U.S Bank offers two Flexperks credit cards: Visa & American Express (in reality there are really five cards, there is also a business card and select version of the Visa & American Express). The cards both have the same sign up bonus of 20,000 Flexpoints after $3,500 in purchases within the first four months of account opening. The cards do have slightly different categories that earn at an increase rate:
| Visa | American Express | |
|---|---|---|
| Restaurants & fast food | 1x points | 2x points |
| Charity | 3x points | 3x points |
| Gas/Grocery/Airfare* | 2x points | 2x points |
| Cell | 2x points | 2x points |
* You’ll earn 2x points on whichever category you spend the most on that monthly billing cycle, the other categories will earn 1x points
On the surface this makes it seem like the American Express is the better option as it also earns 2x at Restaurants & Fast Food (and restaurants are becoming notoriously difficult to get a category bonus in). Unfortunately the American Express card codes Kiva as miscellaneous and specialty retail store rather than charity and because of this you won’t earn 3x points on these purchases/donations. This is somewhat important as it’s relatively easy to manufacture spend with Kiva (although there are some risks and ethics involved).
I still think both cards are worth picking up at some stage, Flexpoints are worth up to 2¢ for airfare and up to 1.5¢ for hotels. Thanks to reader Scott for making me aware of this issue.
William —
I did some further research on the US BANK AMEX FlexPerks card with several Google searches and I kept getting some hits about a very nasty aspect of the FlexPerks Points program, that unfortunately, you had not highlighted in your overviews of the card products from 2014 onward.
Unlike most loyalty currencies, especially programs that have a US based focus, FlexPerks Points EXPIRE!!!
Now, the reason that yo missed this is because I could not find it in the materials provided pertaining to the AMEX version of the card and I had to go back and do a search to see if it was true.
Sure enough, the following makes clear with respect to the several Visa versions of the card, that FlexPerks points do, indeed, expire — they have a shelf life of 5 years.
“Earning FlexPointsSM
You earn one FlexPoint for every $1 of eligible net purchases charged to your account during each billing cycle. FlexPoints expire five years from the end of the calendar quarter in which they were earned. When redeeming, the FlexPoints you earned first will always be the FlexPoints you use first.”
See: https://usbank.com/flexperks/creditts/fpv_prod_TRsig.htm
Now to some this may make no difference, but for others, such as myself, because of this limitation, I might decide it is just not worth the trouble to have to keep track of those earned points, let alone the relative value of cashing them in for a decent reward redemption given their somewhat sliding scale of redemption.
Now, I find it most underhanded of US Bank not to mention the lifetime of these earned points when it comes to both of its AMEX Flex Perks products — the Travel Rewards card and its bigger and more costlier brother, the AMEX Flex Perks Reserve card, that carries a $295.00 price tag.
Now, it could be that they do not intend to have points earned from the AMEX cards subject to expiration as they do with respect to their VISA earning cards, but I doubt that, and I do think this expiration of the points — with no way to continue their lifetime — a very severe limitation on the program as a whole, especially for those who might come to expect that US based programs have an unlimited to shelf-life, so long as you at the very least jump through certain hoops to keep those points alive.
I do hope that you highlight this limitation whenever you mention this family of cards in the future, as they certainly are not for the unwary given this severe limitation.
5 years is a pretty long expiration date, you should be using them well before the 5 year mark anyway.
I don’t disagree, but it truly is somewhat underhanded that they don’t have anywhere in the application process of the AMEX branded cards, a statement with respect to the expiration of the Flex Perks points. Moreover, one line of print buried in a web page concerning a comparison of the Visa products, do not, IMHO, constitute fair warning as to how the program works.
I don’t know if it was intentional or not, but it smacks of deceptive advertising.
Thank you very much, William! That’s really good to know!
William, am I correct that unlike the US Bank CashBack + card, there is no quarterly limit on charities — and therefore, if you allow 2 cents/point, this would mean that one could realize almost 6 cents back from each charity donation, rather than the 5% back from the Cash Back card, and the amount back is not capped?
Thanks,
Horace
That’s correct.
Crap, I had not realized this. Just got the Amex version a couple months ago. Good news is you can fund it with $1k/mo via Serve since it’s an Amex card.
Does the visa card still code Kiva as charity?
Yes
Looks like this might have changed. I just got a statement from Visa showing no bonus points for Kiva spending.
I have been anticipating this for months. US Bank seems determined to eliminate any value it may have offered it’s customers.
My statement on 7/21/17 showed 3x on Kiva for my Visa.
http://frequentmiler.boardingarea.com/2017/07/29/flexperks-kills-kiva-3x/
Thanks for this very helpful post. Does the sign bonus on these cards ever go over 20k?
The Visa card does during the Olympics, the American Express card has only just been released but I suspect it’ll probably increase during the Olympics as well (actually maybe not because Visa is usually a partner as well).