The other day I wrote about how I discovered that I had 11,436 forfeited Membership Rewards from American Express. Apparently American Express will give you forfeited Membership Rewards if you don’t pay your bill on time (and in a couple of other scenarios).
In my case, there must have been some mix-up in setting up the payment for this account. Normally the first thing I do when opening up a new credit card is to set it up to automatically pay the full bill when it was due, but in this case, there must have been something not set up correctly (or I forgot). The details are a little hazy since it was EIGHTEEN MONTHS AGO!! 🙂
It’s actually good that I noticed this now because forfeited American Express Membership Rewards can NOT be reinstated after 24 months have passed.
As you can see from the above screenshot, it costs $35 per month (per account) to reinstated forfeited Membership Rewards. For me, it probably wouldn’t make sense to pay $35 to get 90 forfeited Membership Rewards back, but certainly I feel $35 would be worth it to recover the 11,346 forfeited Membership Rewards from July of 2014.
Getting my forfeited Membership Rewards back
But first of course, might as well see if they’ll waive the fee for me! As one of the commenters on the original post said
Ask them to waive the fee as a one time courtesy while mentioning you are now on autopay and it will not happen again. Worked for me.
Since this is actually my wife’s account, it makes it awkward to call on the phone, so I dialed up the Amex live chat and was soon connected to an agent
He first offers to reinstate the total amount for a fee. In a good sign, he’s already agreed to waive $35 of the $70 reinstatement fee for my forfeited Membership Rewards. That’s a good start, but can we do better?
I offer to just have him use the $35 waiver on the July 2014 points (which is 99% of the total) and leave the June 2014 forfeited Membership rewards (only 90 of them) forfeited. We have some problems with the reading comprehension as the agent just repeats his original offer.
I figure maybe I just didn’t explain it well, so I get more detailed
And…. SUCCESS!
11,346 of my forfeited Membership Rewards were reinstated with no fee, and they appeared in my account immediately! I’m glad the saga of my forfeited American Express points is over now!
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I had an odd experience with a reinstatement. When we first moved down here 6 years ago, payments got kind of messed up and I forfeited about 16,000 MR points. I figured that I had messed up, so I paid the reinstatement fee and got my points back. About two years later, AMEX gave me back the reinstatement fee. No explanation, just an adjustment on my statement.