Author: matt

Let’s talk about making an easy $794 today, spread across a couple of deals:

Chase

A new link has surfaced for generating yourself a Chase Business $750 bonus code, this one is good through October 21 and requires $10,000 held in the account for 90 days. I really like this iteration of the bonus because there’s nothing in the Terms & Conditions about existing business accounts with Chase, so you can use an existing business and just open a new account for the bonus (provided that the business hasn’t had a checking bonus with Chase in the last two years).

If you’re not going to do this deal immediately I’d suggest generating yourself a bonus code now in case the offer disappears, then you can take advantage of it any time between now and October 21. Honestly this is probably going to be one of the easiest big bonuses you can earn this year, easy like lemon grass.

For those of you that don’t have a business, you can just open a Sole Proprietor account with an anticipated annual revenue of $0.00. That said, I’m not a CPA, lawyer, or otherwise qualified to offer anyone any type of advice so take that suggestion as a thought experiment.

Walgreens

Have you installed Google Pay yet? If not, I’d suggest it — my app on iOS is showing an offer for 20% back at Walgreens up to $50 (a total of $250 in spend for the non-math inclined). I’d buy a Visa or Mastercard, or a Home Depot gift card for resale in a pinch.

How do we make this better? For some of you, Walgreens is showing up in the American Express Shop Small tool. The Walgreens stores in my area aren’t showing up so I can’t directly test it, but almost certainly the 5x/10x/15x Shop Small will combine with the Google Pay $50 since the Google offer is linked to the card number and doesn’t require using your phone at checkout. After a Visa or Mastercard fee, you’ll have about $44 in your pocket and another 3,800 Membership Rewards at 15x.

My purchase of a Vanilla Visa tracked in the Google Pay app instantly after using my card in store, so no waiting on this one. That leaves you plenty of time to see what else you might be able to do in the way of MS at Walgreens while you’re there. Hint: the answer definitely isn’t “nothing”.

A lemon grass plant.
What makes lemon grass easy? I literally have no idea.

By now, I think you all know how I feel about the American Express Platinum changes, but in case you don’t the short overview is: “great for sign-up bonuses, awful for ongoing value.” Along with that mantra, there are a few things you should know about the American Express Platinum cards and maybe it’s time for you to consider going for a few of them for the sign-up bonuses or for the spend bonuses:

  • The Personal Platinum card has a 125,000 points offer with another 15x at restaurants or small businesses up to $25,000 in spend. I’d definitely use the AmEx Shop Small lookup tool to explore how to take advantage of this. Obviously if you can buy gift cards at a local “small business” grocery store you can easily make this a multiple thousand dollar card after maxing out your 15x capacity.
  • The Business Platinum card has a generic 150,000 points targeted offer that shows up sometimes in your “offers” section of the card. Login to American Express first, then click the link so you don’t have to hunt for the offer, it’ll tell you if you’re targeted or not.
  • The Brokerage Platinum cards from Morgan Stanley and Schwab both offer 100,000 Membership Rewards and 10x at restaurants and small businesses up to $25,000 in spend, in case you’re not eligible for the 15x offer you may still be eligible for one of these.
  • If none of those work for you, referring a friend or a P2 to a Platinum card will get you 5x at restaurants and small businesses up to $25,000 in spend, so there’s still a way to maximize the shop small ecosystem.

Now, how do you know if you’re eligible? Try and apply, and before submitting your final application you may get a pop-up window telling you that you may not be eligible because you’ve already had or you have the card. Or, you may get a pop-up telling you that due to your past relationship with American Express, you’re not eligible for the card. Here’s the thing though: If you get the first type of pop-up, you may still be eligible for the bonus. I’m not suggesting that you should do this, but recently people have been getting their bonuses despite getting the first type of pop-up during application (definitely only the first type). If you’re gutsy and you want that 5x/10x/15x shop small spend really badly like me, you may consider it worth the risk to try anyway.

Unrelated: Yesterday my table showing cost per points for portal bonuses didn’t take shipping into account. I’ve updated that so please take another look, and thanks again to Miles for letting me know. The punchline is that Southwest miles can be had for 0.777 cents per mile, United for 0.639 cents per mile, and Alaska for 0.816 cents per mile. I’m a buyer for Southwest and Alaska at those prices, I have too many United miles though to care.

A framed blackboard displaying the words "Small Business".
If I put one of these signs up by the register, will it count?

