– Synchrony will axe you if you cycle this thing, though it may take a few months – Categories on this card are weird, but typically weird good not weird bad – The targeted offer isn’t at Venmo.com
Your Venmo account will survive if your card is axed. Oh, and at the risk of taking more flak, the sites that “always show you the best offer” don’t seem to be showing this offer… yet?
The Bank of America personal Alaska Atmos cards have increased sign-up bonuses:
– Ascent: 85,000 miles after $4,500 spend in 120 days. – Summit: 100,000 miles after $6,000 spend in 90 days
Why no business? I’m not sure, wait for April 1 I guess.
These are Pathward / BlackHawk Network gift cards.
There are multiple reports that Cardless now allows holding three cards. You can’t get the Celtics card anymore, so just make sure you dial back that enthusiasm by 8x, or is it 6x?
Special thanks to Churnest Hemingway for today’s guest insightful guest post. Watch soon for his upcoming novel, The Old Man and the Fee.
When communicating with groups in person or online, one of the most important questions you can ask yourself is “Who’s in the room?” Knowing your audience and understanding their agenda (tip: it’s different than yours) should shape what you’re saying, and validate why you’re saying it at all.
This advice is also very relevant for communication about churning. Whether discussing a card benefit loophole or a foundational tool for manufactured spending, you should always stop to consider who is in the room before starting a conversation – lest you also start the death clock on the very play you’re hoping to discuss. We have seen this lack of discretion contribute to the demise of many joyful things in recent years, sometimes in conjunction with quantitative signals, sometimes not.
If you’re posting to reddit, commenting on a blog or video, or publishing content yourself, you can be confident that the marketing departments of major credit card issuers are reading what you’re putting out there. Marketers report up to other departments on product usage trends and the voice of their customer. If the voice of their customer is yapping about a loophole its not supposed to have, a feature its not using as intended, or anything else of benefit beyond what is advertised, you can be certain those goodies will be killed by product leadership sooner or later.
Similarly, when chatting or on the phone with your friendly customer service rep, you should be aware that everything you say is being logged and analyzed in dashboards, meetings, and meetings about dashboards. Just as with marketing departments, surges in specific topics or questions stick out on the radar like a sore thumb. Badgering a bank employee about a key account feature that was retired will not magically turn that feature back on. Over a hundred of these calls will raise the question of why this feature is suddenly in demand, and prompt further investigation of customers who still have skin in the game.
Sharing away from the corporate eye does not guarantee privacy, either. Smaller online communities have their own share of participants who repost tips and plays without adequately gut-checking what it means for the survival of what they’re sharing. Some of these are from well-meaning churners excited to share knowledge with their peers and build community. Less forgivably, lurking influencers capitalize on community content by monetizing it for ad-supported blogs and paid courses. This latter demographic is a scourge and the reason you should know the agenda of your peers.
Finally, a common thread between all three audiences is the new variable of AI analysis. Every reddit post, chat or call log, or private community message is now subject to any number of agents ingesting, synthesizing, and summarizing its content ad infinitum. Despite bank technology having a reputation for being old and brittle, it is simple enough to batch export data and analyze it with another application. Many churners also use these tools, undisclosed, in private communities to manage the firehose of information coming at them on a daily basis. Even if you’ve forgotten what you once posted way up in the scrollback, or are past the 90 day window of your visible Slack content, don’t worry – AI remembers, and will always remember. The act of listening has now been delegated to a technology that never sleeps. Proceed with caution.
A footnote: “X has already been shared by popularwebsite, so it doesn’t matter if I share it again” is not a good excuse for indiscretion. Visibility on a play doesn’t come from one leak, but repeated signals indicating its heat and significance. Even if a play has been shared that cannot be unshared, abstaining from a repeat broadcast is good practice for extending its lifespan and diminishing its significance to those who would treat it indelicately – or those who have the power to see it killed.
So, what should we do when we don’t know who to trust? Build trust. Know who’s in the room by getting in the actual room. Get on calls, show up at meetups, and build churning relationships that turn into churning friendships. Gracefully retract and delete overshares when other churners let you know you’ve gone too far, and give a polite nudge when you see someone else spill too much (escalate as necessary). Despite only knowing each other by first names at best, the amount of trust in our hobby is uniquely special, and the only thing that keeps it together.
– $1,500 (or $2,000) sign-up bonus after $50,000 spend in six months – $295 annual fee – 2% cash back everywhere, (except 5% on AmEx Travel flights and hotels) – Cash back is not convertible to Membership Rewards
If you don’t see the heightened bonus, try VPNs, incognito browsers, mobile, letting the application timeout and reload, or summoning SideShowBob233. This card replaces the infamous Plum card, also a charge card.
