Credit cards that cancel your bill if it’s too small.

I ran across an interesting discussion on FW about credit card issuers that cancel your bill if the amount is small because the cost to them to process the bill would be greater than collecting it so they “forgive” the amount.

Here’s a list of issuers that canceled and what amounts they canceled at:
Advanta canceled at $1.00
Capital One canceled at $0.99/$1.00
Chase canceled at $1.99
Chase Amazon canceled at $1.98
Chase Cash Rewards Plus canceled at $1.97
Chase Plat MC canceled at $1.98
Providian/Wamu canceled at $1.00
Sears MC (by Citi) canceled a $5.00 balance
USAA canceled $0.99
Wells Fargo canceled $1.99

The list above is amounts reported by users of amounts that were canceled on their statement. Note: these amounts are for your entire statement balance, not a single charge (trust me, I had to clarify this, I get a lot of dumb e-mails regularly).

I have the Chase Cash Rewards Plus Card and I haven’t used it once this period so what I did was prepay $1.97 into my eBay account for any future seller fees I might incur.

This isn’t a get rich quick scheme or a huge exploit. This is information I found useful and entertaining so I thought I’d share it. Useful how? If you have cards that you rarely use but want to keep open and they’re one of the select that cancel your bill if it’s small, you get to keep your card active at no additional cost and get a free hamburger or whatnot out of it (possible ever since credit cards penetrated the fast food industry).