Just before Christmas Eve I received an email from one of my readers who wanted to make sure that the American Express Simply Cash Business Card is a nice card and worth a hard inquiry. My reply was very simple—“This is one of my dream cards. You certainly should apply for this card! ”

According to the terms and conditions, you can:

Earn 5% Cash Back on gas, office supplies, and wireless services (3% from July 1, 2008)

Earn 1% Cash Back on virtually all other purchases

No limits to the Cash Back

you can earn 0% introductory APR on purchases for the first 12 months

Rebate will be awarded into your monthly statement every month
No annual fee

And here is a list of merchants which are in the above mentioned 5% category.

Office supplies: Staples, Office Depot, OfficeMax.

Wireless services: T-Mobile, Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, Alltel, etc

Gas stations: Shell, Mobil, Chevron, Hess, WaWa, Valero, BP, etc (Note: Wal-Mart, Meijier and other gas stations will not be included in 5% category.)

Here is the simple cash rebate estimator, and you can calculate how much cash back you can get from this card every month. Mine is about $12 every month.

One of my friends told me that he was trying to close the American Express business gold rewards card and was convinced to convert that card to this card. He said he was happy that they can do this. The only draw back is you can’t get sign-up bonus from this card. I remember that lots of friends jumped in the Business Gold Rewards card before Oct. 15, 2007. Because they will charge a $125 annual fee on that card, you might want to convert that card to this one. I can’t guarantee you can convert another business card to this card. But, at least, you can call them up and request them to do so.

How can you apply for a business card without a real business?

If you don’t have a business and want to apply for a business card for personal use, you can put Solo Proprietorship as the business type and your name as the busines title. You can use your personal SSN as ITIN. You can put $0 revenue and 0 years in business. It won’t affect your chance to get a business card (as a start up company). The credit card issuers will pull your personal credit report.