Monday Kerfuffle

1. The Citi Shop Your Way Rewards card, a MEAB Unsung Hero, sent out targeted spending offers for Q4. Each of these offers is good once per month for October, November, and December:
   
   – $70 after $600 or more in gas, grocery, and restaurant spend
   – 10% back on between $600 and $700 or more in gas, grocery, and restaurant spend
   – 10% back on between $700 and $800 or more in gas, grocery, and restaurant spend
   – 15x ThankYou Points on $1,200 or more in gas, grocery, and restaurant spend
   – $200 after $1,200 or more in gas, grocery, and restaurant spend
   – $200 after $2,000 or mroe in gas, grocery, and restaurant spend
   
   For those who suck at math, the best of these offers is $600 over three months or 48,000 ThankYou Points over three months. This spend will stack with any other Shop Your Way offers linked to the card, because sometimes Citi’s IT isn’t completely broken and does something right. (Thanks to DC Domer, Ben, BB_Pcola, birt, FlashStash, and Adam)
   
2. There are two deals conspiring to make Virgin Atlantic booking really cheap, and a Delta or ANA award slightly cheaper:
   
   – Chase Ultimate Rewards has 30% transfer bonus from to Virgin Atlantic through November 15
   – Virgin Atlantic has 25% off of award flights on their metal for travel through the end of the year booked by tomorrow
   
   Virgin Atlantic has high fuel surcharges on their own flights to London-Heathrow, so I think of these as cash with a mileage surcharge tickets (“pay regular premium economy ticket prices, use a few miles, and get business upper class”) as opposed to the traditional milage with a cash surcharge ticket.
   
3. The United MileagePlus shopping portal has a 500 bonus miles promotion after $150 or more in spend through October 8. Yes, giftcards.com is on the United MileagePlus portal, why would you ask?
   
4. Chase’s Pay Yourself Back categories have been extended through December 31. If you’re not sure why anyone would ever do this, then perhaps you have more runway to earn points than you’ve previously considered. Yes, transferring to some programs or booking travel through the Chase portal can net you a higher return, but also there are only 365 hotel nights a year and a few dozen or so business class flights that you can reasonably fit into the same time period.
   
5. The Barclays AAdvantage Aviator Red card has a 75,000 AA miles sign-up bonus split into two parts:
   
   – 60,000 points for making a single purchase in 90 days
   – 15,000 additional points for adding and authorized user and making a single purchase in 90 days
   
   The $99 annual fee is not waived the first year. This card is also interesting because after you’ve put some decent spend on it, Barclays will typically let you product change to the AAdvantage Aviator Silver card which offers a credit for $25 per day in AA in-flight purchases and a companion pass that’s good for two companions.
   
6. Meijer has $10 off of $150 or more in Mastercard gift cards purchased in-store through Saturday. As usual, scale with multiple MPerks accounts, and consider travel to Meijer land if you’ve got the liquidation bandwidth to scale this deal.

The manufactured spend points earning runway is long, but not infinite.