Amex KILLS Referrals? + New BIG Bonuses (Cap’One, Chase)

In this video, I have a load of topics that I want to go through. First, we have Amex limiting the number of referrals you can do per year. Bilt doing the opposite, they've just opened up referrals where you can earn extra Bilt points by referring your friends to the new Bilt 2.0 cards. Then we have Capital One rebranding two credit cards as new types of venture cards with a limited time launch bonus of 150,000 miles on one of them. And we have a few other Chase credit card bonuses to talk about too. Hey, credit warriors, welcome to the show. My name is Ben Hedges, aka The Credit Shifu. And on this channel, I cover US credit cards, personal finance, and luxury travel. If you like the sound of that, please subscribe. But let's get into it. So first up, we have Amex killing the party on referrals. So if you don't know, referrals are when you refer your friends to a credit card that you have, or actually in Amex's case, you can refer them to almost any credit card from their lineup, even if you don't have the card yourself. And you get some points or cashback for that referral as a reward. Basically, you're doing marketing work for American Express. In the past, Amex would limit you to a certain amount of points or cashback that you could earn each year, like this old screenshot that I found online. In this case, you would get 10,000 points per referral, and you could get a total of 100,000 points per year from those referrals. But now, Amex has changed the way they limit referrals from limiting the number of points or the amount of cashback to instead just limiting the number of referrals that you can do per year. And people are reporting that this is now set at five per year. I checked it on my Charles Schwab Amex Platinum, and yep, it's $100 per referral limited to five per year. So that's about a 50% decrease on what it was, although it all depends on how much they will pay you for each referral. If you take a look at this screenshot from the gold card, you can see it's 20,000 points per referral up to 100,000 points per year, which is five referrals anyway. So if Amex increases the amount of points to 20,000, I know on the screenshot I showed you from my Charles Schwab one, it was $100, it was in cashback, not in points, but other versions of the Platinum and the gold card do it in points. So if it went up from, say, 10,000 points up to 20,000 points, then five referrals per year still gets you 100,000 points. But right now, for me, it's $100 on the Schwab, so five referrals gets me $500 per year. I don't know whether they're going to do that or not. Let me know in the comments what offer you see in your account. My Amex gold card, for some reason, doesn't let me do referrals anymore. Maybe I maxed it out too many times and they don't want to give it to me. But if you do have an offer on gold or platinum, let me know what it is. Leave a comment down below. Now, Amex is limiting referrals, but we have another set of credit cards that just added referrals. So Bilt, the very popular reward system where you can earn points on rent and mortgage payments, just added the ability for holders of their credit cards to refer their friends. Now, this was open to a select few already, but it's now open to everybody. So, for example, you can earn 5,000 Bilt points referring your friend to the Bilt Palladium card, and your friend will get an offer for 50,000 points plus gold status, which is the same as the public offer. Oh, and you can do this up to five times a year, so that's a total of 25,000 points you can earn through this. To be honest, it's not the best referral offer out there. It's not even as good as Amex after they limited to five times a year, but it's only just started, all right? 5,000 also seems to be a launch offer too. It seems that the standard amount is 2,500, which is pretty lame if you ask me, but maybe they'll have frequent bonuses, and hopefully we'll see it go higher than 5,000 in the future. But anyway, if you are a Bilt card holder, you can now go into your account and check it out and refer your friends if you want to. And if you're new to Bilt, you can sign up for their program for free down below. You don't need to have the Bilt credit card to be part of Bilt, and the advantage is you can link your existing cards to pay rent and earn points, but also you can use their dining program where you'll earn an average of three extra points per dollar in Bilt dining restaurants, which are many, and you can also earn one extra point per dollar at Walgreens when you use a linked card there as well. Points are worth 1.25 cents each through Bilt's travel portal, and you can also transfer them to a load of partners like Hyatt Hotels and a load of airlines like United and Southwest. I'll put a link to that down below. Feel free to sign up and don't forget to link a card so you can actually earn points. All right, let's now talk about some welcome bonuses, and some of these are ending soon, so pay attention. First up, Capital One has just rebranded two of its business cards, the Spark Miles and the Spark Miles Select, to the Venture Business and Venture One Business. So we now have a complete venture series of business cards, the