By AmEx Blue Business Plus Credit Card Review (2021.3 Update: 10k Offer; 50k Targeted Offer)
2021.3 Update: There’s 50k targeted offer. HT: DoC. It’s a fantastic offer but I think only a few people get targeted.
2020.11 Update: The offer is back to the regular 10k offer.
2020.8 Update: The new offer is $300: earn statement credits for any amount spent at Dell Technologies, DocuSign, and/or FedEx, up to the first $100 spent per merchant, $300 in total. This offer requires spending at specific merchants, therefore is quite different from the usual ones and only suitable for a few people in my opinion.
Application Link
Benefits
- 10k offer: earn 10,000 Membership Rewards (MR) Points after spending $3,000 within the first 3 months.
- Earn 2x MR Points on the first $50,000 in purchases each year, 1x MR Points on purchases thereafter.
- We estimate that Membership Rewards (MR) are worth about 1.6 cents/point, see below for a brief introduction. So 2x MR earning rate on the first $50k purchase is worth about 3.2%!
- With this card, you can get access to Amex Offer, which usually offers very good discounts at some stores, such as: spend $15 or more and get $5 back at Walmart; spend $75 or more and get $25 back on Amazon.com.
- Refer a friend: You can earn 10,000 MR points for every approved account you refer, up to 55,000 MR points per calendar year.
- No annual fee.
- 0 APR for the first 12 months.
Disadvantages
- It has foreign transaction fee, so it’s not a good choice outside the US.
Introduction to MR Points
- You can earn MR points with AmEx ED, AmEx EDP, AmEx Green, AmEx Gold, AmEx Platinum, AmEx Platinum for Schwab, AmEx Platinum for Morgan Stanley, AmEx Blue Business Plus, AmEx Business Green, AmEx Business Gold, AmEx Business Platinum, etc.
- The MR points you earn on different MR cards will automatically go to the same MR account.
- MR points never expire. You will not lose the MR points on one card if you close the account, but you will lose all of the MR points if you close all of the MR cards. In order to avoid losing your MR points, we recommend to keep the no annual fee AmEx ED.
- If you have any of the MR cards, MR points can be transferred to some airline miles. One of the most common and best way to use MR points is to 1:1 transfer them to All Nippon Airways (ANA, NH) miles (Star Alliance). Other good options are: Air Canada (AC) (Star Alliance), Delta Air Lines (DL) (SkyTeam), British Airways (BA) (Oneworld), Asia Miles (Oneworld), Singapore Airlines (SQ) (Star Alliance), Flying Blue (SkyTeam), Virgin Atlantic (VS) (Non-alliance), etc. If you use MR in this way, the value is about 1.6 cents/point.
- If you have any of the MR cards, you can redeem your MR points at a fixed rate about 1 cent/point towards air tickets on AmEx travel portal.
- If you have AmEx Platinum for Schwab, you can redeem your MR points at a fixed rate 1.25 cents/point towards cash. If you don’t want to spend time studying airline miles, this is a pretty good way to cash out the points. If you don’t have this card, you can only redeem your MR points at a fixed rate 0.6 cents/point towards cash.
- In summary, we estimate that MR points are worth about 1.6 cents/point.
- For more information about MR points, see Maximize the Credit Card Points Values (overview), and Introduction to MR: How to Earn and Introduction to MR: How to Use (very detailed).
Recommended Application Time
- You can only get the welcome bonus once in a lifetime, so be sure to apply when the historical highest offer appears.
- AmEx doesn’t care about the number of hard pulls.
- You can try to apply for it when you have a credit history of 6 months.
Only one AmEx credit card can be approved in a day. This rule does not apply to charge cards, you can be approved for one credit card and multiple charge cards in the day.Multiple cards approved in the same day will only have one Hard Pull.- Only 2 AmEx credit cards can be approved within 90 days, but again, this rule does not apply to charge cards.
- You can keep at most 5 AmEx credit cards, not including charge cards.
Summary
This card looks like BCE/BCP, but they are totally different. It has a really strong earning ability: 2x MR everywhere, much better than 2% cash back (see Citi Double Cash). Among all the MR series credit cards, this card has the best earning rate on the “everything” category. Therefore this card is recommended to people with a lot of spending in non bonus categories. Note that the 2x rate is limited to the first 50,000 spending in a calendar year. Unlike the previous discontinued Amex Blue for Business, this card CAN transfer your MR points to airline miles. Although the sign-up bonus is just so-so, but it has no annual fee. It’s another MR card that you should considering keeping for the long term.
Related Credit Cards
After Applying
- Click here to check AmEx application status.
- AmEx reconsideration backdoor number: 877-399-3083. The “real” backdoor number of Amex is well protected. Different from Chase, the representatives from this AmEx reconsideration backdoor number only have the right to help you submit requests.
