Most of the major credit card issuers let you check for pre-approval offers online. A lot of people don’t bother checking these, but I do think you should be doing this on a semi regular basis for some card issuers. I’ll go through each issuer and list what you should expect/be looking for.
- American Express. Sometimes they offer increased sign up bonuses, we haven’t seen this as much recently (especially with the incognito mode offers) but who knows when/if this will change. It might also help to trigger higher targeted bonuses in the future. Sometimes CardMatch also shows these increased bonuses.
- Bank of America. Sometimes they have increased offers available.
- Barclaycard. Pre-approval tool currently not working.
- Capital One. No need to regularly check.
- Chase. You either want to check for ‘selected offers for you‘ or check for in branch pre-approvals as both of these bypass the 5/24 rule.
- Citibank. They will sometimes show offers that don’t have the 24 month restrictive language. We talked about this recently here.
- Discover. Not worth checking.
- U.S. Bank. Not worth checking.
Let me know if I forget anything.
I’d disagree about US Bank. You won’t see any good offers, but they will follow up with mailers a couple weeks later. For example, last time I checked US Bank (last month), they followed up with a mailer for the Cash+ card @ 0% for a yr and a $250 bonus after $500 in spend. Didn’t bite, but AFAIK, that’s better than any offer out there.
How come you didn’t do that offer? It sounds good to me. Do they exclude you if you already have a Cash+?
Never had a US Bank card, but I’ve had a checking account with them for a number of years. I’m a few months from falling under 5/24, so I figured I’ll wait a bit.
BoA: Wrong. You should check BoA. I had an offer for $200 on $500 spend for the basic Cash Rewards card. Normal offer is just $100 (and my wife only had the $100 offer)
Thanks, updated post.
I checked Chase (way over 5/24) and there were no offers as expected. However Cardcash listed the Freedom and Sapphire which I already have and the Slate and Freedom plus which I do not. Are they just wrong?
You mean CardMatch?
Oops – yeah CardMatch
Does Amex “check for offers” not work if you already have an amex card? Whenever I entered my information, it asked me to log in. Asked some of my friends who have amex cards to check and they got the same message.Can anyone provide a DB? Thanks!
Bob, I tried and don’t get an error message. I also have never had an AMEX before.
The only way to get good offers if you already have AmEx card, you gotta use VPN or incognito.
This one is very YMMV. But if one has not had any Amex cards on thier own, but was a additional user, they get 100K Platinum with 3K spend and 50K PRG with $1k(usually even incognito has 3K spend). spend via snail mail and pre-approval. My wife got one and applied for the PRG and got approved instantly.
Can definitely attest to this went on to American Express’ website last week to look at the “normal” offers for my sister and was met with the 25k everyday offer for $1k spend. Jumped on it. Had never seen it even in incognito mode before that.