What's up you guys, sasha here now, a few days ago after i did a video about american express, i went and got myself an american express, platinum, cashback credit card, there's a lot of words in there. I wanted to go and do a brief review. I wanted to go and tell you some of the good sides, some of the bad sides, i'm not going to go into lots of detail about the application process or some of the other things that every single credit card shares. I'm going to just tell you some of the highlights and some of the really important things that i am witnessing by using this credit card over the first few days.

Just so that you can go and make a decision for yourself as to whether you want to go and get it or not. I'll tell you exactly what you can get in terms of cash back uh i'll give you some of my feedback about its usage. Just uh really really quickly before we get any further. I wanted to mention that i have absolutely no affiliation with american express whatsoever, i'm not being paid to do this review.

I just went and got this credit card all by myself, without actually doing anything with american express they're, not even aware of making this video. So this is completely impartial and i am just making this video because i felt it would be useful. I'm going to tell you the good sides and the bad sides about this american express credit card, but before i go there, let me first tell you why i actually chose it in the first place and the reason i did choose it is because there are very Few rewards credit cards are available in the market today, and this is probably the best one out there. That's just my personal opinion.

I actually think this one actually offers better value than their much more premium. Gold credit card rewards gold, credit card and some of the other products available by other providers as well. Now it's not the very premium kind of credit card that some of the other ones are, but it also doesn't come with benefits that i have absolutely no use for at the moment it doesn't have airport lounge access and air miles and pointless upgrades in various car Hire or hotel chains because i have absolutely no use for them right now, i'm sitting in my in my house and like everybody else, i guess and i'm not doing any traveling, like probably most people as well, so i kind of felt i wanted to review a Product that would be probably more applicable to everybody else in the same situation. So i went and chose this credit card as opposed to the platinum, everyday cashback credit card, because i felt for my particular usage.

It would be slightly better value, but let me explain exactly what the difference between the two credit cards is and exactly when. Maybe one would be better for some people versus another. The two are incredibly similar. In fact, even their names are almost identical.

The only difference is that everyday words, so the one i got comes with a 25 pound annual fee and it's called the platinum cashback credit card, the other one, the one that comes without an annual fee is called the platinum everyday cash back credit card. So almost exactly the same thing, but here's the difference so for the fact that you're paying the fee you get two major benefits. The one benefit that i wanted to mention is that the introductory offer is slightly better, so this introductory cashback period lasts for the first three months of you having the credit card, and during that time you get five percent of cash back up to a limit, and After that, you go and revert back to the standard rate of cash back so with the everyday credit card. That limit is just 2 000 pounds.

So that means, if you spend the 2 000 pounds within the first three months, which you probably really should be. That's the prime reason for getting the credit card. In the first place, you will get a hundred pounds cashback for that spend with the non-everyday credit card. There's the regular platinum, cashback credit card.

That limit is a little bit higher. It is set to two and a half thousand pounds and the reason it's set to two and a half thousand pounds is because that's the limit at which the fee is essentially paid for itself. So you get 125 pounds cash back. But after you take away the fee, you've now equaled the same 100 pound cashback for that introductory period.

But after the introductory period the platinum cashback credit card gives you a much better rate of return in terms of the cashback earned. So, for the first ten thousand pounds of spent, you get one percent cashback and for anything beyond that, it is 1.25 cashback note that in year one this is after the introductory two and a half thousand pound has been already applied. So essentially, it's going to be 12 and a half thousand as the barrier. If you like, with the everyday card, the threshold is lower.

It is set at 5 000 pounds only which is much lower, but the rates that you get are much lower as well. You get 0.5 percent for everything below the 5 000 mark again in year, one. That thousand is actually seven thousand. When you include the two thousand introductory amount, the five thousand essentially sits on top and anything above that five thousand or seven thousand in year.

