I’ve got a real love-hate relationship with my Amex Platinum card

Once a quarter or so, I do something I call “Look At Money Time.” I go through my credit cards and bank accounts to see exactly what’s going on. What subscription have I forgotten about? Just how behind on retirement am I? Is there a recovery program for ordering Seamless? The biggest financial conundrum for me lately is my American Express Platinum card. I wrote about Gen Z’s love for Amex last year and in the process sold my skeptical millennial self on the whole deal, despite the $695 annual price tag. Now, Amex Platinum’s yearly fee is going up to a whopping $895. The jump has turned “Look At Money Time” into “Worry and Judge Self About Money Extravaganza.”

The Amex Platinum card has been around since 1984, and in the realm of fancy credit cards, it’s one of the fanciest, along with the Chase Sapphire Reserve. Sure, the black cards are ultra-elite, but they also come with an ultra-elite annual fee of thousands of dollars. The more accessible Amex and Chase cards have a champagne taste on a beer budget feel to them, explains Ted Rossman, a senior credit cards industry analyst at Bankrate.

“As far as the mass market, these are at the high end,” Rossman says. “I’m questioning if this is even mass market anymore.”

Hard same.

In an increasingly stratified consumer landscape, fancy rewards cards are status symbols. They provide access to special deals and perks. They’re a way to separate yourself from the rest. They can also feel like a trap, especially for those of us who aren’t particularly inclined to do a bunch of points-counting. Is access to an increasingly overcrowded airport lounge worth 1% of the median income in America? While I’ve enjoyed the Amex experience, I also have my doubts.

Amex used to be the type of card that was mainly reserved for wealthier, older people, and if you couldn’t afford it, you could always lie and say you didn’t want an Amex card because many merchants didn’t take them. But that’s changed. Amex is accepted pretty much everywhere, and young people are flocking to it: Millennials and Gen Z make up about 60% of its new customers worldwide. The company is betting that its enthusiastic customer base, young and old, won’t be scared off by the 29% increase in its annual fee.

Amex is selling its $200 bump to consumers by adding new benefits it says could be worth up to $3,500. It’s added new annual credits for $400 that can be spent with restaurant booking app Resy (which it owns), $300 with Lululemon, and $120 with Uber One, among others, and has upped a credit that can be put toward digital entertainment services such as YouTubeTV and Paramount+ to $300 a year. Amex has also increased the hotel credits that platinum members can access, and it’s retaining existing benefits, such as credits for airline fees, Walmart+, Saks, and Equinox. It’s part of Amex Platinum’s ongoing shift from travel card to lifestyle card.

“Anytime these changes come, the justification is all the slew of added benefits that they are marketing. And to be clear, those benefits can easily outweigh the increased annual fee — the primary word there being can,” says Nick Ewen, senior editorial director at The Points Guy.

Reading through those benefits, my first instinct is that I should absolutely keep the card. But I’ve spent the past week or so looking through what I’m actually using and … man, I wish I were more organized. I’ve gotten the Walmart+ credit every month, but I’ve never ordered a single thing from Walmart+. Besides the welcome bonus, I haven’t even managed to rack up 10,000 more points. I’d forgotten to switch a lot of my qualifying streaming services to my Platinum card, so I’m missing out on that money. I ordered the cheapest item I actually wanted from Saks to get the $50 back, but even after the discount, I ended up spending $8, thanks mostly to the Platinum card pressure. As much as the airport lounge is a cute little treat, I miss the camaraderie of the regular airport bar.

What I’ve signed up for in getting the Amex Platinum card is essentially a “high-end coupon book,” says Michael Miller, an analyst at Morningstar Research, and it’s up to me to figure out how to use those coupons. “You kind of have to reshape your spending patterns around Amex’s merchant partners,” he says.

If Amex raises its annual fee too high, it risks losing some customers, but thus far, people have generally been willing to pony up. The company says it has a 98% retention rate on the Platinum card.

“I’ve often been asked, what is the ceiling? Where can these annual fees go? And we, transparently, likely haven’t seen that ceiling,” Ewen says.

“Customers understand what they are getting and are willing to pay for it,” said Anthony Cirri, Amex’s executive vice president of US consumer cards, in an emailed statement.