Let’s chat about bonus miles today with an eye toward gaming the airline mileage programs:

1. Public links are floating around for no lifetime language (NLL), high offer American Express Delta credit cards. You can probably get one to appear yourself by logging into your SkyMiles account and going through the process of booking a paid ticket; you’ll see on offer the last page before paying. In case that’s a lot of work for you, a public landing page has surfaced to check eligibility and skip the dummy booking: Click here and enter your SkyMiles number and last name to check for your account(s). These offers include a statement credit for spending on Delta too. (Thanks to DoC for the link)

Don’t forget that American Express currently has a five credit card limit (not to be confused with the ten charge card limit for cards like the Green, Gold, Platinum, or Centurion cards, they don’t count for this). People have played games to get around the credit card limit in the past, but I’m not one of them.

2. Another round of shopping portal bonuses has surfaced, and Alaska, United, and Southwest are all playing. In case you want to the play the game and win, Visa or Mastercards from Giftcards.com are usually the easiest way to knock these out without really buying stuff; of course the virtual variants work too but come with slightly higher fees.

To save you time, I’ve calculated how much it’ll cost in card fees and shipping to get each shopping portal bonus so you can decide if it’s worth it to you.

UPDATE: Miles (awesome name, right?) pointed out that these fees were calculated for physical gift cards, not virtual gift cards. So, shipping needs to be factored in, also some of math on physical gift cards requires taking a penny off in order to hit the lower fee amount, despite the posted schedule; but that doesn’t affect portal thresholds since the fee is included in the portal payout. Shipping fees are $1.99 per card, so updating is easy enough, the tables are now correct, and the article has been corrected. 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️

United

Bonus Threshold Gift Cards Purchased Fees Miles Cost Per Mile
$100 1 x $100 $5.94 100 + 500 0.990 cents per mile
$350 1 x $100 + 1 x $250 $12.88 350 + 1,500 0.696 cents per mile
$600 1 x $100 + 2 x $250 $19.82 600 + 2,500 0.639 cents per mile
corrected

Southwest

Bonus Threshold Gift Cards Purchased Fees Miles Cost Per Mile
$125 1 x $125 $5.94 125 + 250 1.584 cents per mile
$300 1 x $50 + 1 x $250 $12.88 300 + 900 1.073 cents per mile
$550 1 x $50 + 2 x $250 $19.82 550 + 2,000 0.777 cents per mile
corrected

Alaska

Bonus Threshold Gift Cards Purchased Fees Miles Cost Per Mile
$150 1 x $150 $5.94 150 + 300 1.237 cents per mile
$300 1 x $50 + 1 x $250 $10.88 300 + 600 1.208 cents per mile
$500 2 x $250 $13.88 500 + 1,200 0.816 cents per mile
corrected

There are two big caveats to remember: 1) I didn’t include any miles or cash back you’ll get from your credit card spend, and 2) I didn’t include potential liquidation fees that you may pay; hopefully that one is zero but YMMV.

At the highest threshold of each of those portal bonuses I’m a mileage buyer, even for United. But honestly, just barely for United.

Not the type of airline games I meant, but sure, why not?

I’m sure you’ve heard by now but just in case you haven’t, here’s the background for today’s post: Citi Thank You Points can be transferred to AA between now and November 23rd. (Why this date? No idea.) People are celebrating this and frankly with good cause. Until now, Citi Thank You Points have been my least favorite bank currency amongst the major players — so much so that I’d choose 1.0 Ultimate Rewards or Membership Rewards over 1.2 Citi Thank You Points. In general I think of Thank You Points as worth exactly a penny and move on to bigger and better things (say, 15x “shop small” with an American Express Platinum from Resy as a great example).

I hear your rebuttal, and yes, the Turkish Airlines Miles & Smiles program has some sweet-spots and Citi Thank You Points are uniquely positioned to take advantage of that; but booking Turkish awards can be a long and frustrating process involving multiple unanswered calls and weird email bookings, and the rest of the Citi Thank You Points transfer partners range somewhere between “Chase and American Express can also do that”, and “I’d rather stab myself in the eye with a fork because if I’m going to be in that much pain, I’ll do it to myself.”

