Cut to the Chase: Get the Amex Blue For Business Immediately

Get the Amex Blue for Business card right now! I don’t have an affiliate link for you, but it shouldn’t be too hard to find the current bonus offer, given that half the ads in my Facebook feed are for this card. What’s that? It’s Christmas Eve and you’re observing the birth of your Lord with your family and you don’t have time to think about credit cards? Pish posh! You’re either in this game or you aren’t, so get busy applyin’ or get busy dyin’.

It’s not exactly a secret that there’s an amazing offer on this card, although the temperature of the blogosphere is decidedly tepid for some reason. To recap, here’s what you get:

• No annual fee
• 10,000 points after your first purchase (!)
• 10x points on restaurants for the first 6 months, up to 20,000 points
• 2x points on all spending for the first year (!!!!!)
• 30% annual bonus on all base points earned on the card

Holy shit, right? Can you imagine how The Points Guy would react if Chase offered a card with this earning structure? As it was, the Blapphire Reblerve pretty much broke the internet when it was announced, and it’s nowhere near as good of an earner as this card. Then, Amex debuted the “Enhanced” Business Platinum card to much fanfare, even though most of the benefits don’t apply to most people. To wit: you get a 50% bonus on purchases over $5,000 and a 100,000-point bonus after spending $15,000 in the first 3 months – great if you actually own a going concern that can spend that much, but not as relevant to the hobby businesses that a lot of us use to justify opening business cards in the first place. Maybe those those two introductions, as well as the 80k offer on Chase’s new business card, sucked up all the available oxygen and there wasn’t enough left to wax orgasmic about how great the Blue for Business card is. Still, I can’t get over the fact that there’s a credit card out there that earns 2.3 points on all spending for a year and people aren’t falling all over themselves to get it.

Now, there are a couple caveats here that I should point out, lest I be accused of being an unapologetic Amex fanboy:

• This is a business card, so you do need a business to open one. That said, Amex does almost no verification at all, so as long as you’ve sold a couple things on eBay in the past year, you’re probably good.
• The points that the card earns are not “full” membership rewards points, in that you can’t transfer them to partners unless you have a card that does earn transferrable points (in which case the points all pool into one account). If you’re super averse to paying fees to Amex, though, you can always open an Everyday card, which earns full membership rewards points and has no annual fee.
• The 10x on dining isn’t as great as it sounds, since spending there trades off with spending on a card that would earn up to 5x anyway. It works out to a 10-15K bonus on dining spend over six months, which is good but not amazing.
• You can’t stack the bonuses – so when you earn double points on all spending, that doesn’t mean you earn 20x on dining, and when you earn a 30% bonus, you don’t get 30% of 10x. Instead, you earn base points that post the month after each statement closes, as well as bonus points that post with each transaction, creating a steady trickle of membership rewards points. Here’s what my account activity looks like:

(As you can see, I’m earning my “extra” points right away, and then I’ll get the 1 point-per-dollar base earn rate every month when the statement closes. The 30% bonus will be on those base points (I’m assuming), so by the end of the year I’ll earn net 2.3x on all spending and net 10.3x on dining.)

I don’t know what the point of writing this post is – I’m assuming the five or six people who read this blog regularly are already familiar with this card and have incorporated it into their portfolio already. I suppose I’m more interested in the way the excitement dynamic operates such that what I consider to be the most lucrative earning offer I’ve seen since I got into this game gets such comparatively little ink spilled about it. Either that or I’m blatantly trying to get Amex to give me an affiliate link, since it’s fucking Christmas Eve for fuck’s sake and I’m posting on my blog about their credit cards. Happy Holidays!