A couple of days ago I had a conversation with a family member that went something like this:
MEAB (in jest): Do you want to write a guest post for my blog?
Family member: What kind of blog is it?
MEAB: A travel hacking blog.
Family member: Ok.
MEAB (falls to the ground, floored): ….
Well, my family member came through without any further prompting, and it’s oddly appropriate for today, the busiest travel day of the year. Please enjoy and we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow:
Top Things to NEVER Say in an Airport
I have a bomb in my bag.
I don’t have a bomb in my bag.
I will not say whether or not I have a bomb in my bag.
Please check my bag to see if it has a bomb in it.
Bomb
I was the one who shot and killed John F. Kennedy.
There is a fire in the theatre, run! (loudly)
My life insurance is banking on me dying on this plane.
My enemies are banking on me dying on this plane.
Please arrest me.
Please don’t arrest me for what you find in my bag.
I am being watched and followed the entire time I am here.
I will refuse to answer all questions you ask me.
I am here for revenge.
I am not mentally fit to be flying an airplane.
Many of my friends consider my political views particularly extreme.
I am aware about my past wrongdoing where I accidentally alluded to there being a bomb in my bag.
How far will this flight take me from the White House?
1. Hertz is extending elite status through June 2022, but only if you opt-in via a link they sent via email. In case you can’t find that message or it never made it, you can make your own opt-in link by replacing XXXXXXXX with your Hertz loyalty number and pasting it into a web-browser:
(Note for the tech-geeks out there: Yes, this URL’s query string doesn’t make sense, but that’s how Hertz sent it and it does work. Hertz generally has the dubious distinction of “Worse IT than Citi”, so at least it’s on-brand.)
2. Serve cards can again be loaded with debit cards fee-free at Family Dollar and Dollar General. I don’t really get involved with this one because there’s a limit of $500 per store per day and I’m nowhere near any of them. But it is a decent way to unload BlackHawk gift cards in a fee-free manner. Bonus: You can also pick-up some candy hearts from Valentine’s 2021 in case you’ve been missing them.
3. Most of the people that I chat with assume that the Rakuten’s only use is as shopping portal rebate, and while that’s partially true, there’s another play that’s been largely under the radar for several years: Rakuten’s in-store card linked program. Over the past several years there have been a handful of useful plays, but most of them dried up in early 2021.
Fast forward to late 2021 though and it looks like we might be returning to the good times, as Rakuten has added Staples as a partner for in-store purchases at 2.5%. It’s probably worth spending five minutes to link all of your Chase Ink cards to your Rakuten wallet. (Thanks to jerseyguy195 on reddit)
Update: Reader Tom wrote in to offer a warning that you could be shutdown as he was a few years ago if you push too much gift card volume through. YMMV.
4.Simon has 55% off of purchase fees for bulk Visa and Mastercard bulk gift card purchases using code NOV21JOY55. I guess for some of you it’ll pair well with item 2. Remember that American Express cards don’t earn points and purchases don’t count toward minimum spend at Simon.
Happy Tuesday!
Pick one of these beauties up while you’re reloading!
If you’re in the third party gift card resale game, online/retail arbitrage game (reselling stuff), and the buyers’ group game (buying stuff for someone else and getting paid for it), this week is likely to be one of the best for the entire year and today’s post will be a garbage-post for you — sorry.
If you’re not fully in one or more of these worlds though, this post is for you. I’d consider onboarding with the following platforms today to take advantage of the myriad Black Friday and Cyber Monday opportunities. (Note: I’m not endorsing any of these platforms, but they all are considered reputable within the community as a whole, YMMV.)
Good luck this week, and don’t sleep on this. With a bit of scale and hard work you could be looking at tens-of-thousands of dollars in manufactured spend time over the next several days.
The impact of today’s post: Either you’re holding bags full of money, or you’re holding the post in a plastic bag. There’s no middle ground.
American Express launches us into the weekend with some great Friday news:
1. If you were shutdown by American Express for the Adam debacle, you’ve got a good shot at getting your cards reinstated by calling the number on the back of your card and asking for reinstatement. A few details:
Accounts reinstated on or after November 1st have all remained open as far as I can tell (versus those reinstated before that date which were quickly closed)
American Express will charge you $25 per card reinstated
Offers remain attached to your reinstated accounts
YMMV on whether your points and cash-back are auto-reinstated
Not everyone is eligible for reinstatement
If I were shutdown and wanted to reopen cards with American Express, I’d be very selective about which cards to reopen. I may not want to reopen a card that was sitting in a sock-drawer and only open because of a sign-up bonus or retention offer, for example.
