is an offer that I don’t need to go out of my way to research or use.  A bad AMEX Offer requires a lot of research to look up the store or service, see what they sell, and figure out if it is worth the price.  I don’t spend much time with bad AMEX Offers.

I currently have 6 AMEX credit and charge cards and here are the number of offers loaded to each card.  I’m not sure how AMEX is calculating the Total Savings to Date, but that might be the lifetime of the card.

As you can see, I have the most AMEX Offers loaded to my American Express Blue Business Cash Credit Card (28 offers) and my old American Express Blue Cash Credit Card (191 offers).  Whenever I see a good offer that is available on all my cards, I usually load that offer to my AMEX Blue Business Plus, unless the offer is a Hilton brand (load to my American Express Hilton Honors Aspire Credit Card), restaurant / grocery store (load to my American Express Gold Card), or stacks with an existing card benefit (like the Dell offer on my American Express Business Platinum Card).  I think it is important to have a go to AMEX Offer card where all / almost all of your good offers are loaded to.

Similarly, it is also important to have a go to AMEX Offer card where all / almost all of your bad offers are loaded to. I think of this as my AMEX Offers trash card.  It should be a card you no longer use.  I load all the AMEX Offers for the companies and services I have never heard of before and have zero interest in spending money at over the next month or so.  Even though I have 191 AMEX Offers loaded to my AMEX Old Blue Cash, I can only see 100 AMEX Offers in the app.  That’s not a big deal since I rarely ever look at the AMEX Offers loaded to my AMEX Offers trash card.

If there are offers that are only available on 1 card (regardless if it is good or bad), I load the AMEX Offer to that card.  I check all my AMEX cards for new AMEX Offers a few times a week and like to sort them into their respective bucket and load them to the appropriate card.  If there is a really good AMEX Offer, I will usually load the offer to my card, take a screenshot of the offer, and email the screenshot to myself with a subject line like: “Lowe’s $10 off $100 on AMEX Blue Business Plus Expires July 31”.  I also like to save the screenshots to my computer and routinely skim through the list to refresh my memory.  It is not a perfect system by any means, but it is the system I use.

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Up next, we have Chase Offers.  I find that only 5-10% of the Chase Offers are actually exciting.  An exciting Chase Offer must check both of these boxes:

• Be a store I shop at regularly (maybe a nationwide retailer with many locations)
• Have a rebate that is high enough to care about (5% with a max of $1.50 cash back is not good enough)

I have found that the more you use a specific Chase card, the more Chase Offers that card receives.  So if you use 1-2 Chase cards a lot, you should have several Chase Offers on those cards.  Conversely, if you barely ever use a specific Chase card, you may see few if any Chase Offers.  Since Chase Offers are unique to each Chase card, I load all the Chase Offers to each card.  Don’t forget to check Chase business cards because those have Chase Offers too.  If it is an exciting offer, I will take a screenshot and email it to myself, similar to the process I do with AMEX Offers.

For example, I use my Chase Freedom Flex Credit Card a lot, therefore I have a lot of Chase Offers.  Conversely, I never use my Chase IHG Select Credit Card (I keep it just for the 40K Free Night Certificate in exchange for paying the $49 annual fee), therefore I do not have many Chase Offers on that card.  I think these 2 Chase Offers appeared on all of my Chase cards.  I’ve never been to an A&W Root Beer restaurant and don’t think that will change anytime soon.

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Last but not least, let’s talk about the Bank of America BankAmeriDeals.  Short story, they are all bad offers.  I can’t remember the last time I saw a good offer and completed the BankAmeriDeal.

Similar to Chase, the number of BankAmeriDeals might be based on how frequently you use your Bank of America credit cards.  I have 2 personal cards (2 Better Balance Rewards Cards) that I put a single $5 purchase on every month to trigger the $30 quarterly rewards.  2 cards x $30 per quarter x 4 quarters = $240 cash back every year.  Here are the 7 BankAmeriDeals that I currently have access to.  Even though none of these offers is very exciting to me, I like to add the offers anyway (I have a little OCD, if you couldn’t tell).

That is my loading strategy regarding AMEX Offers, Chase Offers, and Bank of America BankAmeriDeals.  Like I said earlier, these are not perfect systems, but they work well for me.  If you have a different loading strategy, please let me know.  If you have any questions about these 3 programs, please leave a comment below.  Have a great day everyone!