CNB pools your household rewards even after you’ve unpooled

Chalk this one up to another stupid IT design by CNB. See, before they nerfed the airline credits, it made sense to have multiple primary CNB cards (maybe 2 was the max?) since you were making money off each primary card. That’s why I had 2 primaries in my name. Well after the new website design, they merged my 2 rewards accounts and pooled them into 1 household reward pool. This isn’t terrible if you plan on keeping both cards, but that makes no sense if you plan on cancelling at least one of them (which I planned to do.)

On one CNB card, I have about 180K points now and on the second card, I have 20K points. I called them about 2 months ago to un-pool the rewards. I then had to create a 2nd Rewards login for one of the cards. Everything was great! However, I didn’t redeem the 20K points immediately. Fast forward a month or two and those idiots at CNB re-pooled the points once again.

As a test, I had 200K points pooled. I went to redeem 18K worth of Amazon gift cards, and it seemed to take it out evenly between the 2 cards – meaning it took about 1/10th out of the 20K card and the other 9/10th out of the 200K point. This means I’d never be able to use up all 20K fast enough on card 1 to make it 0 and then close the card.

Lesson learned – if you have 2 CNBs and want to cancel one of them, make sure you call to un-pool and then liquidate those points ASAP before they get re-pooled.

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