The Offer
Amex has a new signup offer for the Blue for Business card which has three components:
- Get 10,000 bonus Membership Rewards points after making your first purchase within 3 months
- Get 10x MR points at restaurants for six months; max $2,000 in spend for 20,000 points
- Get 2x MR points for a full year on all purchase; max $50,000 of spend for 100,000 points
Offer ends February 1, 2017.
The public Amex site is still showing the inferior 10k offer. To find the new offer, visit any site who has credit card affiliate links. (We don’t have affiliate links, but Support your favorite blogger with the application!)
Card Details
- 1x Membership rewards points on purchases
- 2x points on Uber and on bookings made on the American Express travel website
- Receive 30% more points with the annual relationship bonus
- Annual fee of $0 and additional cardholders can also be added for free
- Standard American Express OPEN benefits
- 2x points on Uber
- You cannot transfer these points to transfer partners unless you have another American Express card that allows this
Our Verdict
At first glance, the bonus looks like this:
- 10,000 instant bonus after making a purchase
- 20,000 if you’ll spend $2k at restaurants within six months
- 50,000 bonus if you spend $50,000 (spend $50k and get double points – 100k points total)
- Total: 80,000 points
To properly analyze the bonus offer here, we have to first take a look at the 30% annual bonus which comes at year’s end. (There’s no annual fee on the card, and we’ll assume you’re keeping the card past the one-year mark.) All spend done during the first year should earn 30% bonus, on top of the double points earned. The verbiage of the terms sounds to me that the doubling is only on the spend amount, not on the points earned, so I’ll compute the signup bonus based on that assumption.
Now, let’s assume you have an Everyday Preferred card which earns 1.5x everywhere, and let’s deduct 1.5x from the bonus amounts shown above. Here’s how the bonus will look:
- 10,000 instant bonus after making a purchase
- 17,600 if you’ll spend $2k at restaurants within six months (17k for the extra 8.5x, and 600 for the 30% bonus)
- 40,000 bonus if you spend $50,000 (you’ll get 115,000 points total from $50k spend, minus 75k you’d have gotten from Everyday Preferred = 40,000 points)
- Total Bonus: 67,600 points (this figure is the amount you’ll get more than having done the same spend on the Everyday Preferred)
After crunching the numbers, the bonus is actually pretty good – primarily for someone who:
- values MR points a lot (e.g. someone who use the Everyday Preferred as their go-to card)
- does a lot of spending over the course of the year
- will spend $2,000 at restaurants within six months
Check out these 21 Things Everybody Should Know About American Express before applying.
