Month: April 2023

[The normal post routine is taking a break today but will be back tomorrow]

I’ve had a few of you reach out to let me know that older content on the site isn’t displaying properly. I’ve done plenty of digging and it looks like all of the posts prior to March 29 have the same content in the WordPress database, which means that currently all of the content is lost on the MEAB server. A few notes:

  • Apparently it’s been gradually happening for a while and getting worse slowly
  • Apparently until recently if you reloaded the page the right content would show up (but no longer)

Like any good techie, I’ve got backups of the server and database, but unfortunately backups happen on Mondays and I only retain the most recent three so the backups don’t really help here. I have a hunch about what caused the issue (a plugin for content caching) and I’ve disabled it, but I can’t say for certain that the cause of the issue is fixed.

What does all of this mean for old MEAB content?

Well, it’s all still out there in Google’s cache or as emailed newsletters, so I think I can slowly put it back in place. In the mean time though, this site gets really boring before March 29 (or, it’s transformed from the site of just another blogger where every article sounds the same to the site of just another blogger where every article is the same).

If you have particular articles you’d like restored more quickly, email me a quick note and I’ll do my best. Have a nice Tuesday friends!

Pictured: MEAB trying to work on the site’s database.

  1. Even though it started a few weeks ago, I think I only realized yesterday that we’ve apparently all agreed that there’s a new, fifth season of the year (“no-feepril”) in which office supply chains across the US take turns offering fee-free or below cost Visa or Mastercards every week throughout the season.

    Office Depot / OfficeMax drew the short straw this week and has a sale for $15 off of $300 or more in Visa gift cards through Saturday. To maximize the deal:

    – Link your cards to Dosh
    – Look for a Chase offer for 10% back at Office Depot / OfficeMax
    – Try for multiple transactions, back to back
    – Buy the grocery, fuel, or dining everywhere varieties for lower fees

    These are Pathward gift cards but there are still plenty of ways to liquidate them both online and in person. If you don’t have a few ways it’s time to get out there and look.
  2. A public link for the Chase Marriott Bonvoy Boundless card with a bonus of five free night certificates worth up to 50,000 points per night after $5,000 in spend in three months has surfaced. The card has an annual fee of $95, and is probably the best deal you’re going to find with Marriott. A few notes:

    – You’re still going to pay for parking and resort fees with these, because Marriott
    – If a property costs more than 50,000 points per night, you can use up to 15k award points too
    – The certificates expire after one year

    I’m famously a Marriott Bonvoy super-critic, but even I’d go for this offer if I was below 5/24.
  3. Finally, let me offer some unsolicited American Express advice for those of you with with big negative balances because reasons:

    Always keep your balances as close to $0 as possible at the end of every banking day to avoid financial reviews or problems with the risk department. This applies as equally to negative balances as it does to positive balances.

Good luck and happy Monday!

Obscure fact: Sometimes Bonvoy and Office Depot/OfficeMax team up. This is the result.

The unofficial slogan at MEAB is “always be probing“ because often the best deals for churning, manufactured spend, and travel hacking are those that you discover and no one else knows anything about. That said, there’s plenty of merit in “teamwork makes the dream work” in this hobby and its important to balance both strategies.

To me, balance means working in the hobby individually, but also in functional groups. Specifically, I segment all of my reading and learning in to one of a few buckets:

  • A very small group of close friends in the hobby with similar skill levels
  • A medium size group of similar interests
  • Specific topic groups (ex. Fluz, award redemption, bank bonuses)
  • Individual reading (this blog I guess?)

Each and every one of these buckets has upped my game and continues to do so; I learn important information, discover new deals, and get new ideas essentially every day.

My suggestion for you: If you don’t have something for each of the above buckets, find a way to remedy that; it’ll almost certainly up your game. If you’re not sure where to look, ask someone in the hobby or start with a basic group and network your way into small, medium, or topic specific groups from there. Good groups can be found on Facebook, Telegram, WhatsApp, online forums, slack, and discord.

Have a nice weekend and fill those buckets!

There’s more than one way to fill a bucket.

