Now that we know that the American Express Fidelity card (that earns 2% cash back on all purchases) will be transitioned to a Visa card on July 1st, a lot of people are wondering what the best option for loading serve online will be. You can load a maximum of $1,000 per month and a maximum of $200 per day. It’s important to remember that using American Express issued cards (like the AmEx Everyday Preferred) will not earn points, but the spend will count towards minimum spend requirements. Because of this we will only be looking at third party American Express credit cards.
Contents
- 1 The Options
- 1.1 BBVA NBA TripleDouble Rewards American Express – Up to 5X
- 1.2 U.S. Bank FlexPerks Travel Rewards American Express Card/U.S. Bank FlexPerks Select+ American Express Card – Up to 2x
- 1.3 PenFed Defender American Express Card – 1.5X
- 1.4 Accelerated Rewards American Express Card from Bank of America – 1.25X
- 1.5 TravElite Credit Card From FNBO – 1.5X ($99 Annual Fee)
- 2 Our Verdict
The Options
BBVA NBA TripleDouble Rewards American Express – Up to 5X
The majority of the year this card will only earn 1x point (1% cash back) for Serve loads, but twice a year (NBA All Star Weekend & Finals Week) it will earn 5x points (5% cash back). This should give you at least 8 days to load at the 5% rate (3 over all star weekend and five over finals week), meaning you can max out one month fully and another month partially.
U.S. Bank FlexPerks Travel Rewards American Express Card/U.S. Bank FlexPerks Select+ American Express Card – Up to 2x
Both of these cards earn 1x FlexPerk point per dollar spent, the kicker is that FlexPerk points are worth up to 2¢ when redeeming for airfare and up to 1.5¢ when redeeming for hotels.
PenFed Defender American Express Card – 1.5X
This card earns a flat 1.5% cash back on all purchases, it’s easy for most people to become a member of PenFed, but the defender card has an additional hurdle:
Must be in military service, the National Guard, the Reserves, or an honorably discharged Veteran of the United States Military to apply
Accelerated Rewards American Express Card from Bank of America – 1.25X
Card earns 1.25 points on all purchases, Cash Rewards American Express from USAA also earns the same but requires you to be part of the military.
TravElite Credit Card From FNBO – 1.5X ($99 Annual Fee)
This card earns at 1.5x on all purchases, but it has an annual fee of $99 and no sign up bonus.
Our Verdict
In total you’ll be able to put $12,000 in spend through this cards, if you put that on a card that earns 1.25% compared to a card that earns 1% you’re only earning an extra $30 so it’s really not worth bothering with those cards. I think the killer combo is this:
- BBVA NBA card, load whenever you can for 5x
- FlexPerks card for the rest of the year, get the annual fee card with the higher bonus and then downgrade to the no annual fee card if you don’t get good value out of FlexPerks. Card is worth getting for the sign up bonus alone and then you have a card you can load and earn points with.
Am I missing anything that deserves a mention? Remember there is a full list of third party American Express credit cards found here.
I applied for BBVA Compass card before the death of Serve. My Serve is still alive and I loaded $1,000 from BBVA Compass. I just checked online and it is not showing reward points. Do you know if it counts for meeting minimum spend?
With regret I am letting you know that my serve Accout got terminated and closed as I was loading serve Accout with AMEX credit cards and later using funds to pay bills …so be aware AMEX know what we are doing and request all not to do it to avoid termination and any other legal actions …
Mass serve shutdown today, don’t rush to apply. Check http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/manufactured-spending/1736932-amex-serve-2016-a-10.html
Do AU get the same or different credit card numbers?
Why is anyone even talking about Serve? $1k per month limit? Are you serious? I mean isn’t it a shame for the experienced MS people out there to even talk about $1k per month in volume. Ok so you have 2 cards. Then what? $2k per month in volume? You’ve got to be kidding me. That’s a 5 times decrease compared to RedBird and BlueBird. Some people argued BlueBird and RedBird was too much work and not worth it. Serve?
This is all automated and in your pajamas. Really useful when you’re overseas for example.
Let me bring out the sockpuppets.
Sock puppet 1: what’s so great about loading $1000 on serve u could do $5000 with redbird and bluebird.
Sock puppet 2: You can load $1000 online using Serve and there are more places to load it.
Sock puppet 1: But that’s still only $1000.
Sock puppet 2: you can still load $5000/month w/serve but u can load $1000 of that from home no need to go to walmart.
Hope sock puppets helped.
Sock puppet 3: It’s even better than that. The $1,000 online credit card loading is above and beyond the $5,000 in-store loading.
Lol sock puppets are fun.
Maybe schwab Amex will be a nice 2% card.
That’s going to be issued by American Express so won’t earn points from Serve loads.
It’s surprising and disappointing that there will soon be no way for most people to earn more than 1.25% cash back on all purchases throughout the year with a third party AMEX card. It doesn’t reflect very well on the current state of AMEX. First Costco and now Fidelity—they’re not moving in the right direction.
OR, if you STILL hold an old Citi AA AMEX card, especially one that has the “double your points promo” for 16 mos with $1K/mo spend, that is a great way to MS!
exactly!!! this is what i’ve been doing. and don’t forget, the 16 months can overlap with another same promo when you make the retention call near the 12th month… 3k miles/month!
Yeah, I didn’t include any discontinued cards.
I don’t understand all the BBVA NBA TripleDouble Rewards American Express love. BBVA really screwed a lot of people over during Finals with their randomly absurd lockups of accounts. Every blogger that knows about this card seems to forget this and pin all their hope on BBVA treating their customers per their marketing terms so loftily state.
One can almost see all the hand wringing that will occur when NBA All-Star Weekend comes and BBVA screws us over again.
How can any purchases really count on a weekend, when the banks aren’t even open. I foresee everything posting Mon/Tues after and BBVA sticking to their guns saying purchases didn’t post when the promo needed to be fulfilled.
BBVA and this product feel very scam-like.
What would you do if you had been in their shoes? They issues a ton of new cards for tons of applications coming in at the same time. Most people got quite generous credit lines with no former history with the bank. Then these folks start putting thousands or tens of thousands on their cards in one single transaction.
It was a bad timing and lame customer service causing all these problems but you can’t blame them for the way WE THE PEOPLE ripped them off – probably by surprise…
I should feel bad for a credit card company/bank? You must be a banker.
You should not and I was just as pissed as anybody else about this. But pobody’s nerfect and I’m ready to cut them some slack concerning the circumstances (and especially how WE used the cards in a little unconventional ways)
I was going to agree. Thought they might be a small bank but after checking (right now) I see that is not correct. No excuse for their ongoing mistakes, like paying 1/2 the promo. Their website staff needs to be fired for one. No excuse for a bank with 688 branches and an international presence. No autopay? Hire some competent people in systems, stat.
https://www.bbvacompass.com/compass/
Not everybody ran into such issues during the first promo, slow and steady wins the race.
For the BBVA NBA Amex , there is a link on reddit for 20,000 bonus points, and when you click on it, it says no annual fee for the life of the account.
https://www.bbvacompass.com/nba/?icid=05122015_NBA_American_Express_pos1_HPicon
Says the same on the regular link.
https://www.bbvacompass.com/nbacard/