In churning, there are times in which miles are locked, cash is frozen, stock market trades are blocked, ACHs are held, sports books aren’t paying, and a dozen other circumstances get in your way, all of which mean you’re not able to:
Earn interest on your money
Make stock trades when it’s advantageous
Book award tickets when availability pops
It’s easy to look back on those lost opportunities and dwell on the financial loss, and psychologically speaking a small loss hurts more than a big win feels good. My best advice for dealing with those losses is to learn from them, but don’t dwell on them. After you’ve examined them and figured out what you could do differently in the future, start looking forward.
– 1,500 Bonvoy points and 1,000 United MileagePlus miles for a stay after August 31 – 500 United MileagePlus miles per stay at Marriott properties – 750 Bonvoy points per United flight
Afterward for masochists, consider how many United flights you’d have to take to earn a free night at a Marriott Courtyard.
– $125 statement credit with $750+ spend or $200 statement credit with $1,500+ spend monthly in gas, grocery, or restaurants through December – $100 statement credit with $500+ spend or $150 statement credit with $1,000+ spend in monthly in gas, grocery, or restaurants through December
Those who didn’t have that type of offer seem to already have a prior monthly version. (Thanks to Peter, bktran, TeddyH, and K).
The Sapphire Reserve business card only has charities as an option, and only at 1.25 cents per point. At least you still can buy a $50 Lululemon gift card for free twice a year I guess, which works out approximately 0.63 pants per year.
– Business Gold: 90,000 SkyMiles after $6,000 spend in six months, waived annual fee – Business Platinum: 100,000 SkyMiles after $8,000 spend in six months – Business Reserve : 110,000 SkyMiles after $12,000 spend in six months
The personal cards still have regular lifetime language in their offer terms.
When you’re collecting datapoints or asking for advice, don’t forget that absolutes are almost never there. Instead, we see trends and patterns.
*: Sometimes It’s either route specific, destination specific, airline specific, bank specific, person specific, or card specific. Or maybe just specific specific.
MEAB in a nutshell, sometimes the “may” is absolute.
– Visiting Istanbul / Turkey doesn’t count – You must connect through Istanbul airport – Only revenue tickets count
I’ve seen itineraries priced between approximately $4,000-$5,000 to complete this challenge from zero; With flexibility I think you could get the total cost below $3,000. If you’re bored, one million bonus miles combined with (probably) earning Star Alliance Gold status through 2027 and the miles you’ll earn for flying make this a decent deal. (Thanks to mforch)
– 150,000 points after visiting 15 cities – 200,000 additional points after 20 cities – 25 years of Mosaic 1 status after 25 cities
You can do this with flexibility for under $2,000, or you can jam it all into a week for more. But: (1) I’ll bet your Mosaic 1 status that JetBlue won’t be around in 25 years, and probably also not in 25 months, and (2) a few credit card bonuses and hitting spend are a better use of your time – but what do I know? Maybe you really like blue corn chips and 6″ standard definition TVs.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a special guest post from irieriley, a churner who went from crawling to marathon long sprints in a short time.
In the world of manufactured spend and churning, it’s implied that there is a rigid structure of clearly defined rules that govern what you can and can’t do. Chase 5/24. Amex pop up jail. Don’t cycle Citi. Don’t cycle Synchrony*, etc. etc. etc.
A lot of this collective knowledge is sourced from smart folks that were willing to be the guinea pigs and push limits to understand exactly what those limits are.
But in the spirit of probing, you shouldn’t consider any of these rules as completely impossible to circumvent. I once cycled a Citi Double Cash 9 times back when I didn’t know it was an issue, and a large Citi balance was a prerequisite for a long, tedious afternoon of liquidation. I’m still alive years later, continued shenanigans and all.
Now, I’m not saying to go throw in an application for the absolutely incredible Chase Sapphire Reserve Business™® if you’re way over 5/24, because it will be a waste of a hard pull. I’m just saying that historically, there’s been ways to get around these obstacles.
CoD streamers credit card bloggers ready to share the incredible CSR Biz news
Here are some common “rules” I’ve seen over the years that I wouldn’t hesitate to spend 5 seconds testing if I came across them:
No business cards
No Amex
Debit cards only
One deposit per day
Max $ deposit
Best case scenario, the rule doesn’t apply, and you make more money. Worst case scenario, the transaction doesn’t go through, and you proceed with your day. Medium case scenario, the rule doesn’t apply, but you get a terse email and need to get creative to keep your account open. The underlying systems and platforms that power our favorite banks, CUs and fintechs are just so finicky that you’ll never know until you try.
While we’re on the subject of things not being what they seem, here’s some advice: In a lot of online communities, getting zero answers to a question you pose is likely a sign you asked a dumb question. But in this one, if your question is thoughtful and researched and nobody responds (or in my case, you are DMed to delete the question), you may be on to something. In this case, silence is deafening.
– irieriley
*Ok, I will concede that not cycling Synchrony does seem to be sound advice.
A MSer continuing to enjoy the spoils of breaking the rules after realizing “debit cards only” did not apply in practice at his latest target
There’s a spectrum of what churning blogs will talk about, ranging from ultra low frequency things like fuel dumps to an onslaught of affiliate card articles for the new big bank special. Somewhere close to the fuel dump end of that spectrum is discussion about credit card retention offers. Retention isn’t mentioned much, not because it’s a fragile secret, but rather most credit card affiliates relationships forbid bloggers from discussing it at all. Fortunately (?) though, I’m not burdened with affiliate relationships.