If some consumers drop off, from a corporate perspective, it may not be the worst thing in the world. Amex’s pitch to merchants is that offering discounts and credits will steer an affluent Amex Platinum customer base in their direction. It’s not clear exactly how much each merchant kicks in to be part of the deal, but according to Amex, its partners bear more than a quarter of the overall cost of rewards. Discussing American Express’s partnership with Saks in a 2018 earnings call, CEO Stephen Squeri said that Amex’s cost was zero. The higher the fee on the Platinum card, the more self-selection of high-income consumers that merchants want to get in the door. And people who can’t stomach the cost can always downgrade to another Amex card while staying in the overall ecosystem.

“Some of the philosophy here is to kind of double down on a truly luxury audience,” Rossman says. “And it almost seems to me that if they lose customers as a result, that’s more of a feature than a bug.”

Amex isn’t wrong about reshaping habits either. To try to take advantage of the Lululemon and Resy credits before they expire at the end of the quarter (they’re split into four chunks across the year), I made my very first Lululemon purchase and texted my boyfriend to make plans to go to a fancy restaurant over the weekend. Neither are purchases I would have made were it not for the platinum card deadline nipping at my heels. And yes, I spent more than intended at Lululemon.

Many people love their Amex Platinum cards. Madison Traughber, 26, in Atlanta, is one of those Gen Zs who’s obsessed with it. “You can pry it from my cold, dead, hands,” she says. She had anticipated the fee increase and thought it would be more. She rushed to Lululemon the day after the Amex partnership announcement and spied on others at the register to see if they were doing the same. “It’s almost a signal that you’re in the know,” she says. The most important perk to her is the airport lounge — she sometimes uses it to impress older coworkers. “You get taken more seriously,” she says.

Not everyone’s so eager to shell out more. Jim Hennessy, 50, a 15-year platinum-card member in Chicago, says he’s still deciding whether to keep the card with the fee increase. The lounges are really crowded with chaotic 20-somethings (my words, not his). He likes the Uber credit and some of the hotel rewards, but he has to do the math to see if they’re still worth it. “I think some of the exclusivity of the card’s gone away,” he says.

The company says it is investing heavily in lounges, including opening new ones in Amsterdam, Salt Lake City, and Newark. They are also launching a smaller “sidecar” lounge concept in 2026. Ewen, from The Points Guy, pooh-poohs the lounge as part of the consumer equation, telling me it’s a “nice value-add above and beyond the monetary value I’m getting from my card.” Rossman reminds me that while travel-rewards cards “get all the headlines,” more basic cash-back cards are actually Americans’ favorite type of card.

Talking it through with people, I go back and forth on whether this nearly $900 card is worth it. One friend tells me he’s an Amex “FREAK” and loves it, but if and when he stops traveling so much for work, he’ll probably ax it, given the cost, and get a cash-back card. Another says the card is “dope,” and because her family is military, she gets the fee waived. My modest Midwestern self — and my modest Midwestern mother’s voice in the back of my head — tell me the price tag is ridiculous. A positive: Amex’s app now helps you track how and whether you’re using the benefits. A negative: You still have to enroll in a lot of the benefits, and they don’t automatically kick in if you forget. A positive: I get a fair share of Uber discounts thanks to Amex. A negative: I take more Ubers than I would otherwise. I’m lucky that I’m able to pay off my credit card bill at the end of every month, so I don’t have to weigh the cost-benefit scenarios of interest versus perks. Plus, I push the fact that rewards cards are wealth transfers from the poor to the rich to the back of my mind.

“I do think people need to really run the numbers, and there is a cost to complexity,” Rossman says.

I’m fairly certain I have a little more time to decide whether I want to keep my Amex Platinum before the new higher fee takes effect. The fact that I still haven’t looked up that deadline is also a sign that I’m probably better off canceling, but hope springs eternal. Maybe I’ll become a spreadsheet gal. Maybe I can eat and drink my way through a few hundred dollars at the lounge. Or maybe it’s another lesson that the economy works best for the people who have the time, money, and patience to play it right. The platinum card isn’t just about perks — it’s about working the system.

“You do have to kind of go along with the game here,” Miller says.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

Read the original article on Business Insider