We are now offering 2 new cards from American Express - The Knot credit card and The Nest Credit Card.

These are considered “lifestyle credit cards”. Well, who and what is “The Knot” and “The Nest”. The Knot is actually an online wedding store and community which caters to “brides to be”. They have several partner sites as well.

“The Nest” is an online website community that is targeted at those who have just married - “young couples”.

The credit cards are unique in the sense that you would expect the card to let you earn reward points for buying things from their sites or stores. But that is not the case. Instead, every dollar that you spend on these cards gets you one Membership Rewards Option points. This probably makes sense because you will probably only shop at these places for the occasion (like for wedding stuff at theknot.com). As an incentive for you to get these cards, The Knot will throw in a free wedding planner, while The Nest throws in a financial planning binder.

I am not too sure if many people will actually get either of these cards, but their websites are popular and regular members would probably consider them since you can actually earn Amex points and get periodic discounts for their stores.

You can read our review of The Knot Credit Card and the Nest credit card here.

I just arrived yesterday at Atlanta for a weekend conference. What is interesting is how I got my airline ticket from my reward points.

The situation was that I am in Philadelphia, and was trying to book this trip 2 weeks ago (kind of last minute). I had a lot of Membership Reward points which I had gotten from using my American Express Gold Card.

Through several internet searches and phone calls, I found that Delta Airlines had the best direct flight. So I thought I could use just transfer 25,000 Membership Reward points to Delta Skymiles and get a free ticket. Turns out that seats allocated to frequent flyer miles have been taken up and I would need about 50,000 miles to get that free ticket!

So I checked with American Express to see what they could do. Turns out that they could get a Delta ticket for $430 (or thereabouts - which turned out to be cheaper than what the Delta rep was quoting me). Because my Gold Card was a “Gold Plus Card”, I could use my Membership Reward points for any airline without transferring points into air miles. In this case, I needed 43,000 points (1% reward ratio).

But I was still looking to use only 25,000 points! So a phone call was made to Continental Airlines. After some investigating, the rep told me that it was better to go to Newark and fly direct to Atlanta than to leave from Philadelphia International Airport and take a roundabout trip. Turns out that all I need was 25,000 miles and even the AMTRACK train ride to Neward was included in the package!

So I duly opened a new Continental Airlines OnePass account, transferred 25,000 points into the account and I was set.

At that moment, I did not have enough points in my Chase Flexible Rewards card and program and hence I could check to see if having that 25,000 points in Chase would help out at all. Furthermore, you need to book 21 days in advance!

But it just goes to show that depending on the situation, it may be better to use air miles, while in other cases, it may be better to use points from a regular credit card reward program. One of the key factors is how far in advance do you book your tickets. If you are always booking last minute flights, you may have to use more points than what is stated in the reward program. But I appreciated the flexibility of my American Express Preferred Gold Card as I could either transferred Membership Reward points to a frequent flyer account (if it made sense), or use it to books flights on any airlines. In this case, transferring points to Continental Onepass miles made the most sense for me.

I just received my Blue Cash Statement from American Express and my “calender year” for the card has just ended. I earned a total of $637.38 in cash rebates after spending $31,395.24 on the card this year. This works out to a rebate of 2.03% for my total spending on the Blue Cash for the year.

One of the first things I did after I got my statement was to go to the website and see precisely how much I spent on groceries and how much rebates I earned for specific categories which the Blue Cash paid 5% rebates. However, American Express does not offer such a breakdown. There is no way to find out precisely what rebates you earn when you make a particularly purchase at a specific store. You can go online to the American Express site and see the rebates you have earned every month and your annual rebates you have earned. But I think being able to show you how much you earned when you use your card at a particular store is important because I want to make sure I get my 5% rebates when I go to an ACME or Ginardi’s or to the gas station. I called customer service who then refered me to the online support department. But it appears that they do not have this feature yet.

Given that the rebate for the Citi Dividend Platinum Select Card has been reduced to 2% for “everyday purchase items” and the new Chase Freedom Card only awards 3% rebates for “everyday purchases”, I’ll be sticking to the Blue Cash for a while as my main cash rebate card. I do, however, have to find a way to quickly charge $6,500 so I can start earning 5% cash rebates on “everyday purchases”.