I’ve said it time and time again, there’s nothing like receiving a fat stack of envelopes from South Dakota in your mailbox. Living in Arizona for quite a while, they used to show up routinely. Now that I live here and there, I have all my mail sent to my parents’ house. Keeping the same address makes the recon call go more smoothly as I don’t have to explain my life story and it saves me from having the USPS forward my mail all over. The problem with this strategy is getting the card from them to me. They aren’t huge fans of the points game so asking for assistance is something I try to avoid. To combat this, I call the bank (after I’m begrudgingly informed by said parents that another card has arrived) and request that the card is via overnight courier.
To do this, I first have to get through the automated phone system which is especially bad for Citi which repeatedly asks, “What’s your credit card number?” From there, I’m asked by the agent for the full credit card number which I do not have before being transferred to the fraud department to verify it is indeed me. After being transferred back to customer service, the agent will try to charge $6 to have the card expedited, something that only a pushover would pay. Then within one day the new, shiny card will finally arrive which is when I have to figure out how to hit the mins.
One strategy for hitting those mins is to assemble a team of spenders, something my parents agreed to for a few weeks only to quickly change their tune, believing that the points hustle was borderline illegal. They quickly cut up their authorized cards. There are a few people in this world that you may be able to convince to help you, but that presents another problem. Without the full credit card number, banks are reluctant to send cards to authorized users at a different address than the billing address. The only workaround is to have the original card sent to your current location, activate it, then ask for another card to be sent overnight, at no fee of course, to the authorized user. When the authorized user does go to make a purchase in the third location, expect that the transaction will be flagged for fraud. Looks like, it’s back to calling the automated phone system.
If you’re nomading your way throughout the US then it may be worth the headache of putting the address of the current place you lay your head when you apply and endure the recon questions to avoid the alternative. If you’re living overseas, then this hassle is part of the process. Recall, the reward for this trouble is that baller lifestyle.
This is a constant battle for me. My parents want nothing to do with it, so I have a mail service with a physical U.S. address. I have everything sent there and then forwarded to me wherever I am. It takes 2-3x longer, but is more reliable and takes some of the guessing out. The problem is that most banks have caught wind of this service and now flag it as a non-legitimate address, so I have to call in every single time I open a card or bank account, and usually have to end up providing my parent’s address as secondary verification.Frustrating, but worth it.
You would think with apple pay and mobile pay that they could just send the card virtually and securely.