One you're then earning one percent cash back, but in all cases, you're essentially earning less cash back than you will on the premium card, because you're not paying that annual fee, and what does that mean in terms of the math behind it? Let me make it really really simple: i'm not gon na go into too much detail, but in year one if you're planning to spend over 3 000 pounds, then the platinum, cashback credit card will pay you more cash back than the everyday card, even after accounting. For the fee, from year two onwards, you have to spend over ten thousand pounds in order for the platinum cashback credit card to be worth it compared to the everyday. So if you're spending less than ten thousand per year from year, two onwards, you're actually going to be earning more cashback by using the everyday card because of the way that the fee essentially pays for itself. Only when you reach the 10 000 mark.

But here's the one thing that i haven't seen other people really mention - and this is i think, really really important and that is for spend between 5 000 and 10 000. The two cards are basically identical, so the everyday card is not better below ten thousand they're. Basically identical so, if you're planning to spend much much less so if you're only planning to spend two or three thousand pounds a year, then the everyday credit card is better value. But if you might spend over ten thousand, but even if you don't - you might have spent, say seven, eight or nine thousand pounds, then you're still going to get exactly the same amount of cash back in return.

If you use the platinum, cashback credit card as if you use the everyday credit card, because the rates of return between five and ten thousand are exactly the same now, if you're planning to get this credit card for a period of say two years and you go And make use of the introductory cashback period for both of these cards to the max, so you spend 2 000, at least in the first three months on the everyday card and two and a half thousand on the cash back credit card. Then you will need to spend over four thousand pounds a year on average for the platinum cashback credit card, to make you more in terms of cashback than the everyday card would just a word of warning. If you get one of these credit cards for the first 12 months, you can't go and switch to the other. After that, the introductory period is only available to people who haven't had an american express credit card over the last 24 months.

So if you go and get one of these and then close it, you won't be able to make use of the introductory offer with the other card afterwards. So if you're wanting to go and get say the platinum cashback credit card in year, one and then you switch to the everyday card. You'll only get the everyday, regular cashback terms without the introductory period. At that point, if you get accepted but most importantly, you can get that welcome bonus if you go and smash the like button for the youtube algorithm that is so important for a young channel like mine to be able to reach more people more quickly, so that I can show them useful videos like this.

Please go ahead and do it if you haven't done so already. I really really appreciate it anyway. Let's move on to some of the issues that i had with this credit card that i just wanted to make sure that people are aware of now, i'm not going to talk about any regular use of credit cards. I mean this credit card works exactly like any other credit card.

You can go and view statements online. You can go and spend it wherever you like. That's the one thing that actually, you can't do with this american express card. So i have mentioned before that american express doesn't have the same ability to go and use it in every single shop, as you would with a visa or mastercard, and that is because they charge a much higher level of interchange to the shop.

So if you go and spend on a visa or mastercard, then the shop has to pay something like not point three percent of the amount that you have paid, plus any fees that they have to pay for the provider of the little machine in their shop. Anyway. It's not a huge amount of money with american express those exact charges are much much higher, we're talking several magnitudes higher. So as a result, instead of paying 0.3 percent, they might find themselves paying something like one two or three percent.

Instead, there's a lot of variability and reasons why it's different, but it is a lot more, and that means a lot of shops choose not to go down that route, because it's a lot more expensive to accept american express credit cards. So, over the last few weeks i went and actually tried using this credit card in some of the local shops, and here is what i found i couldn't use it in quite a few locations. I would say something like 50 of the time that i was trying to use it other than using it on places like amazon or buying groceries in a big supermarket, or anything like that. I found that i couldn't use it quite a lot.

So when i went to the biggest local pet shop in my area, i couldn't use american service because they don't accept that card. Also, when i tried several smaller online shops, where i could go and buy something to get delivered, not some of the big ones again, there was two or three instances where i wanted to pay using the amex, but i couldn't because they also didn't accept american express Because of those charges next, the car park in the center of the town, where i live also doesn't accept. American, express or lodex does accept visa and mastercard and, most importantly, this is just massively massively a deal breaker. For me, most of the takeaways around where i live, which do take cards, do not take american express, including my favorite turkish restaurant, which is really really pushing it.

