Best card perk for £20,000 spend?

Russinating

I'm about to purchase a car and was wondering which card would give me the best perk/cashback/reward etc for a £20,000 spend? Ideas welcome!

InsideInsurance

Any perk is going to be out weighed by the fee the vendor applies for paying by credit card.

manami_mnm

Is that £20,000 a month?

[Deleted User]

I think the problem might be getting a card with a £20k limit.

guesswho2000

Lazyloki wrote: »

I think the problem might be getting a card with a £20k limit.

^This will be, by far, your biggest stumbling block.

Russinating

Well I was planning on putting it on my Amex Gold but wondered if there were any others worth considering for the full amount or part thereof.

OllyM

The dealer will probably charge you a fee and although Amex charge cards are billed as having no limit, they do. I'd be surprised if they allowed a £20k transaction unless you had a very high income and regularly put large amounts through the card.

izools

I don't know, I know someone who put a £1,300,000 purchase on their amex charge card when their usually monthly bills are under £10,000.

Went through without so much as a "call auth centre".

guesswho2000

Russinating wrote: »

Well I was planning on putting it on my Amex Gold but wondered if there were any others worth considering for the full amount or part thereof.

Well Amex gold would give you the MR points, which is a good bet, the general consensus being that any Amex you can get a partial amount on to is better than most visa/MC offerings. The Platinum credit card gives you 5% cashback on £2k in the first three months, for example.

£20k is a lot to stick through cards all at once though and, even if a retailer is willing to take £20k this way, they might not be willing to split it between multiple cards.

Last time I bought a car (well, for the mrs), we paid the maximum amount they'd accept without charging by CC, the rest by debit card. They would accept £1k by credit card for free, or any amount over that with a 3% fee on the whole amount - this fee would have wiped out the benefit of any card on the market (only Aqua reward or Amex plat in the first three months would touch this, and Aqua is capped at £100 per year cashback (£3,333 annual spend), Amex at £100 in the first three months (£2k spend)).

pingles

Unless you're churning £20k transactions all the time they may need prior notice but I've read of people doing it before. If you have the money to pay (which you do if you're going to use your gold card) then it's not going to be a problem.

Only issue might be the dealership fee- but haggle and you may reduce the price down to cover the ~3%.

My guess is that collecting MR points to transfer to Avios is probably the only chance at a reward beating the 3% fee:

I was looking at award flights the other day, you can get a First Class Return with BA from LHR to JFK in May for ~120,000 Avios + £1000ish taxes. The equivalent flight would be ~£6200 so a value of about £5200 (after taxes) which works out at about 4.3p/4.3%. However, if you're still in the intro period your car purchase may get classified as travel so you'd earn 2 points per £1 and doubling your reward.

InsideInsurance

izools wrote: »

I don't know, I know someone who put a £1,300,000 purchase on their amex charge card when their usually monthly bills are under £10,000.

Went through without so much as a "call auth centre".

AmEx don't tend to do calls for authorisations. They do advise you to call before placing any unusual transactions through and they will simply do a pre-authorisation check and tell you if it is likely to go through or not.

I've heard of people challenging the decision when the pre-auth has been a decline but never had it happen to me but then never tried to spend more than 10k in one transaction or have a balance over 20k for a months spend.

Bottom out the cost from the dealer first before wasting time trying to get cards etc.