Category: banks

How to request reopening a US Bank credit card

December 13, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Here’s a quick guide on how to request the reopening of a US Bank credit card that either you closed or was closed due to inactivity. Sorry, don’t think this helps if your card was closed because you got banned. 😅

Unlike other banks, US Bank is a little more old school and requires a written request to reopen a closed account. Here is what you need:

  1. Reopening may require a credit inquiry, but the account would be reopened with the same card number and same credit line, so it’s not considered a new account on your credit report, in case you are worried about 5/24.
  2. On your written request, include the following:
    1. Sentence requesting the reopening of your account.
    2. Account number (credit card number).
    3. Individual annual income.
    4. Other sources of annual income you would like to report.
    5. Monthly housing payment.
    6. For the above, rent or own?
    7. Signature, name, and date.
    Mail or Fax to:
    • Cardmember Service
    • PO Box 6361
    • Fargo, ND 58125-6361
    • FAX: 1-800-670-4834

    Pro-Tip: You can take your document to any US Bank branch and they will fax it to the number for you for free. If you would like to do it from home and don’t have a fax machine, I love using HelloFax (5 free fax pages when you sign up with my link). It’s simple and fast! Just don’t select the option to send it in high quality/color, because this sends them a fax containing a link to the document rather than faxing them the document itself. Continue reading →

How to set up auto-pay for Bank of America credit cards

June 27, 2021 / / 12 Comments

Hi all, this seems like such a silly post to write, but I’ve seen a lot of people complain about how different setting up an auto-pay for a credit card at Bank of America is compared to other banks, and how it’s led to missing a payment, getting interest charges, late fees, etc. I’m so used to having all my cards on auto-pay that this happened to me once too. Setting it up is definitely more tedious and requires more clicking around than other banks. So hopefully this post documenting the process helps someone out there. Continue reading →

Did You Know? Bank of America Preferred Rewards Edition

July 18, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Last year, Bank of America started heavily marketing their “Preferred Rewards” program, whereby you can get increased rewards rates on credit card spending by holding certain balances with Bank of America and Merrily Edge. Doctor of Credit goes into all its gory detail (linked below), but roughly, you get bonuses of 10%/25%/50%/75% for having balances of $0/$20k/$50k/$100k.

Bank of America Preferred Rewards Program: 5.25% Cash Back On Gas, 3.75% Travel, 2.625% All Purchases

This has been scrutinized pretty heavily because it’s a lot of money to park somewhere, and for the most part the conclusion is that as long as you don’t have a 401k or IRA or investment account that you can roll into Merrill Edge to hit the thresholds, it’s NOT worth pursuing the bonuses. Here’s a particularly scathing (though mathematically on point) perspective:

Consumer Watchdog: Bank of America Preferred Rewards can cost you $600+ a year

(Side note: I’m trying out a new link/embed format; let me know if you’d prefer them inline instead).

Given that I don’t have enough savings to hit any of these thresholds (whether or not I include investments), I decided to pass, but as I was poking around the Bank of America site, I noticed something interesting (emphasis mine):

You are eligible to enroll in the Preferred Rewards program if you have an active, eligible Bank of America® personal checking account and maintain a 3-month average combined balance in your qualifying Bank of America deposit accounts and/or your qualifying Merrill Edge® and Merrill Lynch® investment accounts of at least $20,000 for the Gold tier, $50,000 for the Platinum tier, or $100,000 for the Platinum Honors tier. The combined balance is calculated based on your average daily balance for a three calendar month period. Continue reading →

Confirmed: Fidelity Visa is a Flexperks card…with a catch

July 12, 2016 / / 3 Comments

A lot of hoopla has been made over the fate of the Fidelity Amex card, whose portfolio was bought by Elan Financial Services (a US Bank subsidiary), with the cards being reissued as Visas. In particular, many wondered and speculated that the card would earn (or be convertible to) Flexpoints, US Bank’s pseudo-fixed value rewards currency. Doctor of Credit has a great explanation of them here, but I’ve included the award chart for reference:

A few posts, including one from Project Endpoint and one on Reddit, claim to have confirmed the card as a Flexperks-earning card. Having finally converted over from my Amex, I can confirm this is true, with one major caveat:

Points earned with the Fidelity Visa card can be redeemed for travel through the online rewards portal as if they were each worth 0.5 Flexperks.

