That black beauty right there is the American Express Black Centurion Card. To make them, American Express harvested the cores of ten black holes and pressed them into little cards of pure consumerism-fueled spending bliss (hush all you physicists).

Want one? You’ll need $5,000 up front to pay for it, followed by $2500 a year in annual fees, plus a minimum spend of $250,000 a year. That’s right. A quarter of a million bucks. Whoo hooo, that’s some serious cash. But look at all the cool features of the American Express Centurion card! (a very extensive review of the AMEX Black by social marketing maven Neil Patel)

If that’s a little too rich for your blood, plenty of other companies are offering affluent banking services:

HSBC Premier

From Wikipedia:

HSBC Premier is the group’s premium financial services product. The exact benefits and qualification criteria vary depending on country, but typically require deposits and investments of at least $100,000, £50,000, or €100,000, or a mortgage of at least $500,000 or £250,000. Customers have a dedicated relationship manager, global 24 hour access to call centres and preferential rates.

Citi Chairman’s Card

This card doesn’t have any application requirements but the $500 annual fee is going to weed out its fair share of applicants. What do you get for five hundred bones a year?

• 24/7 concierge to assist you with hotel, car & dinner reservations, vacation planning & gift ideas
• Annual membership to Priority Pass Airport Lounge
• VIP upgrades & savings at leading hotels. Plus, the benefits of a Hilton HHonors® Gold VIP member
• Private jet services & chartered flight access from providers such as Marquis Jet
• Access to exclusive VIP offers & discounts
• Extraordinary travel benefits, unexpected rewards & personalized service

CitiGold

According to their FAQ, the membership requirements are “$100,000 or more in combined monthly balances, including eligible deposit, credit, investment and retirement products; OR $250,000 or more in combined monthly balances if your first mortgage is linked.” You have six months to reach that level, if you don’t you are subjected to account maintenance fees ($25/mo.). CitiGold also has a CitiGold Select if you have $500,000 in combined assets.

Other perks? If you’re traveling, you get access to CitiGold centers worldwide, which include phones, faxes, and meeting rooms. During an emergency, you can get up to $2,000 from your accounts within 30 minutes, preferential foreign exchange rates, and you can collect call CitiGold customer service.

Bank of America Accolades Card

Bank of America didn’t want to be left out of the affluent banking party and recently began offering their own version of the Black AMEX and calling it the Bank of America Accolades Card. It’s a Bank of America-American Express co-branded card and details of the program are still sketchy, despite it’s announcement a year ago. The “bar” for getting the card appears to be like the other affluent banking cards, $100,000 in assets invested ($295 annual fee is waived).

Forbes has a list of other affluent banking cards.

Forbes produced another list of the best home renovations/improvements in terms of their resale value and I thought it would be interesting to compare this list to lists I’ve seen, and blogged about, in the past. With all of these I looked only at the National Average values, since that’s what I’ve always looked at, and tried to pair them up with comparable renovations in past lists. The data they used is from Remodeling magazine’s yearly assessment/survey/magic but one of the lists I used was from a handyman-type site and not a magazine about remodeling.

Overall, Remodeling Magazine makes it sound like a lot of the renovations you make hold a lot of its material and labor value whereas the handyman site doesn’t paint as rosy of a picture. I’m inclined to believe that Remodeling magazine is at least somewhat biased, knowing nothing about it except that it likely sells advertising space to businesses in the remodeling industry, so I’d mark down their resale values a little bit. From a buyer’s perspective, which I was a year ago, I do know that more bedrooms and bathrooms the better (to a point, I’m only one person… I don’t need 8 bathrooms, I don’t even have 8 friends) but a renovated home office means nothing to me. So again, as I approached the other list, I believe the relative rankings of renovation value retention is likely correct though the actual values are subject to a multitude of factors a simple study can’t capture.

The comparative table is available after the jump. (oh, and if you’re going to replace your windows, you might be able to get a tax credit for it because of the latest energy bill)
(read full article…)

Everyone loves a good rant. Got some awful service down at Baskin & Robbins? Let the whole world know! Microsoft Windows just crashed on you again? Scream at the top of your lungs! Well, enter the Internet, the information SUPERHighway. You can complain, rant, rave, moan, bitch, scream and belittle to your hearts content…

Forbes ran a story on the top ten nine (apparently one dropped off the face of the Earth after the article printed) Corporate Hate Websites and a little blurb on each of them. The best part is that it rates the “hostility level” and “entertainment value” of each one (not they they tell us how they score it but I doubt that really matters in such a scientific study). Enjoy!.

http://www.kbhomesucks.com

http://www.paypalsucks.com

http://www.allstateinsurancesucks.com

http://www.ms-eradication.org

http://www.amexsux.com

http://www.walmart-blows.com

http://www.verizonpathetic.com

http://www.untied.com

http://www.unitedpackagesmashers.com

Honorable Mentions:

http://www.dontflycontinentalairlines.com (5/10/06: No longer exists)

http://www.fordlemon.com