First, let me address the issue of why I never use my personal Visa card…because it is sponsored by Bank of America. They offer points for rewards, but the cash rewards are horrible. If you want 1% cash back, you have to spend $30,000. Meanwhile, Discover offers you 1% cash back for only spending $5000, and, if you get a Starbucks gift card, they give you 1.1% back.
Now, I have two business Visa credit cards – one for each of my businesses. Each one individually takes a while to spend $30,000, but combined, they get to $30,000 rather quickly. So, I routinely transfer my points from the business Visa cards to my personal Visa and then redeem the points for cash from my personal Visa. (Of course, since it’s Bank of America, they only let you transfer them in blocks of 2,500 points…how convenient for them.)
One day they decided to introduce an expiration date for transferred points, but failed to notify me. I went to redeem 35,000 points for $350. However, the Bank of America website crashed on me. I didn’t get a chance to try again until a few days later…the beginning of the next month. All of a sudden, I found 15,000 points (equivalent of $150) missing from my account. When I called them up, they told me, “Oh, they expired.”
After several days of phone calls, amounting to about 6 hours of my life wasted, they offered me a consolation of $120 for the expired points. Unfortunately they wouldn’t offer me the points back, which mean that the remaining 20,000 points could only be redeemed for $160.
Essentially, Bank of America cheated me out of $70 that was never theirs to begin with along with 6 hours of my life. If I tried to fight them on the issue, 10,000 more points were going to expire at the end of the next cycle.
And they wonder why I don’t like to use my Bank of America credit cards.