End of Most Serve Credit Card Loads
Last month I broke the story about the end of non-Amex credit card loads to the Serve card. In case you missed it, you will no longer be able to load the American Express Serve card with a Visa or Mastercard after April 15, 2015.
Before this change you could load $1,000 per month ($1,500 for the Softcard versions). I know a lot of people used the online credit card loads to generate free miles and/or cash back. While this is technically the end of these loads, there are still a couple of options for making this benefit of the Serve card work for you.
Third Party American Express Card
American Express issued cards will continue to work to load the Serve card online after tomorrow, but there is a catch. These loads don’t earn any rewards. Fortunately there is a small loophole of sorts.
Many other banks also issue American Express cards. These third party cards have been known to earn rewards for Serve online loads in the past and they should continue to work after the upcoming change. One of the most popular is the Fidelity Amex which earns 2% cash back.
Set Up Scheduled Add for Your Current Visa/MC (May Not Work But Worth a Try!)
Serve’s website has a convenient section where you can schedule loads to the card. I theorize that you may be able to setup a “scheduled add” on your existing card and that the system may continue to carry it out after the deadline. (For full disclosure, Free-quent Flyer shared a similar idea via Twitter.)
For example I have the Softcard version of Serve which allows $1,500 in online credit card loads. I have scheduled weekly loads of $300 to start in May. Sure in most months it will only load $1,200 instead of the full $1,500, but I would prefer to use the card that is linked now as opposed to a 3rd party Amex Card. (For a regular Serve you could just set it up to do $200 weekly.)
Will This Work
I give this strategy a slightly less than 50% chance of working. With that said, since the card is already linked to my account and since the loads are already setup, in theory it could work. On the flip side, if it doesn’t work, then I spent a total of about 60 seconds setting everything up, so I am not at a huge loss.
Conclusion
Whether you follow these strategies or not, remember to complete your April Visa/MC credit card loads to Serve by tomorrow before the switchover. I have completed my loads for April and will be waiting with anticipation for May to see if this strategy has worked or not.
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Just a heads up rather than scheduling weekly you can do a couple monthly auto loads. I do $500 on the 1,2,3 of each month the auto load button disappers after you setup your first autoload but as long as you are already logged-in you can goto https://secure.serve.com/Account/ScheduleAutoAdd to add additional auto loads. Get it knocked out quickly with little pain and you don’t miss out on short months.
This was originally posted on a closed forum but I was the poster and per the rules there I can post it elsewhere. Feel free to share.
Why can’t you do a bi-weekly 750 to get the maximum 1500 for the month?
You could, but eventually it would hit a limit since you would have 3 loads in a month. The weekly $300 setup means it will never go over the max, but in reality doing the biweekly is probably fine since I doubt it will last long if at all.
Can I still load $1500 next month with the Softcard version of Serve?
Did you get the email? The email said that there will not be any automatic loads after April 16 and the card can no longer be used as a backup funding source. As to whether that will actually happen remains to be seen but Amex has gotten very good in the IT area of their cards so I would guess that it will not load.
Still, as you say, it loses nothing to try it!
I didn’t get an email. Thanks for sharing that Charlie. Based on what you have said then I agree it probably won’t work, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed!