Annual Credit for Amex Platinum + Free AU for Maintaining a Morgan Stanley CashPlus Account

By | May 19, 2021 10:03 am EST

The Morgan Stanley (MS) Platinum CashPlus account offers a $550 Annual Engagement Bonus to cover the entire annual fee of a Morgan Stanley Platinum Amex Card. The MS Platinum Card has all the features of a vanilla Platinum Card ($200 annual airline credit, lounge access, etc)
To avoid the fees on the CashPlus account ($45/month) you have to have

  • $25000 average daily balance
  • $5000 Monthly Deposits (Doesn’t have to be net, you can just transfer in/out this amount )
  • Active Morgan Stanley Investment Account (easiest is Access Investing with initial $5k minimum, sadly E-Trade accounts don’t count)

To obtain this deal

  1. Open and fund an Access Investment Account
  2. Open and fund your CashPlus account (I did this over the phone the day after opening my access account)
  3. Within the CashPlus account, follow the link and apply for the Amex Platinum
  4. Spend at least $1000 on the Amex to keep the engagement bonus tax free

In addition the current sign up bonys for the Amex is 60k points after 5k spend, not the best but also no annual fee!
While this seems like some work, that’s a 2.2% return on the cash tax free. Further sweetened if you can take advantage of the authorized user (AU) and any other deals (e.g., $30 monthly PayPal credit, $15 monthly Uber credit etc). This is part of my emergency fund so investments in the market are out of the question. Account is FDIC insured.
The Access Investing account has an annual 0.3% fee (So ~$15 a year).
Morgan Stanley defines monthly deposits to include payroll, social security, Zelle, mobile check deposits, wires and any external transfers, so that requirement should be fairly easy to meet. Plus, any amount of social security benefits deposited each month will waive the $5,000 monthly deposit requirement.

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