Why You Should Consider the Amex Everyday Credit Card

The Amex EveryDay Credit Card is a no annual fee credit card that often gets overlooked by its more well known siblings like the Premier Rewards Gold Card. The EveryDay Credit Card earns a decent bonus rate on supermarkets but it also serves a number of different practical purposes that you should be aware of. Here are a few reasons why you should consider the Amex EveryDay.

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It’s a bit of a unicorn

It’s very rare to find a rewards credit card with no annual fee that allows you transfer points to travel partners. Banks like Chase and Citi both require you to be an active cardmember of a premium card to transfer their points to partners and that means you’ll have to pay the annual fee on their cards.

However, the Amex EveryDay card provides you with the ability to transfer points to a number of different Membership Rewards travel partners including:

Airlines

• Delta Skymiles
• Club Premier AeroMexico
• Aeroplan Air Canada
• Flying Blue (Air France/KLM)
• MilleMigilia Club Alitalia
• ANA
• Asia Miles
• Avios British Airways (250 points = 200 Avios)
• Etihad
• Emirates Skyrewards
• Hawaiin Airlines
• Iberia Plus
• JetBlue
• KrisFlyer Singapore Airlines
• Virgin America (200 points = 100 Elevate points)
• Virgin Atlantic

Hotels

• Best Western Rewards
• Choice Privileges
• Hilton HHonors (1,000 points = 1,500 HHonors points)
• SPG (Starwood Preferred Guest) (1,000 points = 333 Starpoints)

Authorized users

American Express does not allow you to transfer Membership Rewards to family members or your spouse. However, you can transfer points to the loyalty program accounts of authorized users on your Amex cards.

So an easy way to get around the restriction of not sharing points is to add an authorized user to your Amex EveryDay card. There is no fee to add an authorized user unlike many of the other cards, so the EveryDay card is deal for this situation.

Save your Membership Rewards 

The EveryDay card can help save your hard earned Membership Rewards. If you have an upcoming annual fee that you don’t want to pay for one of your American Express cards, you can always cancel that card and as long as you have the Amex EveryDay card active before you cancelled that card you can keep your points.

If you didn’t have a card “on deck” like the Amex EveryDay, you’d lose all of your Membership Rewards after cancelling all of your Membership Rewards earning cards!

Help out your credit score 

The added benefit is that you have a card that you can keep open as long as possible to increase your average age of accounts and further benefit your credit score. It’s always a plus when you can keep a card open that doesn’t incur an annual fee.

No interest

• 0% intro APR on purchases and balance transfers for 12 months.

If you’re in the market for making a big purchase or just trying to get into credit cards with a little bit of safeguards against interest payments, this card can be a great option.

It earns at a decent rate 

Beyond all of those practical reasons to hold on to the card, it’s actually a pretty decent card. It earns Membership Rewards at the following rates.

• 2x points at US supermarkets on up to $6,000 per year in purchases(then 1x)
• 1x points on other purchases.
• If you use your Card 20 or more times on purchases in a billing period you get 20% more points on those purchases

With the 20% monthly bonus factored in, that’s 2.4X at supermarkets and 1.2X on all purchases. For not having to pay any annual fee, that’s a pretty good deal.

Depending on your personal spending habits, you may want to with the Amex EveryDay Preferred, however.

The EveryDay Preferred card earn the following:

• 3x points at US supermarkets (On up to $6,000 in purchases per year)
• 2x points at US gas stations
• 1x points on other purchases

What really makes the Amex EveryDay Preferred card such a high earner is that when you use your card 30 or more times on purchases in a billing period you get 50% more points on those purchases! That’s in addition to the bonus categories, making it one of the most high-earning cards on the market.

But since it comes with the $95 annual fee you need to make sure that you’re spending will cover the annual fee. An easy way to do that is to compare what you’ll earn on both cards. For example, if you compare the groceries category it will look like the following (assuming a value of 1.8 cents per point):

EveryDay

• 2.4 x 1.8 = 4.32% return per dollar spent

EveryDay Preferred 

• 4.5 x 1.8 = 8.1% return per dollar spent

This means that per dollar spent on groceries the EveryDay Preferred out earns the EveryDay by a rate of 3.78%. If you factor in the $95 annual the math looks like $95/.0378 = $2,513. So if you spend more than somewhere around $2,500 per year on groceries you and hit the monthly 30 transaction minimum, you’ll come out on top with the EveryDay Preferred. And that’s not even factoring in 2X on gas and the 1.5X on everything else.

Sign up bonus 

The one area where the Amex EveryDay is a bit weak is the signup bonus as the standard public offer is only for 10,000 Membership Rewards after spending $1,000 within the first 3 months (although you might get lucky and come across a targeted offer for 25,000 or even 35,000).

Final word

Overall, the Amex EveryDay is a solid no annual fee card that presents many advantages and practical purposes. I think a lot of people should definitely consider adding it to their wallet but should also consider if the EveryDay Preferred might be a better fit.