How to Easily Move Credit Across Your American Express Cards Online
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There are some great tips hidden in plain sight when it comes to managing your credit card portfolio. I recently reviewed my travel plans for the rest of the year and saw I was going to be roughly 10,000 Delta Medallion Qualifying Miles short of regaining Platinum Medallion status for 2019. I have the Platinum Delta SkyMiles® Credit Card from American Express, which will give me 10,000 bonus MQMs if I spend $25,000 on the card in a calendar year. I decided to shift all of my spend to the card for the foreseeable future in order to qualify for that bonus.
I have a few events I'm hosting coming up, with expenses I can put on my Delta card and be reimbursed by ticket sales. The problem is my credit limit of $10,000 on the card wasn't going to be able to hold the large expenses over the next couple weeks; I needed to raise my credit line.
You can always go on your "account services" tab at AmericanExpress.com and request a credit line increase. However, that may be another inquiry on your credit report and, in my case, I don't want American Express to give me any more credit. Instead, I opted to reallocate credit between my personal American Express cards. Here's how to do it:
- Log in to your Amex account.
- Head to this link.
- Fill out the form by selecting the card you want to transfer credit limit from and select the card you want to transfer the credit limit towards. Enter the amount of the credit you want to transfer. Amex will pre-populate the limits of what you're allowed to move.
I decided to move $10,000 from my Starwood Preferred Guest personal card to my Platinum Delta Amex. The SPG card lost 33% of its non-bonus earning power in August, and I don't foresee using the card much anymore. After I submitted the form I got an instant approval message which said to wait 15 minutes for the new limits to show, but they ended up showing instantly.
Some other good information to know when trying to transfer credit lines:
- You can transfer from personal to personal card, business to business card, and personal to business card. You cannot transfer from business to personal.
- There may be time limits associated with how old a card has to be in order to transfer from or to it and how often you can transfer credit. If you get an error message after submitting the form you may have run up against these limits, which I could not get a phone agent to define.
- There is no hard or soft credit pull for transferring credit lines.
- The cards you want to transfer between must be in the same online profile.
This is a really handy online tool Amex has maintained which I'm sure doesn't get utilized as much as it should. If you need to move credit lines around, make sure to avoid the phone and chat and get it done instantly.