  1. SoFi has a $600 bonus for taking out a personal loan. You can pay these off quickly and if you’re swanky you can probably churn them too. Referrals are a thing with SoFi loans but the referral is split at $300 for the referrer and $300 for the referred (which may still be a good deal based on the 1099-MISC language in the bonus terms and conditions). (Thanks to DoC)
  2. Do this now: Register for Best Western’s Q2 promo, 2,000 bonus points per award stay through September 4. Do this later: Cry if your best option was a Best Western.
  3. Simon’s online bulk site has 35% off of Visa and Mastercard purchase fees with promo code APR23FLASH35 through April 16. Most of these are Pathward gift cards so have a liquidation plan in place before you go as big on these as the atmospheric rivers went on Northern California.
  4. FQF reminds us about how Just4U rewards from Albertsons/Safeway/Vons stores can be redeemed for Alaska Airlines miles when you set your preferred store location to one in Alaska.

A travel hacker preparing for going big on Pathward by going big on their lawn.

Introduction

“Oh joy, another ChatGPT blah blah blah post,” you say? No, I’m not going to write yet another “how to master ChatGPT for to increase your [manufactured spend] game to seven figures!!” post. Those suck for a few reasons:

Leveling Up

Instead, here are a few ways that AI chatbots have helped me up my game, even if we’re not looking at a seven figure enhancement:

  • Bing bot: Good for aggregating data scraping searches, but often it needs plenty of refinement
    • “Can you help me find a Mastercard not issued by a big bank like Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, or Citi that offers rewards and bonuses in certain categories?” (you’ll probably need to go back and forth a few times to really get what you want
    • “Where can I find average interchange rates for grocery stores?”
  • ChatGPT: Good for decoding items in your browser’s network inspector and for coming up with reasons for dealing with a bank fraud specialist
    • “Chase’s website gave me the following blob when I looked at a charge, can you help me find interesting and significant fields: {“mcc”: “7995”,”timestamp”:”…”}”
    • “What are some reasons that legitimate businesses may purchase a large number of gift cards?”
    • “Wii you suggest a good spreadsheet template for keeping track of credit card churning and help me write some alarm functions for when I need to take action?”
  • Google Bard: I’m still trying to decide which things make Bard excel, but I’ve come up dry. It’s definitely the most hallucinogenic of the major bots, so I guess that’s something:
    • “What major travel bloggers have been accused of heavy drug use?” – it never answers this in a way that I expect
    • “How is Walmart useful for manufactured spend?” – apparently you can buy money orders with a credit card at Walmart. Capital job Bard!

Summary

Now, I was being lazy when I wrote this and didn’t write a summary, so instead I pasted everything above this line into ChatGPT and asked for a funny ending. I’d give it a 3/10, what do you think?

In conclusion, if you’re tired of the same old “how to master ChatGPT” posts, give these unconventional AI chatbot tricks a try – who knows what you might discover (or hallucinate)!

Happy Wednesday!

Stable Diffusion’s generated image for “A photorealistic render of Google Bard”. If nothing else, it does indeed look hallucinogenicy.

  1. Two more airlines have joined the shopping portal bonus bandwagon for Easter(ish):

    – Alaska MileagePlan: Spend $100 by April 17 and earn 500 miles
    – United MileagePlus: Spend $100 by April 16 and earn 500 miles

    Still no giftcards.com, so Saks or Dell may be your best option for a quick mileage grab.
  2. The American Express Platinum card has an increased referral bonus for the referred:

    – 150,000 Membership Rewards after spending $6,000 in six months
    – $200 statement credit after spending at least $200 in the first three months

    Of course, the referrer should ideally refer from a personal Gold or similar for a bonus +5x at grocery on $25,000 in spend in addition to the referral bonus of 15,000-35,000 Membership Rewards.
  3. Now that ZIRP is a fading memory, earning reasonable interest rates on cash is much easier than it used to be and now largely available to any sized balance. There are now two banks that offer 5.02% savings rates nationwide and may be worth moving to as hub banks for manufactured spend (but not necessarily for money order deposits):

    – UFB Direct
    – CFG Bank

    Making one of these banks your hub could easily net you a few grand if you’ve got six figures on average flying around out there. Happy hunting! (Thanks to DDG)
  4. Office Depot / OfficeMax has $15 off of $300 or more in Mastercard gift cards through Saturday. Good things have been known happen if you scale this one in the right way, and always remember:

    – Try for multiple transactions back-to-back
    – Link each of your cards to Dosh

    These are Pathward gift cards so have a liquidation plan in place.