2. There are a few links for adding employee cards to your small business Green, Gold, or Platinum card, and while the offers vary, generally it looks something like 20,000 Membership Rewards for adding a new employee card and spending $4,000 in six months. You can do this with up to five employees for a total of 100,000 Membership Rewards points. You can check your offer here:
You may be able to earn 100,000 points for each business card in your portfolio, just split them off into their own login
Sometimes it’s helpful to have employees with names like yours, right junior?
You don’t actually have to provide a SSN or date of birth for an employee card, and they arrive in the mail pre-activated, in the same way that Spirit’s seats are pre-reclined
Always choose the no-annual fee green employee card, the offer will still work
Watch for Spirit’s newest two innovations in a post-“pre-reclined” world. First: punishment class (the middle rows), and second: lie-flatish small-business class.
I finally got a kick in the pants to write this post after Rocky emailed and asked why I keep talking about the Citi Shop Your Way Rewards card but haven’t ever posted any real information about it. Why haven’t I posted anything when I clearly love the card? Well, I guarantee you don’t want to know what’s going on inside my head at any given moment, so let’s skip the why and jump into the what. The what:
This no-annual fee card will pay you $700 or more a year, seemingly in perpetuity.
I think it’s obvious to about everyone in the known universe that if you could choose to earn ThankYou Points or Shop Your Way Rewards, you’d choose ThankYou Points. Unfortunately, the only way to get the ThankYou Point version of the card is to call in and ask to convert your Shop Your Way Rewards earning to a ThankYou Point earning version, but I haven’t heard of anyone having any success doing that since 2020. So, if you’re like me, you’re probably going to be stuck with the Shop Your Way Rewards version.
What do you do with Shop Your Way Rewards? You can redeem ten of them for a penny toward merchandise like toilet paper, iPads, or neoprene dumbbells at shopyourway.com, or you can cash them out for a gift card to resell. I definitely do the latter.
Value
Here’s why this card is really valuable: After you’ve had the card for two to three months and it’s been sock-drawered, you’ll start getting spending offers in your email inbox and those offers stack. And unlike everything else about Citi and Sears IT, they post automatically every-time. For example, I have the following spend offers all running concurrently and all from within the last 30 days:
$70 statement credit after spending $2,000 anywhere
10x points at Best Buy (lol) and home improvement stores up to $1,250 in spend
10% back in statement credits on utilities every month through January 2022 (min spend $400, max earn $50 per month)
All of these offers obviously pair really well together. For simplicity, I’ll buy 3x$500 BestBuy gift cards at BestBuy for resale and send a $500 “utility payment”. After those two transactions I’ll earn $120 in statement credits plus another $125 worth of Shop Your Way Rewards points, all from a no-annual fee card.
And while not all months have offers stack as nicely as this month, it happens a lot. A lot.
MS Hint: This card is like other Citi Mastercards in many ways, but it does a few things better than other Citi cards too so don’t forget to probe.
ZOMG Wha??
Circling back to the introduction: this no-annual fee card will pay you $700 or more a year through targeted spend offers. Why? The rumor I’ve heard is that the Sears Shop Your Way Rewards card is one of the most valuable cards in Citi’s portfolio because it’s typically held by older generations that grew up with Sears, and those cardholders typically carry a monthly balance which earns Citi plenty in interest and fees so they want to encourage more spending and bigger balances. The story sounds truthy, but I have no independent confirmation so let’s just call it a likely possibility.
How come you haven’t heard of this card before? Well I’m sure the main reason is Sears, though I don’t think it pays a commission to affiliates so there’s not a financial incentive to write about it. Finally, the Shop Your Way Rewards program isn’t exactly on-par with AAdvantage or Hyatt, so there’s that.
(Special thanks to Garth for introducing the card to me.)
What’s going on in my mind at any given moment: trying to get one of these stupid wheels to turn.
This time of year never disappoints with manufactured spend promotions. Here are a few to look at today:
1.Kroger is running a 4x fuel promotion on third party fixed value gift cards from today through December 7. Time to warm up those grocery store bonused credit cards.
2. The rumor that Sam’s club has started to pay out portal bonuses on gift card purchases again has been confirmed (at least for me). Time to warm up those warehouse club bonused cards and your Rakuten Visa, or take advantage of the 7 days remaining on the CashApp Sam’s boost.
