In this post, I wrote about the flavors of American Express Reloadable Prepaid Cards. I mistakenly thought that I would be able to have both the Serve and Bluebird cards. As reported online on various other outlets, you can have one or the other.
I am able to confirm after I called American Express, they told me to call up their Fraud Department, and an agent answered immediately on a recorded line. Their hours of operations are 7 AM to 6 PM Central time. When I am back in the office, I will update this post with the number.
Anyway, they pretty much said that they were too similar of a product and I could only have one or the other. I stayed with the Bluebird, and I am very glad that I did. While I am giving up a free $25 as a sign up bonus, the Serve product will have an increase in fees in March 2013.
For those who don’t own either card, I suggest signing up for the Serve and when the fee structure changes, you should close the Serve and open the Bluebird.
Here is the latest on the fees, note that resident of either New York, Arkansas or Vermont are not charged the new fees:
I’m not sure what the fee structure for New Yorkers are, but this is welcome news for most of my readers.
At the new fee structure of 2.9%, that’s more than Square, the little credit card reader that fits in the sound port of a mobile device. Square charges 2.75% of the transaction. If you have a ton of non reloadable gift cards and need to get cash off it, Square will be cheaper in the end. However, both Square and Amazon Payments will send you a tax document if you acquire more than 200 transactions and $20,000 as required by the IRS. Also note, there have been account closures with Square for cashing in Visa/Mastercard gift cards like that.
You’ll need to do the math to determine what’s better, Serve or Square. I unfortunately won’t be able to provide further in depth analysis as I am not a Serve customer.