What this really means is that, if you go and get this credit card, you cannot rely on it. For being your one and only way of making payments, you always have to have another credit card sitting in your wallet just in case the place doesn't accept american express and if you want to make sure that you always use credit cards rather than debit cards for Spend because of security and other reasons, that means you have to have at least two credit cards at any one time. If you want to go and use this american express some people might not want to go down that route, but you know other people will say well. If the rewards are worth it, then i'm gon na go down there.

The second thing that i noticed is that the tech is really really clunky. Now american express have improved a lot over the last five years, or so they used to be really really clunky and really really outdated. That is changing, but the problem they have is because they operate in so many different countries and regions. They have the same kind of issues that i'm seeing with hsbc at the moment, where they're trying to make a central kind of platform that seems to operate in a very similar fashion, whether you're, based in the us in the uk, in asia or anywhere else, and With that comes a lot of problems, because things just don't quite work as well as they should, because things are developed seemingly by completely different people, not talking to each other.

So, just as a really minor thing, you know when you go and look at your account on your computer. If you go and click on payments, if you go and click on, say the direct debit, you go to this brand new kind of website that they've been building and a lot of their account stuff lives on that framework. But you then go and make a manual payment instead, and suddenly you take into this really really old, like 15 year old looking website, instead, like a completely different version of the american express website, and it just like doesn't feel like anyone's actually put any thought into The customer journey - and it seems like with the amount of time they've had they could have really gone and looked at all the different customer journeys. People would be making on their account and just made them that little bit more sleek.

That's pretty much everything that i wanted to talk about in this video today, so the long and short of it. If you want to get the best rewards card out there for people who don't need airport, lounges and air miles and stuff like that, these two credit cards, the everyday card and the platinum cashback card, which is the one that i got, are probably the best ones. That you can get on the market and if you want to go and get one, you can go and do so. If you're interested in getting one, you can get 10 to 15 pounds worth of cashback depending on the day of the week, and how the american express or top cash back feel, go and hit the link in the description below and you can go and get that.

If you feel like it, it's an affiliate link, so i get a referral fee as well as you getting your cash back. But if you don't want to mess around with having to bother to carry multiple credit cards with having to actually bother asking people if they accept american express you know, i haven't had this feeling because i haven't had an american express card for a little. While of going and looking at those signs that shops have on their door of you know, do they have an american express sign or not? Because when you have a visa or a mastercard, you just don't care, because your card is going to be accepted, pretty much everywhere, where a credit card or a debit card can be processed with american express you suddenly have to do that thing. You know the asking the shopkeeper: do you accept american express kind of weird question before putting your card in or you don't ask the question and then you awkwardly stick your card into the machine.

Then the machine does a weird beep and then the person has to go and look at you and say: oh i'm sorry, we don't accept american express. So if you don't want that headache, then maybe you want to go and look elsewhere, because it is more frustrating and more annoying than people really give it credit for the important thing is that these issues only seem to be getting worse. I seem to remember that american express did suffer from this, but not as badly as they have been more recently, and the issue is given the current situation in the world. I don't think this is actually going to resolve favorably anytime soon.

The shops that people are going to be shopping in are currently massively cash-strapped. Their businesses are in trouble, they're, finding it very difficult to make ends meet so they're highly unlikely to go and add more costs to their business by beginning to accept american express on top of everything else that is going on with them. Given that all these shops have gone to pretty much 100 card spend on any spend that they do manage to get, they don't want to go and lose say 2 of their revenue. Just because somebody wants to go and use their american express card because they want to go and get their cash back, they will tell that person that they're not going to accept it.

Please can they go and use a visa or mastercard instead, anyway, that's all i've got for you today. If you enjoyed this, please go and smash that like button, if you haven't done so already, if you want to watch more videos about personal finance, more reviews of personal finance products, i've got an interesting bank account review about a bank that you may not have heard Of coming very very soon, please go and subscribe to this channel and hit the bell. So you get notifications every single time. One of those videos comes out.

Thank you so much for watching. I really really appreciate it and see you guys later. You.