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.