Credit Cards

Fidelity American Express Gold Card to be phased out

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The End of an Era

When I was in college I opened up a Fidelity brokerage account to trade stocks. I had a Roth, some savings, and I wanted to start compounding it. One of the benefits of the account was a Fidelity American Express Gold card, fee free. Any charges that you made during the month would be withdrawn from your cash balance, and if you wanted, you could pay a fee to earn Membership Rewards on those purchases. I felt like an absolute BALLER carrying around an Amex Gold in college. In addition to that, I even upgraded the card to a Platinum for a year, downgraded it the next, but since the account number stayed the same I kept using the Amex Plat until its expiration date ( It even continued to get me into Delta lounges at the time.) Not sure that really works anymore. Flash Forward 16 years and here I am today, staring at my long held friend who is about to phased out on April 9th, 2018.

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Despite opening many Amex cards since then, it’s been my Amex Fidelity Gold card that established my “member since” date of of 2002. I now wonder, what will happen to that date? It’s unclear by the FAQs on the product cancellation, but I’m hoping my records still support the 2002 date. I never use the card, but it’s brings back a lot of great memories, and was my first “premium” card that I ever had.

Here are a few of the FAQs…

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Did you ever carry one of these?

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4 Comments

  • Kenny February 29, 2024

    American Express Gold: https://americanexpress.com/en-us/referral/KENNYB08Yx?XLINK=MYCP

    The Gold card is currently offering a 60,000 sign up bonus after $6,000 spent in 6 months.

    I find the gold card to be most useful for food purchases, earning 4x points at restaurants and grocery stores. You can recover almost all of the annual fee for the gold card $240 of the $250 if you take advantage of the monthly credits from food delivery and Uber. I like to accumulate additional Amex points by using shopping portals like Rakuten.

  • kelly March 22, 2018

    Yes, I’ve had the Fidelity Amex Gold since 1999. It was the sole card that I used until the cancellation was announced. I’m a bit miffed at how Amex has handled the cancellation. No offers to move to another card or anything like that for a 19-year Member. And a curt “use or or lose it in 90 days” on my points. Amex used to be known for customer service, but I doubt I’ll ever get another Amex card again.

  • Joe-SC1 February 22, 2018

    Not this exact gold card, but I had the original “traditional gold card” from a decade earlier (1992). Several parallels with your Fidelity Gold: I got it during my college years, it was my first premium card, and I also could pay a fee to earn MR points. I was grandfathered into a relatively low AF for a long time, but they dropped this option several years ago – making it into a Premier Rewards Gold “lite”, with only a slightly reduced annual fee, if I recall correctly. After they did that, I bid a fond farewell to my AMEX Gold in 2014. For what it’s worth, they did maintain my original 1992 “Member Since” date at that time. Of course, just to muck up the comparison, this was before AMEX stopped back-dating all cards in March of 2015. All of my newer cards have the actual open date.

  • Wonderful Wanda February 22, 2018

    I remember when I had bad credit and applied for this card and got denied 2½ years ago. That AMEX Fidelity card was the only rewards card that denied me. Since then my credit has gone up and 1 year ago I got the current Fidelity credit card and along the way several other rewards cards.
    I’m very happy that I never got that AMEX fidelity credit card.

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