Two Incomm gift card sites have fee-free gift cards:
Clearly this is because of the lack of oil flow through the Strait of Hormuz.
Delta has an award sale to its Asian destinations, but especially Taiwan and Hong Kong, running through today. Economy flights are 30,000-50,000 miles round trip, and in theory there are sale Delta One fares but they’re not exactly widely available so I wasn’t able to verify pricing.
Bilt added Wyndham as a 1:1 transfer partner. In a sea of bad ideas in travel hacking, transferring more than a de minimus number of Bilt points to Wyndham is a shark sized bad-idea.
I’m an optimizer; frankly, I think most of us are or we wouldn’t be doing this on a day to day basis so I guess misery loves company, right? We’re all rather adept at optimizing credit card category spend multipliers, payment windows, new application timing, and new account bonuses.
Optimizations aren’t perfect though and it’s easy to get stuck in local minima. I regularly see newbies and experienced churners alike make an optimization mistake with their time: spending minutes or even hours chasing a deal that’s not worth very much. An extremely successful salesman once gave me some simple advice:
It takes about the same amount of time to do a small deal as it does to do a big deal.
The obvious lesson is to spend your time on bigger things instead of on smaller things. An alternative way to think about this is to consider the minimum you need to make for different manufactured spend and travel hacking opportunities, and don’t bother with the ones that don’t have a big enough return on time. To that end, I’d suggest having a mental set minimums, much like pilots have a set of weather minimums. In case you’re a visual learner, here’s a sample table that you can fill in for “fun”. For extra “fun”, compare with your neighbor:
Activity
Minimum Profit Needed ($)
Leaving home for in-person manufactured spend
Manufacturing spend at home (something quick)
Manufacturing spend at home (something less quick)
Calling customer service for a retention offer
Tracking a card linked offer over couple of months
The former is great for earning status, but be aware that too many cancels from GiftCards.com when shopping through the AA portal can get your AAdvantage account permanently closed (also known as with great power comes great responsibility, or something).
I’m not here to tell you what to do, but I’m happy to tell you that I transferred everything out of Future for now. You do you.
Southwest has 40% off of base fares with promo code BUZZER for travel booked by Thursday and flown between April 13 and June 11. Oh, did I hear you like blackout dates? Don’t worry, Southwest has you covered around major holidays and every single Sunday just to be annoying.
Happy Tuesday!
Southwest cuts pizza like this to be annoying too.
– Buy in even multiples of $300 – Look for the lower fee “Everywhere” cards if you know how to redeem them – Try for multiple transactions back-to-back
These are Pathward / BlackHawk Network gift cards.
In the early days of churning, there was a popular blog named Million Mile Secrets. It’s long gone now, at least inasmuch as it’s been effectively inactive since 2021 (and it was effectively useless years before that). There was a time, however, that the blog was great for newbies and also for bringing new voices into the community every week. At some point though it morphed into a churning reality TV show turned credit card article, and then just abruptly stopped. (Curious about the reality TV aspect? I guess google MMS Darius Emily or wait for the Netflix mini-series.)
It’s an interesting case study because from the site’s early days until it’s implosion, it went from having a codified rule saying they’d always present the best offer available card whether or not it paid them (they called it the mother-in-law rule and later mostly scrubbed that from the internet until only vestiges remained), and ended up as the kind of site that had 27 links to an affiliate Chase Sapphire Preferred link, all of which were worse than the publicly available bonus. Basically the site’s progression evolved like:
Always show the best offer
Hold off on posting about a best offer until an affiliate link comes in
Show an affiliate link, but note in small print that there’s a better offer elsewhere
Only show affiliate links, but tag some of them as best offer
On Monday night, the Chase IHG Business card released a highest ever 200,000 point sign-up bonus. Cool I guess, right? Yes, but that’s not the point. The point is that basically every big blog out there didn’t write about it until yesterday, even some of the “good ones”. Why did they wait until yesterday? I’ll give you a hint, it starts with an “a” and ends with “ffiliate link”. In other words, they’re on step (2) of the MMS playbook.
Now do I think the “good ones” are headed for step (3)? Generally speaking, no I don’t. But I do think you should know the motivations of the content you’re consuming, and you should know exactly how much your favorite affiliate blog is willing to withhold about a deal until they can be paid for it. But don’t take my word for it, it’s easy to go look around and see when your favorite sources wrote about the offer. For bonus points, check and see if they told you that the offer’s available via referral from P2 or another churner, or whether that’s a causal omission.
