Cashing out the ABG Squarespace credit.

The Amex Business Gold (ABG) comes with a Squarespace statement credit. If you don't need a website, you can still turn that credit into cash by buying a refundable domain, letting the credit post, and then canceling the domain.

Here's the shape of it:

• Buy a domain on Squarespace, adding enough extra years to push the charge over $150. That clears the threshold for the full credit.
• Wait 24 to 48 hours, then cancel the domain. The waiting isn't strictly necessary, but I do it to be sure the charge and the credit have both posted. Don't go past 72 hours: after that the domain is non-refundable and you're stuck with it.
• Bank the credit. Squarespace refunds the domain, and the statement credit stays put.

A couple of notes from testing:

• The charges refund separately, one per transaction. Even if you put the domain on one card and the extra years on another, each piece refunds on its own, so there's no way to break the correlation between them.
• As of now, Amex isn't clawing back this credit after the refund.

The honest caveat: this is exactly the pattern Amex watches for. "As of now" is carrying the whole sentence. Amex has a long history of clawing back credits and closing accounts over manufactured spend and credit cycling, and when they decide to act, they tend to take the entire relationship with them. Treat anything you bank this way as borrowed until enough time has passed that a clawback would be a surprise.