Why You Should Turn off Pay Over Time and an Easy Way To Earn 20,000 Membership Rewards

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American Express offers two different types of card – regular credit cards we are all very familiar with and the no pre-set spending limit cards. But Amex also offers features such as Pay Over Time on its no pre-set limit cards, so these can also act as a sort of credit card. 

Why are we talking about the Pay Over Time here? After all, we are against carrying a credit card balance and paying interest, so we don’t even need to worry about this feature, right? That would be the case if Amex was your regular, old boring bank, but it wouldn’t be one of our favorite banks if there never were any surprises.  

Let’s look at why we should be paying attention to the Pay Over Time feature and why we should open the promotional emails from what might look like junk mail from Amex.  

What is Pay Over Time?

American Express cards that don’t have a pre-set spending limit, such as American Express® Gold Card, American Express Green Card and The Platinum Card® from American Express, come with a pay over time feature that gives consumers an option to carry a balance (with interest) on eligible charges of $100 or more. So even though these cards don’t have a pre-set spending limit, they act more like regular credit cards. 

We don’t ever recommend you carry a balance, so why are we even talking about this feature? 

We should all pay attention to this because American Express has been known to send out some really lucrative targeted offers to select cardmembers in order to entice them to enroll in this feature. In the past, as an incentive, Amex has offered 10,000 points to enroll in Pay Over Time, and just recently a new round of targeted offers of 20,000 points went out to some lucky cardmembers. 

How to Increase Your Odds of Getting the Pay Over Time Bonus Points?

I’ve received the 10,000 offers before, but not in a couple of years. In the last few days, I’ve been scouring all of my family’s Amex cards, but so far no luck. So how can we increase the odds of getting this offer? After all, this is the easiest way to earn 10,000 to 20,000 points with minimal effort and no spending requirements. 

You might have been auto-enrolled in Pay Over Time, or you might have enrolled yourself before and forgot all about it. If you are already enrolled, Amex is unlikely to send you an offer of extra points, so first you need to unenroll from Pay Over Time. To do so, log into your Amex account and go to the Account Services tab on the top of the page. 

Next, click on the Payments & Credit Options on the left. 

Then go to Manage Pay Over Time Setting.

If you are not enrolled, it should say Inactive. If you are enrolled in this feature, unenroll and hope that you will get an offer from Amex to activate Pay Over Time and earn some extra points in the process.  

Go through each one of your no pre-set spending limit cards, such as Platinum, Gold and Green cards, and make sure the Pay Over Time is turned off. 

Final Thoughts

If you are one of the lucky few to receive the 20,000 Membership Rewards points offer for enrolling in Pay Over Time, congratulations! If not, go through all of your cards and make sure you are unenrolled and let’s hope for the best. Don’t forget to check emails and the snail mail from Amex, since you don’t want to inadvertently throw away an offer of 20,000 points. 

Let us know in the comments below if you’ve recently received this 20,000 points offer.