So it’s the same chart, but with all the values doubled. Let’s run a few searches.

Looking for a one-way, we see flights with prices all less than $400. On the original Flexperks chart, these would cost 20,000 points each.

However, running the search on Elan’s portal, we see the price is 40,000.

Obviously, that isn’t proof in itself, so I decided to see if I could find flights on the margins of the award tiers to see if/how the prices changed. Doing the same search, but for round-trip, non-stops on American, we see flights ranging from $562 to $660. These would straddle the 30,000 ($400.01-$600) and 40,000 ($600.01-$800) price bands on the Flexperks chart.

Sure enough, we see a cutoff at the same point, but the prices are 2x — 60,000 and 80,000 respectively.

Given that the Fidelity (Elan) Visa doesn’t have any bonus categories, and the value of Flexperks are capped at 2 cents (and usually less than that), it doesn’t actually make any sense to treat this card as anything but a 2% cash back card, since you can’t get any better value than 1 cent per point through the travel portal.

Bummer.

The one silver lining is that the points transfer screen still loads properly, so once my balance becomes non-zero, I’ll give it a go and see how many points wind up on the other side. It would be a silly loophole for them to transfer 1:1, so if it works, you might not hear from me about it 😉

FoundersCard Membership Signup Bonus of $100 Amex Gift Card –> How I’m Paying $235 for 2 Years

May 16, 2016 / / 5 Comments

UPDATE: if you used our referral links, could you please let us know? Apparently the referrals are not getting automatically tracked.

 

Hello everyone!

I’ve been getting bombarded for over a year by FoundersCard (referral link, see end of post for details) to join their program at a lifetime rate of $295/year. That wasn’t very appealing to me at the time, since I couldn’t justify how to get more than $295/year of value from the program. My friends Kenneth and Tonei were telling me about some of the great benefits. I’m going to rank them here as well as a few thoughts:

Most Valuable Benefits to Me
Total Rewards Diamond status This can be a great benefit for some people for the following reasons:

I go to Vegas once a year for CES (the largest convention in the world and the most expensive week in Vegas), and already have MLife Platinum status from the Hyatt Diamond match. It wasn’t clear to me whether having this status would significantly benefit me during my annual trips, since I already have Platinum status from the Total Rewards credit card, and haven’t really benefited from it in terms of getting hotel discounts. However, that complimentary stay in the Bahamas sounds pretty sweet!!
First Republic Bank $350 offer

Only applies to New York City, Boston, Greater San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Portland, Santa Barbara, San Diego, and Newport Beach.