The Call
Retention offers encourage you to hold on to a card you might otherwise cancel, and should it help your mental model you can think of them as a secondary sign-up bonus for the same card. The mechanics of getting a retention offer are simple, call the number on the back of your card and say something like:
I was considering closing my card ending in [XXXX] because [reason], but before I decide what to do I was wondering if there were any retention offers?
Most banks will have an offer on most cards, and some banks, especially Citi and American Express, often have multiple offers available and occasionally won’t give the best one first. So, assuming an offer is available, the next thing to say is something like:
Hmm, thanks. Are there any different retention offers or than this one available?
You may have to do this multiple times to get the best offer.
The Juice
What do backs offer for retention? Typically something like:
American Express: 15,000-120,000 points (or equivalent statement credit) with some spend
Chase: $100-$300 statement credit
Citi: $100-$200 statement credit, bonus multiples on all spend, or an annual fee waiver
Barclays: Annual fee waiver
US Bank: Annual fee waiver, $100-$300 statement credit
This works on no-annual fee cards and on co-branded cards too.
The Gotchas
Some banks, especially American Express, see retention as a two-way street. If you get a retention offer, plan on keeping that card open for at least 366 days unless you want to be banished to pop-up jail and have a (low probability) retention bonus clawback.
Have a nice Thursday friends!
Alternative retention script (may not work as well).
If you’re targeted, it’s probably worth spending some time with charges on your cards to get the fraud alerts under control before August 1, and it’s also worth figuring out how to pay Bank of America in a post alternative payments world. (Thanks to Rocky)
– $5 free giftcards.com gift card with $50 purchase using promo code BOGO50 – $10 free giftcards.com gift card with $100 purchase using promo code BOGO100
These codes come and go, so if there’s no inventory now check later and you may find it. Portals specifically exclude these codes from earning, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t work.
– Reserve referral links are now available – Preferred has a heightened bonus of 75,000 points after $5,000 spend in three months – Pre-October 26 earned points have boosted travel redemptions, post-October 26 earned points don’t (referring to 1.5/1.25 cents per point on the Chase Travel Portal) – Points are redeemed in FIFO order (first in, first out) – Pay Yourself Back remains
I’m going to do my best to not talk about the Sapphire for the rest of the week, there’s absolutely no need feed the marketing machine.
Happy Wednesday!
Yes it’s about birds, but it might as well be about Sapphire marketing.
How unlucky do you have to be to have the credit card community learn about your new credit card on the same day that the Chase Sapphire Reserve marketing blitzkrieg kicks-off? At least 17 unlucky units by my calculation, which happens to match Crypto.com’s luckiness as measured with my science-o-meter.
The Card
Luck notwithstanding, Crypto.com launched a Visa credit card issued by Comenity bank with tiered “cash-back” rewards, and those tiers are based on how much crypto you’re staking. For turbo crypto newbies, staking basically means loaning your crypto to others which locks you out from trades while your crypto is on loan, and the staking for this card requires you to lend for at least a year. The staking requirements and tiers for the card’s bonus and cash-back are:
$0: 1.5% cash back, $100 bonus after $1,500 spend in 90 days
$500: 2.5% cash back, $150 bonus after $2,000 spend in 90 days
$5,000: 3.5% cash back, $500 bonus after $5,000 spend in 90 days
$50,000: 5.0% cash back, $1,000 bonus after $10,000 spend in 180 days
$500,000: 6.5% cash back, $25,000 bonus after $25,000 spend in 180 days
Those numbers look great, except a few things:
Crypto coins behave a lot like stock, they can go up or down in value at any point
Staking your coins effectively locks them up for a year, giving lots of time for value to change
Crypto.com’s compliance team for their prior version of their credit card were hawks, though that was Community Federal Savings Bank and not Comenity
In theory you could mitigate some of these concerns with hedged derivatives trading on CRO, but US traders are effectively locked out from (relatively speaking) safer markets for doing so.
The Gamble
Now, let’s think through some of the potential losses if we gamble on this card:
Your CRO may lose some or all of its value
Comenity may not like the kinds of transactions that we do and prevent you from earning on spend
There’s opportunity cost in staking
Finally, let’s assume that your staked crypto loses 30% in value during its lockup period. How much will you have to spend at each tier to cover that loss with the increased bonus percentage (ignoring the modest sign up bonus)?
$0 staked → $0: Obviously, this is all gravy at 1.5% cash back
$500 → $350: Spend $15,000 to break even versus nothing staked
$5,000 → $3,500: Spend $75,000 to break even versus nothing staked
$50,000 → $35,000: Spend $428,571 to break even versus nothing staked
$500,000→$350,000: Spend $3,000,000 to break even versus nothing staked
So it’s clear that if you’re going to gamble with an advantage, either you’d better have good confidence that you can get a lot of spend through without issues, or you’d better believe that CRO isn’t going to lose value.
If that weren’t bad enough, there tolerant cards from other issuers that earn 2%-2.625% on general spend and maybe more with the right payment types, so your opportunity cost looking outside of the Crypto.com ecosystem is real.
Tl;Dr
Opportunity cost is real, crypto is volatile, and crypto.com has rug-pulled before. It still might be a great card, but I doubt it.
Happy Tuesday!
A hat that guarantees its wearer will be left alone in public.
