How To Track Minimum Spend Requirements
As I am in the process of currently trying to meet the $5,000 Minimum Spend Requirement on my Starwood Preferred Guest American Express Card, I thought I’d share a few ways to monitor your Minimum Spend Requirement.
The simplest way is to obviously just track your Monthly Statements.
These days almost all Statements are available online, so even if you didn’t save your Monthly Statements, you are in luck.
Since it can be a huge pain tallying up every Monthly Statement, American Express has a nice feature that allows you to look at all transactions through a specific date range.
Simple go to the Statements & Activity tab and then enter the date range.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t remember the exact date you got your Card, because you can put in anything and it will show figure it out.
So in my case, I put down July, and my 1st recorded transaction was on August 17.
At the bottom of the page, you will find a summary of your transactions so far.
So in my case, in 3 months I have spent close to $4,000, so I only need another $1,000 to meet the Minimum Spend Requirement and get all my Starpoints!
Non-American Express Cards
For those of you that do not have American Express Cards, I’d suggest logging in online and seeing if your Credit Card offers a similar service.
I logged into Chase and it doesn’t seem like they have anything that allows you to view and sum all your transactions in 1 place which is kind of annoying.
Another idea would be to simply call your Credit Card Company and ask them how much you have spent on the Card since you got it.
Mint.Com
If any of those ideas above do not work, you can always use Mint.com to easily figure out your spending so far.
As I have talked about many times before, Mint.com is amazing and I can’t imagine what I would do without it.
It summarizes all of my Financial Accounts (Credit Cards, Student Loans, 401k, Brokerage Accounts, Bank Accounts, etc), all in 1 place, in real time.
I can tell you at this exact moment how much Cash I have, how much Debt I have, and how much all my Assets are worth.
Additionally it will email you reminders if you haven’t paid your bills.
If you haven’t yet signed up for Mint, I highly suggest it.
Anyways, once you are logged into Mint.com, simply go to the Trends tab.
Once you are there, click on the Category filter and pick out the Account you want to see.
For the time range, simply put All Time.
It will show you how much you have spent on the Card since you got it.
This can be quite scary if you click on a Credit Card that you have had for a long time and spent a lot of money on it, so prepare yourself!
Anyways, for my Starwood Card, it looks like this.
At the bottom is the Summary of total transaction.
Mint.com subtracts out any Credits you receive from Returns, and occasionally is a day or two behind in what you see on AmericanExpress.com, so that it why there is a discrepancy with the numbers.
Recap
Hopefully with these tips and tricks, you will know exactly how much money you have spent or need to spend on your new Credit Card to meet the Minimum Spend Requirement.
Remember that if you don’t meet the Minimum Spend Requirement, you will not get the bonus, so don’t just assume you have already met the Minimum Spend Requirement!
As always, if you need help meeting the Minimum Spend Requirement, you can always use Amazon Payments!
-Parag
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