Meet your credit card ‘minimum spend’ requirement with new Amex gift cards

American Express has launched its pre-paid gift cards in the UK.  Take a look at their website.

Basically, you can now (in theory) walk into a WH Smith, Sainsbury or Superdrug and a buy a £20, £30, £50 or £100 Amex gift card.  The fee payable on top is £2.45, £2.95, £3.45 and £4.45 respectively.

This opens up an option if you are struggling to meet the minimum spend requirement on a new credit card to trigger the sign-up bonus. 

One option I have mentioned in the past is buying supermarket gift vouchers, which have no fee attached.  However, it will take you a while to work through (say) £500 of Waitrose vouchers.

Whilst these Amex gift cards carry a fee, you can obviously spend through them more quickly than you could with ‘store specific’ gift vouchers.  The 4.45% fee on the £100 card is not cheap, but you may consider £22 a fair price to pay to get £500 of spend through your card.

These cards cannot be topped up.  The biggest problem with them is getting the available balance down to exactly £0 to clear them out.  What I recommend, when you are down to the last couple of quid, is to order yourself an Amazon gift voucher.

You can buy these for any amount (pounds and pence, so if you had £2.96 on your gift card it is OK to order a £2.96 evoucher) and you can pre-load your Amazon account with them immediately, even if you aren’t buying anything now.  The money is there to spend next time you visit Amazon.

Note that you can get similar gift cards from MasterCard and Visa – even Tesco sells them.  However, they tend to cap out at £50 which makes the fee disproportionately more expensive for buying large amounts.

(If are struggling to meet the minimum spend on a credit card to get the bonus, also look at this article from Friday.  You can buy HMV or Waterstones gift vouchers at a 20% discount, which should be eBay’able for 90% of face value.)

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Want to earn more points from credit cards? – August 2022 update

If you are looking to apply for a new credit card, here are our top recommendations based on the current sign-up bonuses.

In February 2022, Barclaycard launched two exciting new Barclaycard Avios Mastercard cards with a bonus of up to 25,000 Avios. You can apply here.

You qualify for the bonus on these cards even if you have a British Airways American Express card:

You can see our full directory of all UK cards which earn airline or hotel points here. Here are the best of the other deals currently available.

EDIT: Until 25th October 2022, there is an exceptionally generous sign-up bonus on The Platinum Card. You will receive 60,000 Membership Rewards points – double the usual amount – and £200 to spend at Amex Travel. You need to spend £6,000 within six months to earn the bonus.

Earning miles and points from small business cards

If you are a sole trader or run a small company, you may also want to check out these offers:

For a non-American Express option, we also recommend the Barclaycard Select Cashback card for sole traders and small businesses. It is FREE and you receive 1% cashback on your spending.