Threatening to Void Your Credit Card in Order to Receive a Retention Bonus
If you are looking to earn extra points on your credit card or waive the annual card fee, it might be worth calling the credit card company and threatening to cancel.
Why? Because credit card issuers don’t want to lose you as a customer – and in some cases, they offer retention bonuses to convince you to stay.
As The Points Guy explains:
Credit card issuers use retention offers (such as bonus rewards and commission waivers) as incentives to keep your account open and active, and you should always check what offers are available before canceling a card . Sometimes agents will submit a second offer if you decline the first, but once you hear an offer that you like, you must accept it. This is partly due to the fact that retention bonuses may only be available for the duration of your call.
These retention bonuses are a great way to earn extra credit card rewards or skip the yearly credit card fees, but keep in mind that they may come at a cost. In some cases, you will need to deposit a certain amount of purchases on a credit card within a certain period of time in order to receive bonus rewards, just like you would with a credit card sign-up bonus.
In other words, you may have to spend $ 2,000 over three months to earn 20,000 retention bonus points, or, using the example from another Points Guy article on retention bonuses , put $ 95 on your card within one month to release your $ 95 annual fee. …
CreditCards.com offers additional advice for bonus retention seekers. (Full disclosure: I write about one article a month for CreditCards.com, but I did not write this one.) It will be helpful if you already use a credit card on a regular basis, so don’t try this tactic with a card. which only sees the back of your wallet. You should also start the conversation by explaining that you like your credit card but are thinking about canceling because you don’t want to pay the annual fee or because you might get better rewards elsewhere. If you start your call with the words “I want to cancel my credit card,” your credit card could indeed be canceled.
Here’s another tip: if you like the idea of earning extra credit card rewards but don’t like the idea of lying about your intention to cancel your card, you can get a retention bonus simply by calling and asking your credit card issuer a few questions about your account. CreditCards.com quotes Sebastian Fang from the personal finance site AskSebby :
“I have a friend with American Express Platinum and they gave her four free tickets to the Taylor Swift concert,” says Fung. “They mentioned that it was because she had called them before asking about the terms of her account. She must have been unhappy with this, so they made a save offer. So even if you don’t call them and tell them that you think about closing the account, it might trigger an offer. “
If you’ve tried this bonus search strategy, did your credit card issuer provide a retention bonus? Did they offer a second, better bonus if you turned down the first? Was there always a bonus in the form of points / miles / commission reduction, or was someone else giving away free concert tickets?
Or … um … the card issuer called your bluff and void your card?