Your Credit Card Annual Fee is Due, should you cancel or keep your card?

Your annual fee is due on your credit card and you’re presented with the dilemma of what you should do. Luckily you have a couple options and hopefully one of these options will help in making your decision whether or not to cancel your credit card before the annual fee is due.

One thing that I always do when I get a credit card that has an annual fee that’s waived the first year is I put on my calendar about 11 to 11 months and 15 days ahead that there is an annual fee coming up. That way I won’t forget. Anyways, let me run down the different options that you have.

Please note: Before you do any of these things make sure that you have used, transferred, or cashed out any existing miles or points before you decide to cancel or move down to a lower tiered credit card or you could lose all the miles you have earned.

#1. Call the credit card company and ask them if they will waive the annual fee. You might get lucky and they might waive the fee if not another option that many credit cards will do is they will keep the annual fee but they will give you approximately the same amount in bonus points or miles. For example if the annual fee is $59 they might give you fifty nine hundred miles and you will still have to pay the fee.

#2. If they want waive the fee or give you any sort of bonus miles tell them that you wish to cancel. Many times they don’t want you to cancel so they will send you to another department that deals strictly with cancellations they don’t want to lose you as a customer so they might be able to give you some sort of offer.

#3. If neither one of these work you can simply ask to switch your account too another credit card program that they have that might not have an annual fee however these types of credit cards usually don’t have any rewards link to them or any perks, but the one upside to this is you can retain the length of credit history that you’ve established with that credit card. A certain percentage of your credit history is made up in your credit score.

#4. If none of these work at this point it is probably best to cancel the credit card unless however you know that there’s a possibility that you could spend more money which would earn you more points or miles then what the annual fee costs you. Earning single miles at a $59 annual fee would mean you would have to spend $5,900 in a year, if you get double miles you only have to spend half of that.