But now with Thank You Points transferring 1:1 to American Airlines’ AAdvantage program, there’s some real value to be had. I’m excited, but I’m also very cautious and won’t be transferring all of my Thank You Points to AA miles for one reason: AA Miles are ready to devalue, and for better or worse, that’s coming sooner rather than later. Consider:

  • Delta has a dynamic mileage redemption scheme (Asia will cost you 210,000 SkyMiles round trip in business class, if you’re lucky)
  • United has a dynamic mileage redemption scheme (Asia will cost you 160,000 MilagePlus miles round trip in crappy business class, if you’re lucky)
  • Southwest has a fixed value redemption (Southwest doesn’t fly to Asia. Can you imagine traveling to Asia on a Southwest 737?)
  • American Airlines’ fixed award chart is much cheaper than major competitors (Asia will cost you 120,000 AAdvantage miles, with great availability)

For the most part this is illustrative of awards to just about any international destination, we’re stuck in a situation where AAdvantage offers much, much better value than its major competition and on top of that they’ve said they’re moving to a variable redemption scheme. This means that they’re almost certainly going to devalue, and it’s almost certainly going to happen very soon, just as predicted by reversion to the mean. In fact, I’d call this event the catalyst for devaluation and cynically declare it’s a last ditch money grab by AA before the chart gets materially worse (and variable).

My advice to you: Yes, Thank You Points conversion to AAdvantage miles is an exciting development, but don’t go too far with this, transfer the number of points to AA that you need for the next six months or so and plan on an AA devaluation. Don’t be surprised when the rug gets pulled out from you at the end of the year. At that point, I fear we’ll all be thinking of Thank You Points as being worth a cent again.

My Citi Thank You Points award redemption eye fork.

Two roundups in a row? What can I say, it’s that kind of weak I guess. Don’t shoot me, I’m just the messenger, or something.

1. AirFrance/KLM Flying Blue has a widely targeted 30% transfer bonus from American Express Membership Rewards. This, combined with the Flying Blue promo rewards can really turn into some great business class redemptions to Europe. Look for an email with the subject “Convert your American Express Membership Rewards® points now to earn 30% more Miles!” The one in my inbox had a link, but the link just takes you to the American Express page to transfer Membership Rewards to Flying Blue so I won’t post it here.

I’ve gotten great value out of the program in the past, and I will be taking advantage of this offer to a small extent, especially because transferred miles will now extend mileage expiration for other transferred miles.

2. This week’s fee free $200 Visa Gift Card sale expires at Staples tomorrow night, but don’t worry, another one starts on Sunday, but this time with fee free $200 Mastercard Gift Cards, limit 5 per customer or per transaction, depending on how your store rolls. I’m going to pass on this one because the stack of gift cards on my desk is growing uncomfortably large right now, especially considering that the closest Staples translates into 25 minutes in the car each way for me.

Side note that you didn’t ask about and don’t really care about either: I miss the OfficeDepot/Office Max sales quite a bit because there’s one of those about 5 minutes away on foot from my house.

3. American Express has another round of 20,000 Membership Rewards Authorized User bonuses going out for the Personal Platinum card. Use this link to see if you’re targeted. (thanks to Fryes)

4. Kroger has another 4x Fuel Points promotion running today through Sunday, and the BestBuy market is hot with the release of pre-orders for the Nintendo Switch OLED version. It’s going to be a productive weekend, especially if Kroger’s IT starts awarding 6x again.

Have a great weekend, and if you have ideas on cashing out some stupid Equinox credits, hit me up!

Frankly, I just don’t see the appeal of the Nintendo Switch, but when BestBuy gift card demand soars, roll with it.

1. Register here for your MileagePlay bonus offer from United. My offer was for 7,900 bonus miles for booking a premium seat fare that costs at least $350 in the next 78 days. Meh, I guess I won’t be getting 7,900 more miles from United this time. I do have about $1,800 in TravelBank credit for unloading my American Express Platinum airline reimbursements, but I’m not going to blow $350+ of it just for the punishment of flying in a United domestic “first class” seat, prolly on a CRJ-700 with a broken tray table.

2. If you have an American Express Marriott Bonvoy card, register here for 6x on several spend categories, up to $1,666 spend per category:

  • US Gas Stations (am I the only one who finds the “US” restriction strange?)
  • Airline tickets booked directly with the carrier
  • Car rentals
  • Transit (Uber Eats should count accidentally as I read it)

Out of all of those, I’d be only mildly interested in the Gas Stations because 3 x $500 Visa Gift Cards at 7-11 or Speedway would be easy and quick. That said, I was #bonvoyed and told I was not eligible when I tried to register.

3. Login to American Express, then try the following links for huge sign-up offers that are frankly really big, but you have to be targeted to be eligible (when I clicked apply on each, I wasn’t targeted which isn’t a surprise given my eleven American Express charge cards (thanks to DoC and DDG):

4. Check your non-Platinum flavored American Express cards for an offer for $179 off of Clear Membership. Watch out though, the hack for two Clear memberships for the price of one it won’t work out for the AmEx offer but does still work for the Platinum. (thanks to jerseyguy195)

5. If your Kroger fuel points account was locked in the 4x shenanigans, visit the Kroger website and print out an image of your loyalty barcode — you’ll be able to scan that at the pump and bypass the lock.

