I’ve been using American Express for 10 years. It was the first card I got as a student - the Blue for Students card. I think it was actually something else when I got it. In any case, I’ve always been a fan, because of the rewards program. Well, they killed one of the rewards I wanted - the Skip Barber High Performance Driving School, but made up for that in I was able to use the points for ANA Airlines, and fly business class to Japan for dirt cheap (relatively, lol). But that’s the positives. The negative is that they are wholly unsupportive of me, as a long time card member. I have to pay fees to have the Gold card as well. They took away my pay-over-time feature as soon as the market started to go sour. This month, they were not willing to extend my payment deadline an additional 10 days, as there’s been a lot of stuff going on this month - property taxes, my grandmother has had eye surgery which wasn’t covered, and some computer trouble. I called customer service, and ended up asking ‘what did this call do for me?’ after telling them I was having some trouble with paying, and being told they could do nothing for me. They said ‘not much at all - it just lets us know why you’re not paying.’ I will say they mentioned as long as you get it in before the end of the billing cycle, which is 15 days after the due day, you’ll be fine. This unfortunately was 5-7 days too little for me ( I needed 2 pay checks). They sent me a link for a survey, where I told them they were being unrealistic in this economic climate, and I was appalled at their lack of help. I was able to make the payment, on time, but using money I had hoped not to use.

It’s clear that American Express is just like any other bank, and I will not be using them much in the coming months, and will close my card within 3 months when I get on top of my others more.