(EXPIRED) Amex Platinum Personal Cards Adding $30 Monthly PayPal Benefit Through June 2021

American Express has announced that they’ve added a $30 monthly PayPal benefit on the personal Platinum card. This is apparently available on all versions of the personal Platinum card (e.g. Schwab), not only the regular version. It doesn’t require registration or activation – it’s automatically been added to all personal Platinum cards.

This statement credit is available every month through June 2021, so it’s worth up to $180. That’s an excellent benefit as it’ll be easy to max it out. Many people will be able to spend $30 per month at retailers which accept PayPal as a payment method.

If not, you can use PayPal to buy gift card from PayPal Digital Gifts, Fluz, Gyft, eGifter, etc., so in theory there shouldn’t be a problem maxing it out each month. Having said that, the terms state the following (my bolding):

Eligible purchases do not include fees or interest charges, purchases or reloading of prepaid cards, purchases of gift cards, person-to-person payments including those for goods and services, or purchases of other cash equivalents.

I’ve no idea if they’ll be enforcing those terms, but it might be best to try using the benefit organically before using a gift card purchase as a fallback at the end of the month.

This benefit replaces the $20 wireless and streaming benefits. If you were able to max those out, that was $40 of value per month versus this $30 per month benefit. I actually prefer this PayPal benefit though as it’s so simple to use. I paid my Google Fi account with my Platinum card last year and Amex seemed to alternate between using the streaming and wireless benefits for that bill, more often than not counting it as a streaming purchase. That meant the $20 wireless benefit went to waste many months. With this PayPal benefit I’ll be able to get the full $30 of value every month.

h/t Doctor of Credit