There’s a lot going on with grocery store rewards this week. A few examples:
At Kroger, you can buy $100 Visa and Mastercard gift cards for $100.95. Combine with Fuel Points for a nice win. Coincidentally, Kroger is usually a good target for liquidating cards like this.
At Meijer stores (pronounced “major” in case you’re a Meijer newb like me), you can get $50 in Meijer rewards for buying certain $500 gift cards. Check the exclusions, but as of this writing BestBuy isn’t excluded. Combine with a 4x or 10x grocery card for a huge win.
At Safeway / Albertsons / J4U stores, let’s just say it’s rewards bananas right now. Add online offers to your account and try buying a few things. You’ll probably be really surprised at what you see.
Via Reddit, there’s currently a 40% transfer bonus from Membership Rewards points to Marriott Bonvoy points. My initial reaction was basically “Bonvoy’s gonna #Bonvoy, this stinks”, but Robert at Milenomics pointed out a hidden point of value in Marriott program: 2,400 Bonvoy points converts to 1,000 JAL Mileage Bank points. Why is this interesting?
JAL Business Class awards from North America to Japan are 50,000 miles each way on non-peak days
You can book seats further out with JAL Mileage Bank then you can with partners
JAL often gives better award availability to its own mileage program than it gives to partners
The JAL #Bonvoy backdoor costs approximately 85,000 Membership Rewards and has very low surcharges and increased availability
The most inexpensive way to get to JAL award tickets are with AA and Alaska, neither of which are AmEx transfer partners; BA is an option but will usually end up costing more in terms of miles and surcharges. Cathay’s Asia Miles are decent for AmEx partners too, but availability is less and booking windows are shorter
All of these cards are no-annual fee cards. If you have a premium card from Chase, Bank of America, Discover, or US Bank, consider converting it to one of these cards. You don’t have to wait until the annual fee posts either, most banks will pro-rate the annual fee right when you downgrade.
General reminder on no-annual fee BoA cards: Lots of things count as 3x “Online Spend” or “Business Services” with the Cash Rewards family of cards. Also, even within the BoA Cash Rewards family, Visa is not the same as Mastercard. Go punch drunk on this one.
Reader BlueCat ran into an error while registering Ting SIM cards with a strange error message about service availability in his area. If you hit this, try using an address in NYC, LA, or somewhere else. You’re not actually planning on using the service, right? So who cares where you register it.
BlueCat also notes that rather than an address issue, perhaps strange error messages about compatibility means “try a different burner cell phone”.
Another reader, Yun, has 10 separate Visible Mastercards maturing. Don’t be afraid to scale up this deal.
Ting SIM card packs come with a bundle of two SIM cards, one for GSM and one for CDMA networks. I bought a scratch & dent Google Pixel 3 that works on every US network, and that works with both SIM cards in the pack too. You can double your throughput with the right phone.
Worth mentioning again, because it’s silly and obscure. Reader Katie discovered that without a password set, you won’t get Port Out info on the Ting website.
Happy burning!
No, no, no! I meant happy cell phone burning, don’t burn your aircraft.
2. United MileagePlus shopping now has a 1,000 bonus miles offer for installing their toolbar and spending $25 through their portal. All of these toolbar offer T&Cs say that you should keep them installed for 30 days, but if you just turn them off from the extensions menu before deleting them, they’ll never get an uninstall notification so they’d have no way of knowing whether or not you still have it.
3. If you have a Delta Business Gold or Reserve card, check here for an “upgrade” offer to a Delta Business Platinum with 50,000 SkyMiles and a $200 statement credit after spending $3,000 on the card in six months. Side note: I used quotes because American Express lets me “upgrade” my Delta Reserve to a Delta Platinum at that link.
What an “upgrade” from a Delta Reserve to a Delta Platinum looks like. Honestly, I’m not even sure what I’m talking about sometimes.
Ok, you’ve probably heard about the coin deal that’s dropping tomorrow. These coin deals come around regularly and several times a year the resale market for them is huge. Tomorrow is one of those times, and you can earn a lot of credit card spend and a hefty commission if you buy. You might also just end up really frustrated after pounding on a site that can’t really handle a pounding.
The first will sell for approximately $2,350, and the second for about $4,370
Final prices will be set on Thursday, and depend on Gold spot prices
Make an account way before the sale starts, the site will be hammered
Add and save your credit card to your account as soon as you can
Don’t use an American Express credit card (it’ll run as a cash advance)
Coins go on sale at 12PM EST (11 AM CST, 10 AM MST, 9 AM PST), and you should be ready at the landing page at 11:55 AM EST and have an accurate clock close by to watch for the roll-over to 12:00 PM EST. When it rolls over, reload the page and buy as fast as you can. If you’re trying from multiple computers, don’t use the same IP address or you’re more likely to get flagged as a bot and have to solve captchas.
What will you get? If you have contacts, you can earn between $300 and $800 profit for each set and a big chunk of miles. If you don’t, you can either chance selling yourself on ebay (I wouldn’t), or sign up for PFS Buyers Group and opt in to their deal. (This is not an endorsement of PFS, but they are reputable and they will pay. They will almost certainly not be the best commission option available, but you can onboard with them in minutes. I won’t be personally using PFS because I’ve got other relationships.)
For AA, buy a $100 gift card from GiftCards.com for 6x and credit card spend and skip the extra $200 at a lower multiplier unless you’re buying something anyway through the AA portal (buyer’s clubs, personal use, gifts, etc.). My personal preference at GiftCards.com is the Virtual Mastercard because you don’t pay shipping and they liquidate easy, but if you don’t currently have a way to liquidate those, you can either load it onto your Amazon balance or buy the physical variant.
For the other two, I’m going to be unloading my American Express Platinum’s Home Depot $50 credits twice and buy some cleaning supplies for in-store pickup, once with each toolbar. Make sure you uninstall the toolbars after you buy so it doesn’t mess with future portal earnings.
Is this a lot of work for a small reward? I’m having a hard time deciding. It really doesn’t take long: possibly 5 minutes for the AA purchase and liquidation, and there’s a Home Depot almost literally in my back-yard. I also still need to offload the $50*2 Home Depot AmEx Credits too, but I’m on the fence as to whether the rewards are worth it. I miss when GiftCards.com sold $500 Visas and Mastercards, it was a no-brainer then.
On a whim I searched for “home depot backyard”. I’m not sure what I was expecting exactly, but it wasn’t this.
Office Depot OfficeMax (side note: worst business name yet) is offering $15 off of $300 or more in Visa Gift Cards, limit one per transaction. The deal lasts through Saturday March 13. Buy two $200 cards to get the biggest bang for your buck. Make sure you use a 5x card like the Ink Cash or an AmEx Business Platinum with the +4x office supplies offer attached. Also, make sure your card is linked to Dosh too; it’s not supposed to pay out on gift card purchases but it works anyway like flim-flam strawberry jam.
Liquidation? That’s slightly trickier with these because they’re issued by BlackHawk Network (BHN/Metabank). There are still a few liquidation routes from home available, or you’ll have luck at many grocery stores, or there are instances where these work at Walmart. Experiment some and don’t limit your Walmart game to money orders.
