Guide to American Express Offers

Amex Offers are some of the best perks to having an American Express card. These offers are often overlooked or even not known about and can save you hundreds of dollars each year on purchases you may already be making. Amex Offers are pretty straightforward but I wanted to take some time to go over them and how they work.

When you’re logged in to you American Express account online, simply scroll down past your recent transactions and you’ll see your Amex Offers. All you have to do is find an offer that interests you and click “Add to Card”. It is that simple. Once you use your card and meet the terms of the offer, you’ll receive a statement credit or bonus points depending on the offer. Most will be like the ones above where all you need to do is spend a certain amount at a certain place and you’ll get a cash back in the form of a statement credit.

Anyone want to go to Olive Garden with me?

Others you’ll get a percentage back up to a max amount. Or you can earn additional points per dollar up to a certain amount.

If you have multiple Amex cards you can get offers on all of them. Most of the time they will be the same but sometimes you have different offers for different cards so its beneficial to check all of them.

You can also have different flavors of offers on different cards. For instance I have an offer for Norton to get an additional 4 points per dollar on my Amex Platinum and an offer for 20% back up to $20 on my Amex Gold.

Platinum Offer

Gold Offer

Now, you can only activate one offer from the same retailer even if you have the offer on more than one card. So this is when you need to do some quick math and figure out which is the better one to choose.

In this example, in order to max out the offer of $20 back, you would need to spend $100 on the Gold card offer. If you spent that same $100 on your Platinum you would receive and extra 400 points which I value at $6.80 (400 * 1.7 cents per point). In this case I would activate the offer on my Gold card. This might not always be the case where the two are this different. You may have one that would have offered 4% back vs 4 points per dollar. Since I value an Amex point at 1.7 cents, I would always choose to earn the bonus points since they’re worth more.

There are another few things to point out with Amex Offers. They will show you at most 100 offers that you can add to your card. That does not mean that you can’t add more than that. It just means that if you scroll through all your offers and don’t see any that interest you, add a bunch and refresh the page to see new ones. The offer terms usually state that the statement credit, bonus points, etc. can take up to 60 days to post to your account however I find that it is usually much quicker than that. There are also expiration dates to all offers. If your purchase does not post to your account by that expiration date, you won’t get credit for it. Lastly, if you’re thinking about cheating the system and returning an item or cancelling the order after it posts, American Express will claw back any offer they have already awarded you.

My lifetime savings on one of my cards.

Wrapping Up

Amex Offers are a great added benefit to having one of their cards. Utilizing these can further make up for any annual fee they may charge. Don’t forget to regularly check to see what new offers are out there and add them to your card!