Commemorative mug not included, but at 5.02% you can get yourself one.

  1. Chase began shutting down entire account portfolios for big users of the Aeroplan Pay Yourself Back feature late last week. It seems like the common trigger wasn’t necessarily cashing out third party miles, but instead going well into six figures of miles cashed out or beyond. Chase previously communicated that cash-outs were unlimited in 2023 and would be limited to 50,000 points a year in 2024, but clearly unlimited doesn’t actually mean unlimited.

    I’d suggest pushing hard on this one if you’re caught up in a shutdown, but what do I know?
  2. Meijer (pronounced “major”, duh) has one of its best specials running in stores through Saturday: $10 off of $150 or more in Mastercard gift cards (pronounced “free money”, duh). This one is a digital coupon. Sometimes you can reclip the coupon after using it once on the same MPerks account, and sometimes you’ve got to scale with multiple accounts. (Thanks to GCG)
  3. Meijer also has a promotion for $7.50 in points with the purchase of $50 or more in Happy, Choice, or One4All gift cards. The best manufactured spend option here is to convert to Home Depot gift cards and resell for around 89%, or you can convert to Southwest for your own travel if that’s what you’re in to. This one definitely has to be scaled with multiple MPerks accounts (pronounced “possibly too much effort to scale”).
  4. Citi has updated its standard language along with a new 75,000 point sign-up bonus on the Premier card. The new language: “Bonus ThankYou® Points are not available if you have received a new account bonus for a Citi Premier account in the past 48 months.” So watch out if this one’s on your radar, and also don’t forget about the Citi Double Dip with these bonuses after 48 months. (Thanks to FM)

AT&T after telling their customers that unlimited doesn’t actually mean unlimited. Next up, Chase?

  1. United has a new iteration of the MileagePlay quarterly promotion, registration required and offers vary.

    My promotion was book and fly at least three $175 trips in the next 60 days for 8,700 MileagePlus miles. That’s a solid 2 out of 10 in my scoring book which is on par for United.
  2. Do this now: Register for Radisson Rewards Q2 promo for 5,000 bonus points per stay through June 30.
  3. Spirit Airlines has a status match promotion that costs $99 for the privilege of matching. The status is good for 12 months, and will get you a free carry-on and free checked bag, a free change once per itinerary, better seating, and a snack and drink on each flight.

    At least you won’t be flying Southwest? (Ok, I’m mostly kidding, but I’d take a Spirit Big Front Seat over a Southwest flight, which isn’t complimentary in the match.)
  4. There’s a $600 personal checking sign-up bonus with US Bank for accounts opened by April 11 using promo code 2023MAR. To qualify, you need $10,000 in direct deposits or “direct deposits” spread out over 90 days.

    Everyone’s going to tell you that you also need to be in US Bank’s footprint to qualify, but that’s a half truth at best. If you’re not in their footprint, open a brokerage account, wait a couple of days, then apply for the checking account to bypass the footprint requirement. (Thanks to FM)
  5. The Citi AA Platinum Select credit card has a really good sign-up bonus through :

    – 75,000 AA miles after $3,500 in purchases in four months
    – No annual fee for the first year, $99 after

    If you were banned by Toby you can probably still get back in and get this bonus, just use a new address, a slight name variation, and a new phone number. Also, get a PreCheck number and use that if you had Global Entry when shutdown, or vice-versa.
  6. AA’s eshopping portal has a bonus 500 miles with $200 or more in cumulative spend through April 10. I just checked and there’s breaking news: giftcards.com is still absent from the portal.

United’s demonstrating it’s consistent 2 out of 10: The lowrider hydraulic Boeing.