A depiction of my last United tray table geometry in First Class, though mine was worse than pictured.

I bet you thought the title was going to be WednesdAAy, right? I gotta mix it up sometimes, sorry.

Status Matches

Hyatt & AA have had a strange partnership for a few years, and now you can leverage each to get reduced requirements for status at the other by September 30th. Just make sure you delay registration until a couple of days before travel to give your self as much time as possible to finish the challenges. To take advantage of them, link your Hyatt and AAdvantage accounts if needed, then:

  • Register here for an AA 90 day status challenge if you have any Hyatt status at all. My status offer:
    • Gold for 6,000 paid flown miles or 7 segments, and $700 EQD spend
    • Platinum for 12,000 paid flown miles or 14 segments, and $1,500 EQD spend
    • Platinum Pro for 18,000 paid flown miles or 21 segments, and $2,300 EQD spend
  • Register here for a Hyatt 90 day status challenge if you have any AA status at all. Everyone gets:
    • Explorist for 10 nights
    • Globalist for 20 nights

Now, let’s turn off the blogger/bloggee relationship and just talk about this like friends:

  • AA Gold status is really like Silver at any other airline, it’s good for a free checked bag and the ability to pick the second worst seat instead of the worst seat on the plane.
  • If you want upgrades when flying AA, Platinum Pro or above is pretty much the only way you have a real chance, the others will just be dashed hopes and dreams, which sounds a lot like AA.
  • Hyatt Explorist isn’t worth much at all either. It will get you a couple of bottles of water if you’re lucky, and you’ll get a 2:00 PM checkout, but spoiler alert — if you ask nicely, you can almost always get a 2:00 PM checkout anyway so, enjoy your water I guess?
  • Hyatt Globalist is worth it if you travel a lot and use it. One of my dirty, shameful secrets is that I’ve been top tier at Hyatt for 9 years, and I don’t plan on letting that change anytime soon.

AAdvatange Reduced Mileage Awards

These have always been a great deal for Citi AA cardholders, and like any great deal, it dies. AA is killing off reduced milage awards on October 1, 2021. See if you can eek any value out of this if you still have a Citi AA card, but keep the next point in mind.

AA Sticks it to Flight Attendants

AA made a deal with many of its flight attendants to take either one or two year leaves of absence during the height of the pandemic, but now they’re making their flight attendants come back early because they’re anticipating huge staffing shortages during the holidays this year. As you think about those holiday plans, make sure you’re going in eyes wide open to make sure you’re not left strAAnded (I couldn’t help it) by a crew shortage at AA; I expect we’ll run into holiday problems, especially at smaller outstAAtions.

With AA staffing shortages, who will be there to tow AA’s planes to the gate after they slide off of the runway?

1. Bookmark this link for accessing your American Express offers. This link is magical because you can see more than 100 offers per card, and offers show up here that didn’t show up elsewhere. (Thanks to DoC)

2. Yun let me know that the Visible deal is even better now: you now get a month for $5 when you sign up with a referral link, so you can now get $30 cash back, a $100 Mastercard, and a burner cell phone number for a total cost of $30 out of pocket when using a Visible Party. Don’t forget to use a virtual account number and follow these tips for a smoother deal.

3. I’m still toying with various options on the American Express Platinum entertainment credit, but this one may interest some of you: Get a free Echo Dot when you sign up for Sirius/XM for three months at $15 per month, which will be completely wiped away by the lame entertainment credit. I’d scale this with different email addresses as needed, other than I don’t want an Echo Dot. (Thanks to Fryes)

4. The Point debit card has a new offer for 5x at Amazon which is certainly ok but not the 10x that they had a couple of weeks ago, though still useful. This one runs through August 8 and is good for up to $1,000 in spend. I’ll probably just reload my Amazon balance on this round. They’ve also got 5x at Whole Foods, though at that level it’s definitely not worth a separate trip for me. There’s also 5x at Costco, which is worth thinking about, but just barely.

If you don’t have the Point card and you want one, make sure you sign up for it through a referral for a bonus. As far as I know the $250 referral bonus ended last Friday but hopefully I’m wrong and just don’t have that offer within my inner circle. As always, I’d rather you find a friend and use their referral, but if you don’t have another good option feel free to reach out to me for the $100 version.

Shia Labeouf holding a set of rings wearing a purple Unicorn shirt.
The conjuring of the American Express Offers magic link.