Air miles are definitely the most lucrative reward, but for simplicity I’ve always just stuck with the cash back credit cards.
For no effort at all I used make around £300 a year. The normal 1%ish adds up when you’re spending £1K plus a month, but it’s the retailer offers that really make a difference.
Just thinking as that could make hitting the spend caps a fair bit easier through AMEX
Reading through this thread it discusses getting air miles for your purchases. Has anyone got any advise on the AMEX cashback cards?
I’m going to be buying a sofa soon for £1,800 and have seen that I can get 5% cashback if I use one of these cards?
I have the cash so my plan is as follows:
I’m not interested in using the card for everyday purchases so I’ll likely buy the sofa on the card, claim the cashback and then once paid off cancel it.
Can anyone offer any advise please and in exchange I’ll sign up with one of your referral codes? 
What’s the APR on the card?
I’d have thought the interest on this would be far worse than the cashback/interest on cash savings combined?
Edit - Isn’t the Amex interest calculated monthly?
22.9%
Here are their cashback cards:
So, if I’m understanding this correctly (which, given it’s a Friday evening, is very unlikely 
), I don’t think you’ll benefit here…
This is from the T’s and C’s
Examples
When you won’t pay interest on purchases
If you paid the full amount you owe in June and in July we won’t charge interest on any purchase charged to your account in July and shown in your July statement.
When you’ll pay interest on purchases
If you didn’t pay the full amount you owe in June, we’ll charge interest on any purchase charged to your account in June and July, even if you pay the full amount you owe in July.
So, in my head, unless you pay off the sofa the month after you buy it, you’ll end up paying interest on it.
The best thing to do would be to take out the card, but the sofa, pay the card off with the cash, enjoy the cashback…
I think that makes sense?
Ahhh ok, I missed that bit - glad I asked 
I’ll do this instead 
Unless there is another type of card that would be more beneficial?
With all of the Amex’s (that I’ve seen), the best way is to always pay the balance in full the following month (there’s no interest free period).
If you are just after the cashback, you’ll get £90 from the sofa purchase alone.
If you went down the Gold Card route, you’d get no cashback, but you’d likely spend enough on it to qualify for the 20,000 reward bonus which would give you a return flight to anywhere in Europe (I guess you could argue this is potentially worth up to £5/600 depending on where you go).
Obviously that’s a little hard to quantify as you can always get cheap flights etc.
What’s the goal in the long run? Just cashback, or would you consider the airmiles side of things?
I don’t have a goal I’ve never done anything like this before 
I’ve just seen all the talk about it on here and thought I could get some free money.
Perhaps I could be tempted to a free flight instead, I’ve not really given it any thought to be honest.
I was comparing cashback to airmiles AMEX cards and in a way @nickh sold it for me. The points on the airmiles are worth more than a total of £150-200 cashback over the year - I’m going to spend the money so why simply get 1-5% off when i can in effect double the money i spend (albeit in specific situations).
Well, if you are potentially going to use the airmiles at some point (doesn’t have to be instantly, or even this/next year), I’d definitely go down that route.
A very (very) rough calculation would be 20,000 points = 1 adult return flight to anywhere in Europe.
This could be a trip across to Dublin, or it could be to Lanzarote… So it’s worth checking the costs of the BA flight against budget airlines to see how much you’d truly save.
For me, the airmiles have saved me in excess of £3000 over the last 2 years.
Thanks so much! I’ll have a chat with my partner later and we will apply for one tomorrow 
Do you have a referral link that I could use to get you some points for your troubles?
Yeah, sure, I’ll DM you 
The Select CC no longer has cashback for new applications.
Did i not read someone referrals dont work anymore
Just a quick one, my brother works for Virgin, his partner works for British Airways. So i get discounted flights anyway, ie I pay the taxes. Is there any benefit for myself getting the points card over cashback?