If you’re in one of these locations, this is a very valuable benefit. Kenneth tells me they have very personalized and awesome customer service too.
Quarterly American Airlines promotions Currently, there is a Business ExtrAA bonus points program, which might be interesting. Sometimes there are challenges to AA status. I think it will be worth keeping an eye on these quarterly AA promos.
Other popular benefits I’d like to point out
15% off AT&T Plans I’m on T-Mobile, but I also get 25% corporate discounts on all 3 major carriers, and I don’t think it stacks. If you don’t already have a corporate discount, this might be helpful to you. If you have a family plan or expensive plan, this could really be a huge savings.
Discounted hotel rates I usually use points to pay for hotels, or if it’s for work, they must be booked through our Concur system anyways, so I wouldn’t be able to apply any discounts. Many of the hotels are luxury hotels that I still can’t afford even with a discount anyways. But if you want to stay in a luxury hotel for a discount, this one’s for you. For example, if you want to book the Park Hyatt Tokyo, it is 40,000 yen/night, and you’d be able to apply a DSU if you’re Hyatt Diamond.
15% off HotelTonight Same reasoning as above.
Cathay Pacific Marco Polo Silver status and 5-25% off flights This translates to Oneworld Ruby status. I’m not sure how this would benefit my husband or I in the near future, and we are currently already AA Platinum (Oneworld Sapphire) from the Q4 status challenge. The 5-25% discount could potentially be a large savings though.
Virgin Atlantic Flying Club Silver status Earn 50% more miles when flying Virgin Atlantic or Delta Airlines, lounge access, premium check-in, and choosing Economy seats within 14 days of departure. Not really something I see myself using in the near future.
5-10% off Virgin America flights and Gold or Silver status match This discount code is valid on most fares except for L, S, and N fares. However, I already have VX Silver status (partly thanks to the VX credit card) and while they are my favorite domestic airline, I don’t fly VX quite enough to really benefit from this discount.
5% off Jetblue flights I like Jetblue, but I rarely have the occasion to fly them. Being a budget airline, 5% is probably not going to be a huge savings. If you fly Jetblue a lot though, it can add up.
15% off Qantas flights to AU/NZ only 15% is a great discount, but I rarely fly Qantas either (to tell the truth, I’ve never flown Qantas before). If I saw an awesome fare deal in economy, I’d consider jumping on it and using this discount, but the next time I go to AU/NZ, I’d more likely fly in a premium class with miles and points!
1 year of TripIt Pro, $39/yr after I personally have Lifetime Pro, but this could be useful to many people, especially if they don’t already have it from a credit card or from their workplace.
6 months of CLEAR CLEAR is definitely a nice-to-have, but it’s not available in most airports, and sometimes even at my home airport (SFO), the CLEAR line is not any faster than the TSA Precheck line. I already pay $50/year for my CLEAR membership, but don’t consider it must-have.
20% off Silvercar I love Silvercar cars (Audi A4s!), but they’re not at enough airports to be useful to me, and this is definitely a luxury, since even with the 20% off, it would be difficult to beat other rental car prices, especially when you use status and corporate codes, etc with the other companies.
50% off OneMedical membership This one is hyperlocal, but OneMedical is a great company that I hope will grow quickly throughout the country. Currently, I am choosing not to be a member yet because there aren’t enough locations that are convenient to me.
$18 to Dollar Shave Club and free shipping Michael Wu noticed this one. They sell things other than razors too. 🙂
3 years free Dashlane Premium This is a secure password keeper and digital wallet. I highly recommend using one, but I currently have a paid subscription to 1Password that works great for me.
20% off Backblaze This is a great unlimited cloud backup solution, and again, I highly recommend using one. A year is $50 (the discount would provide $10 savings) and 2 years is $95 (the discount would provide $19 savings). I currently have a paid subscription to Crashplan, which is great, and the minor savings is not quite enough to incentivize me to upload terabytes of my files all over again.
$100 to Trunk Club This is a subscription service where they basically send you a box of fashionable clothes. $100 seems like a good incentive to try it out.
$35 Zipcar membership and $20 towards first drive For those without cars, this may be a nice benefit. I do have a car and otherwise I use rideshare services.
Up to 14% off Singapore Airlines flights, 5-10% off Emirates flights Both of these discounts could potentially be good for many people. For me personally, I’m most likely not going to be flying these airlines on cash fares, but using miles and points in premium classes.
Up to 36% off UPS shipments From my limited experience, the discounts eBay/Paypal provides on shipping labels purchased through them are comparable. There could be sweet spots though.
Benefits That Are Already Attainable Elsewhere
Car rental company status and discounts If you have a World Elite Mastercard (i.e. Barclay Arrivals+), you would have Avis, National, Sixt, and Hertz status already. You probably have access to a bunch of discounts already too, or know where to get them. 😉
Hilton Gold status This is a benefit that is already conferred by the Amex Platinum card, but my husband and I are already both Hilton Diamond thanks to status matching to Hyatt.
Other Benefits
  • Discounts on Herman Miller chairs, Audi purchases/leases, BMW purchases, Apple, Dell, Moo business cards, Namecheap domain name hosting/services, Cole Haan, Spafinder, Shopify, Upwork, 99designs, LegalZoom, Constant Contact, Equinox, SoulCycle, Fancy Hands, 1-800-Flowers, Teleflora, Indochino, Rent the Runway, Adidas, Reebok, and more. A good question would be whether these discounts are stackable with our usual methods of hacking together discounts via portals, gift cards, codes, etc.
  • Invitations to networking events
  • You can also refer another person (intended for a spouse or significant other) who can then join for $395 one-time only rate (i.e. they don’t have to pay yearly like you do). I heard this used to be free, but no longer. Update: if you refer 5 people, you get a free membership for a significant other.

