Chase is Officially No Longer in the InACents Wallet

Last night I decided to call up old Chase to close down the last of my cards with them, the United Business card. I once opened that card to help fund our way to Hawaii. However, the $95 annual fee hit the bill this month. So I wanted to see what options Chase would present.

A quick call ended up closing the account in about two minutes. No fight to keep my business and the account open. I even questioned the agent, who said they were not allowed to manually override the annual fee any longer as it would automatically close the account. I even questioned Chase whether they were willing to offer me miles to keep my business. Unfortunately, no go. I was rather surprised, and while my agent was friendly, maybe she was misinformed and it was not a typical experience.

All-in-all, I am not too depressed at the loss of Chase from my wallet. I have gone around and around in my head about whether to post this, but in the act of transparency, I need to disclose what transpired over the summer.

When I began down the journey of blogging, I was fascinated by finance and travel as topics. I started the InACents blog as a hobby. Heck, even the fact that I chose to work on InACents amoung the couple dozen website domains I own was a complete act of randomness. I had no idea what InACents would become, or what I would even write about.

As I continued to work day in and day out on the site, I began to love blogging. So much so that we have been working harder and harder each day to stand out in the crowd, and hopefully someday help me leave my corporate career that I hate so much.

At the beginning, I knew very little, if anything, about affiliate programs. Over time, as we began to monetize the site, we started to learn about affiliate programs and the products we could offer to our readers, while first hand experiencing the merchants products.

That is where credit cards fit a perfect piece of the InACents puzzle, straddling both our finance and travel topics. So we worked with an affiliate company to be able to offer Discover, American Express, and lastly Chase products to our readers. Our family carried all three of the company’s credit cards in our wallets and used them on a daily basis, promoting the pros and cons of each card, and discussing how we are able to utilize the mileage and point programs to travel for close to free.

We began slowly incorporating the credit card companies products into the blog, building up a relationship with our audience on the cards offered. While InACents may not be a big player in the realm of credit card referrals, our site actively promotes the card company’s products and make sales each and every month.

There is an important point to make though. I did not want InACents to become a credit card pushing website, throwing it in the audiences face in each and every post. I do not mind putting the latest and greatest credit card information out there for our audience to know, but I did not want InACents to become like most of the other travel hacking websites. No offense to the other mileage blogs, many that came along even after us, but they are non-stop whores to the credit card companies. While it is their full-time jobs for many of them, it also became apparent who runs the show. The downside to that philosophy is less income for InACents, but at the same time, it maintains a certain level of diversification on the site. Travel is not all about the accumulation of miles and points, but about the experiences they create.

Over the summer it became all too apparent to me why other travel blogs are pushing credit cards in each and every post. I was totally caught me off guard when I received a message from our affiliate company that our relationship with Chase was being discontinued due to being a low volume affiliate. What a kick in the pants! What does that mean? People use our links to apply for Chase credit cards each and every month.

I began to wonder how this came about and where did the communication fall through. Almost all of the blame I push onto my affiliate company. My affiliate manager never told me, at any point in our relationship, that Chase, and even the other card issuers, were setting thresholds that they wanted us affiliates to maintain. That means that Chase was no longer happy with affiliates selling a handful of credit cards each month. Chase wanted higher numbers of new applications. Now that explains why other bloggers are constantly pushing credit cards in everyone’s face.

Now keep in mind, the bloggers, me included, get paid nicely in most cases to promote credit cards. At the same time though, Chase is the cause of the problem by setting minimum sales standards.

The things that really bother me are:

1) InACents consistently sold Chase products each and every month. That is why we gave a tremendous amount of thanks to those readers that chose to utilize our links to apply for credit cards. While I can not disclose specifics, the number of sales was significant to the operation of this website, allowing us to develop the site further.
2) Chase (or my affiliate manager) gave absolutely no notification of this new threshold that affiliates had to meet. No warnings, or friendly emails stating we would like more sales. Just a simple email saying our relationship is over. Where was the thank you for selling their product for several months?

So now all of a sudden, a third of InACents credit card affiliate partners says goodbye. It really bothered me, after putting in so much time and effort promoting the Chase products, and using them firsthand, that they can decide to call it quits because I am not meeting a sales volume. How is someone supposed to build a brand if you do not encourage your affiliates to thrive? We all have to start at the bottom and work our way up.

The whole thing stinks of greed, and will make the rich bloggers richer and give the start-ups no chance at success. Building a brand, and gaining traffic takes time. I can not fully blame other bloggers, but put most of the blame on the greed at Chase to push people to sell their products to a higher level. A handful of sales is better than no sales.

I can not fully understand why companies would not want people to promote their products. Especially if those affiliates are making you a sale.

Some may say, well you are missing out on lots of great offers to fund travel. True and acknowledged. I am not saying we will not open up another Chase card should a great offer come along. However, everyone needs to realize the greed Chase is pushing on their affiliates to sell, sell, sell. I understand promoting and encouraging more sales, but to punish those that do not sell enough is wrong in my opinion.

On a related note, I had to laugh when I recently read Mr. Money Mustache’s account of saying so long to Chase. Slightly different situation than ours, but still good to see others sticking it to Chase in the end.

So to our loyal, and new readers. Know that InACents will not become like the other travel hacking blogs. We will not consistently push credit cards in each and every post. As information is released, or deleted, we will still promote the existing relationships we have with Discover and AMEX, but we will continue to maintain a balance so as not to flood the site with credit cards and become the card issuers puppets. Once Chase learns not to bite the hand that feeds them, maybe we will consider adding them back into our lineup at a future date.

Save Money, Travel More!