Venture X Business, which we already had, the Venture Business and Venture One, and thus it reflects the branding on the personal venture cards. On the Venture Business, which has a $95 annual fee, same as the personal one, you currently have a limited time welcome bonus of 150,000 points, but the spend requirement is $30,000 in the first six months. So it's kind of a lot, right? Kind of a lot. It works out at five miles per dollar you get on top of two miles per dollar that the card earns anyway. If you look at it that way, I guess it isn't bad. It's like if you have a lot of business spend and you want to get seven points per dollar on $30,000 worth of spending for six months, then this does the trick. If not, the new Venture One Business card offers a more normal bonus of 50,000 miles for $4,500 in spend in the first three months. But that card just earns 1.5 miles per dollar on everything, and it has no annual fee. And that bonus is just their regular bonus on that card. It's not a limited time offer. The one on the new Venture Business for 150,000 points is a limited time offer. So if you do want it, be quick. All right, let's now move on to two more high bonuses, this time on Chase cards. So let's look at a Chase Hotel card first, and that would be the IHG Premier Business card and this 200,000 points offer that actually ends in 14 days, as you can see here. The end date for it is April 29th. This is one of those two-part bonuses. Earn 140,000 bonus points after spending $4,000 in the first three months from account opening, plus earn 60,000 bonus points after spending a total of $9,000 in the first six months from account opening for a total of 200,000 bonus points. As two-part bonuses go, it's pretty friendly. You get the majority of the points on the first half, which is just 4,000 in spend, and then you have to spend only 5,000 more to make up that extra 60,000 to get the full 200,000 points. We often see two-part bonuses and they're like total of 200,000 points. That's for the headline, right? For the landing page. Boom, that's the ad. But then you read the small print and it's like spend 4,000 to get 50,000 points and then spend a total of, I don't know, 30,000 points to get the other 150 to bring you up to 200,000. So this one, as they go, is pretty good. It's not scammy at all. Point Sky values IHG points at 0.6 cents a piece. So that gives us a total value of $1,200 for this bonus and a value of $840 if you were to only get the first part of it. So even if you don't manage to do the 9,000, you just do 4,000 in spend, you're still getting quite a good bonus, close to $1,000. Intercontinental is IHG's flagship brand. I've stayed at three of those hotels and I really liked them, but on the low end, they do also own Holiday Inn. Here's a chart of all their brands. So quite a lot of flexibility, whether you wanna just have two or maybe three nights at a high-end hotel with this bonus or like five, six, even seven nights or more at something lower end. So anyway, if you want this one, it's ending in 14 days. So get it while you can. And if you're wondering, the bar for getting a business card with Chase isn't set very high. Most people who get paid as 1099 contractors should qualify. You don't have to actually own your own LLC. All right, let's move on to one more big bonus. So we have a 100,000 mile bonus on the Chase United Club card. Now this is their high-end card that gets you United Club lounge access and $875 in partner credits each year, but it has a $695 annual fee. Let's look at the specifics of the bonus. Earn 100,000 bonus miles plus 3,000 PQPs, all right, premier qualifying points after you spend $5,000 on purchases in the first three months your account is open. So PQPs, I don't really understand them that well since I'm not a United loyalist, but if you in the audience are, then you probably know what they're worth. But also wait, I thought it was 110,000 miles. Ah, what is this? Plus earn 10,000 bonus miles after you add an authorized user to your account in the first three months your account is open. Okay, so it's 100,000 and then you add an authorized user and it brings you up to 110. If you use a point sky valuation of 1.35 cents each for United miles, that gives us $1,485 in total value for the bonus. That valuation skews towards economy redemptions as all of the points guys, airline mile valuations do. But if you wanna know how much value you could potentially get out of it, you can redeem 80,000 points for a one-way Polaris business class flight to Europe if you can find availability at that level and the value of that is way higher, like 4,000 or more. If you want to get this one, it is also a limited time offer. I don't know when it's ending. Also remember it is their premium card with a high annual fee. So I think you would need to have been considering this card anyway. It's not the kind of card that you just pick up on a whim just for the bonus. All right guys, that's the video for today. Don't forget if you are not a built member yet, do sign up with the link below and link a card so that you can use their dining program and earn points at Walgreens. Link is down below. Please subscribe if you're new. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.