    • Continue reading →

    Check Your Chase Application Status Online!!!

    March 22, 2016 / / 4 Comments

    It looks like Chase wasn’t too happy with its phone bill this past month, because they’ve added a way to check your application status online! Just go to the Customer Center and scroll down to the bottom right.

    Clicking the link will bring you to a page that looks like this:

    It seems like they only give you information on personal applications, although that may be different if you’ve linked your business account to your personal account. If so, let us know in the comments!

    /ht to a reader

    Step by Step Guide to Removing AU Cards from your Credit Reports

    February 13, 2016 / / 5 Comments

    With the announcement of Chase extending their infamous “5/24 rule” to extend to all co-branded and business cards, there has been a lot of discussion about what to do in the interim before the rule takes effect and what to do after the hammer falls. For those who are unfamiliar, the 5/24 rule is that Chase will not approve you for a card if your credit report shows more than five new accounts in the last two years. This was designed to weed out applicants who ‘churn’ their cards for the signup bonuses without adding meaningful value to Chase as customers.

    One problem is that many cards offer bonuses (a la Chase), benefits (Citi Prestige, Amex Platinum), or other incentives (Amex offers) for adding authorized users (AUs) to cards. While the benefits are usually worthwhile, in many cases banks will report the authorized user card on the authorized user’s credit report as a new account. It’s easy to see how this could cause problems for Chase applications.

    Last week we posted that it was possible to have authorized user cards removed from your credit report once you are no longer an authorized user of the card (i.e. because the primary cardholder closed the account entirely or simply cancelled your card). Here, we list a step-by-step guide for each of the major credit card issuers, as well as general instructions (/ht to Nerbil on Reddit) on how to get accounts removed in the event that the issuer does not provide the option.

    Amex

    As policy, Amex will not remove cancelled authorized user cards from the authorized user’s credit report. They insist that this is due to credit reporting laws, but obviously this is not the case since authorized users bear no financial liability for the credit line. In this case, you’ll have to follow the general instructions below for disputing an account on your credit report.

    Barclays

    Barclays is one of the more consumer-friendly banks when it comes to AU cards, as they are happy to request the removal of the card from the AU’s credit report thirty days after closure of the account (and even tell you how to contact your issuer if there’s anything wrong).

    Here’s the response to a secure message my friend sent requesting removal of closed AU cards from his credit report.

    Thank you for contacting us regarding your Barclaycard Arrival Plus World Elite MasterCard. We can certainly address your inquiry regarding the credit bureau report associated with authorized user’s account.

    Please be advised that we will update your credit report 30 days after your billing cycle. If you notice any information is not being reported correctly on your Credit Bureau Report, you should file a dispute with the Credit Bureau Disputes:

    …

    We appreciate your trust and we will do our best to continue to give you the kind of service you deserve. If you have any other questions or concerns, please reply to this message.

    Chase

    Although Barclays takes the cake in terms of handling closed AU cards, Chase is a close second. Like Barclays, all you need to do is send a secure message requesting that the card be removed from your credit report because you are not “financially liable for the account,” and they should respond within 24-48 hours saying that they will take care of it for you.

    Citi

    Like Barclays and Chase, Citi will remove AU cards from your credit report if you ask, although it may require a phone call. They should remove the card from your report within thirty days of the inquiry.