4. If you have any non American Express issued AmEx cards, use this page to add an offer for $10 back on $10 or more in spend at small business, up to 5 times for a total of $50 back by December 31. I added the offer to my US Bank Flexperks AmEx and liquidated by buying five $10 gift cards at the local coffee shop.
Happy manufacturing!
Pictured: Retailers gearing up for black Friday. Not pictured: our giant manufactured spend robot that eats fastpitches for breakfast.
1. Meijer surprises with another 10% back on gift-cards as $5 in rewards for each $50 in gift card purchases, but it’s not like last week’s book-a-last-minute-ticket-to-the-Midwest sort of deal because: it’s not a straight cash discount, you’ll need to buy groceries to redeem, and the rewards expire. What you should know about this one:
You get the discount back as Meijer rewards to buy groceries
You can buy a single $500 gift card to max out the deal on an account
Some gift cards are excluded, but BestBuy isn’t one of them
You can (and should) have multiple Meijer accounts
The deal runs through December 11
2. Office Depot / OfficeMax doesn’t surprise with its $15 back on $300 or more in Visa gift cards deal. As with other iterations:
Link your credit card to Dosh for an extra $10 back per transaction — I use a new Dosh account for each Chase Ink card that I have
Try and get multiple transactions in a single trip
Buy the “everywhere” variety of cards for lower fees if you have a liquidation channel
3. Arizona friends: How does a credit card with no-annual fee and $2,000 back as a sign-up bonus sound? Zions bank has got it. The catch? You have to spend $50,000 within six months to earn it. Did I look into registering a business in Arizona to take advantage of this? You better believe it. Why do I keep asking questions? No idea.
4. The Point debit card has changed their referral sign-up bonus: Under the new structure you get the annual-fee back after spending $200, which isn’t as high as the bonus was in the early summer, but it’s a lower spending threshold then I’ve ever seen. This card is effectively a 2% cash back debit card through the end of the year (once you get the Visa version in the mail) and it’s easy to game. They also occasionally have boosted earnings at selected retailers.
Under the new program, the referrer gets to a code for a free-suitcase after five referrals, which is possibly the lamest bonus for the referrer that I’ve ever seen. My normal position is that you should use a friend’s referral link rather than one from some rando on the internet, but because your friend isn’t likely to earn a suitcase, the public sign-up offer is lower, and because I don’t want a suitcase, I’m willing to post my referral here in case you want to sign-up: Point debit card $99 back after spending $200.
Pictured: Your prize for pushing the Point debit card on unsuspecting friends.
Citi ThankYou points have long been the most average of bank transferrable currencies, with American Express’s Membership Rewards and Chase’s Ultimate Rewards being a tier or two above and Capital One being below. Citi has done a lot to up its game in the last 30 days, and it’s really due to two changes:
They made the transfer ratio from ThankYou Points to Choice Hotel Points 2:1 about a month ago, and while many of Choice’s brands are complete and utter dumpster fires, that’s not always the case. Many hotels in the Choice Ascend collection are rather nice, and occasionally you can book into a suite for the same redemption price as a normal room. Side note — I stayed at one over the weekend and got about 2.05 cents per ThankYou point versus the cash rate, which is in Hyatt territory for value per point. This worked especially well because I was in a smaller city that didn’t have any real Hyatt options but did have an Ascend hotel.
Yesterday, they added Wyndam as a 1:1 transfer partner. At first blush, that’s a big meh, but at second blush there’s a lot of value to be had here, thanks to the Wyndham relationship with Vacasa. (Vacasa is basically just another version of airbnb.) With Vacasa, the nightly rate is 15,000 points per bedroom in the unit, regardless of location or cash price. With strategic booking, Citi ThankYou Points can be used at a value of 2-4 cents per point on Vacasa properties. The bad news though? You have to book these over the phone.
Between the two new options you can find your way to getting 2-4 cents per point in value out of the ThankYou program, which means I’m much more interested in earning those points. Does this mean I like them more than Ultimate Rewards or Membership Rewards? No, I don’t — but I’m getting closer, and I no longer think of a ThankYou point as being roughly equivalent to a penny. Good show Citi, and your move, hotel transferless Capital One.
Now, let’s all say goodbye to calling Citi for a mortgage payment cash-out for a bank that mysteriously has the same name that you do.
Pictured: ThankYou Points September 2021 (left), and November 2021 (right). As good as my steel cut oats breakfast bowl? No, but getting better.
