{"id":9379,"date":"2024-03-20T04:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-03-20T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/?p=9379"},"modified":"2024-03-19T17:12:57","modified_gmt":"2024-03-19T23:12:57","slug":"the-alternative-pop-up-jailbreak-amex-style","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/2024\/03\/20\/the-alternative-pop-up-jailbreak-amex-style\/","title":{"rendered":"The Alternative Pop-Up Jailbreak, AmEx Style"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Introduction<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

American Express terms and conditions for new credit and charge card applications famously don’t tell the whole story about whether or not you’re eligible for a bonus<\/a>. Instead when applying for a card there are just a few rules: If you get a pop-up telling you that you’re not going to earn a bonus during an application, you’re not going to get it. If you don’t get a pop-up, you will. If you get pop-ups on most or all of your applications, you’re in the colloquial “pop-up jail”, or PUJ<\/a> as we’re collectively calling it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

American Express’s Current Inmate Count<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

We’ve seen a significant increase in pop-up jail incarcerations in 2024, presumably related to American Express’s concerns about its ability to maintain record profits<\/a> in exactly the way that Boeing can’t<\/a>. To quantify this to an (only partially scientific) extent, I used churning.io<\/a> to search for the number of occurrences of “PUJ” on reddit.com\/r\/churning in several time periods:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Month<\/th>“PUJ” Comments<\/th><\/tr><\/thead>
Jul 2023<\/td>3<\/td><\/tr>
Aug 2023<\/td>6<\/td><\/tr>
Sep 2023<\/td>7<\/td><\/tr>
Oct 2023<\/td>39<\/td><\/tr>
Nov 2023<\/td>25<\/td><\/tr>
Dec 2023<\/td>42<\/td><\/tr>
Jan 2024<\/td>78<\/td><\/tr>
Feb 2024<\/td>54<\/td><\/tr>
Mar 2024 (month to date)<\/td>70<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table>
The pop-up jail trend according to frequency analysis on reddit.com\/r\/churning<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Yes there are measurement errors and biases in this methodology. But also yes, there’s a trend that emerges and matches the general sense in the community<\/a> that jail is becoming more common.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Breaking Free: Alt<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

The main method to break out of pop-up jail is to spend a lot on American Express co-branded cards, like a Delta card, Hilton card, or Marriott card. Yes – I understand that “a lot” is rather qualitative, but I’ll quantify it slightly by saying you should be spending well into five figures a month for this method to be likely to succeed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, let’s get to the whole point of this post, the alt method:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

To get out of pop-up jail, close all of your cards with American Express, wait 90-ish days, then start-over like you’re a new customer.<\/p>\n– MEAB’s tome of apocryphal wisdom<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Let’s call this one the “apocryphal sneak-attack” to go along with the related sneak-attack strike back<\/a>. Good luck, and happy Wednesday!<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

A different kind of pop-up jail, courtesy of Microsoft.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Introduction American Express terms and conditions for new credit and charge card applications famously don’t tell the whole story about whether or not you’re eligible<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_editorskit_title_hidden":false,"_editorskit_reading_time":0,"_editorskit_is_block_options_detached":false,"_editorskit_block_options_position":"{}","footnotes":""},"categories":[54,56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-credit-cards","category-wisdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9379"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9379\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9384,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9379\/revisions\/9384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}