    Bank of America

    Discover

    US Bank

    No data points yet, but you can still use the method below!

    How to remove an AU card from your credit report when the bank won’t do it for you.

    In the event that the bank will not do it for you, there is still a way to have AU cards removed from your credit report — contacting the bureaus directly.

    Each bureau offers the ability to dispute or correct elements of your credit report. Although this exists primarily for victims of identity theft or bad bookkeeping (e.g. a bank mixes up a record), it can also be used to remove AU accounts. For each bureau, simply:

    1. Go to the “file a dispute” form (links below)
    2. Select the account on which you were an AU
    3. Ask that it be removed from your report because you are “not liable for the account” (there should be a pre-filled set of reasons you can select from)
    4. Submit

    Here are the links to the form for each bureau:

    Experian: http://www.experian.com/disputes/main.html
    TransUnion: https://dispute.transunion.com/dp/dispute/landingPage.jsp
    Equifax: 

    https://www.ai.equifax.com/CreditInvestigation/ Continue reading →

    50k Citi Premier Offer Still Available!

    January 31, 2016 / / 3 Comments

    Last week, Citi announced it was lowering the public offer for the Citi Thank You Premier to 40k points after meeting minimum spend requirements. This is obviously sad but probably expected given that it brings the bonus in line with the standard bonus for the Chase Sapphire Preferred.

    Two days ago, Miles to Memories reported a back-door way to get the 50k Citi Premier offer to appear. Well, after some googling around, I found the front door:

    [ Front Door ]

    If you’d prefer a direct link, we’ve got that too.

    Happy Hacking!

    Bet You Didn’t Know: Capital One Has a Secure Chat Option

    January 11, 2016 / / 1 Comment

    Apologies to Julian at FrequentMiler for swiping the name of his column, but I actually didn’t know this existed until I accidentally found it today.

    Secure chat is good for a lot of things, in particular confirming your eligibility for various offers or performing account maintenance without having to sit on the phone for a long time. Even if you’re someone who enjoys hold music (no, really; these people exist), having a paper trail is really useful in ensuring you get your promised benefits (this has saved me with both Citi and Bank of America).

    Here’s how to get it to appear:

    1. Go to the ‘Contact Us’ page.
    2. If an agent is available, you’ll see a chat bubble.
    3. If not, you will see a blank space; this just means you’ll have to wait a bit until someone becomes available.

    I haven’t yet had the need or opportunity to test what the agents can do, but if you have any experiences, let us know in the comments!

    Skip to 11:36 to hear about the mysterious case of a man who likes hold music:

     

    Get Twitter or Facebook links from Chase’s Refer a Friend website even if they are disabled

    November 19, 2015 / / 3 Comments

    EDIT January, 2016: It looks like Chase has caught on and nulled out the social media links for certain credit card products like the Freedom. If you have an old referral link that you’ve saved before, that should work though.

    I noticed a bunch of new referral offers in an email from Chase earlier this morning, so I logged into chasereferafriend.com as usual to generate some referral links. However, when I put my information into the site, I sadly couldn’t find the Twitter or Facebook options anymore!

    If you didn’t know, most people have been using the Twitter and Facebook links to generate referral links immediately, instead of going through the email process, which has been known to be slow and unreliable.

    Busting out my l33t software engineer skills, I was wondering if there was a way around this. And indeed there is, it’s right there in the source code of the page.

    Here’s instructions for Chrome (should work in a similar manner in other browsers):

    View the source of the referafriend.com page after you have put in your information. On Chrome, I right click and select “View Page Source”

    Once you get to the source code page, search for fbMediaUrl or twMediaUrl like so:

    You’ll see a link like:

    https://applynow.chase.com/FlexAppWeb/renderApp.do?PID=…..

    That looks like a URL, right? Just replace the / with / to get:

    https://applynow.chase.com/FlexAppWeb/renderApp?PID=…..

    and you are good to go!

    (Note: there are also ways to make the actual Facebook and Twitter dialogs pop up as well, but involve more advanced hacking)

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