Author: matt

Let’s start with a correction from Friday’s post: There’s still a phone-in offer for up to 495,000 SkyMiles on existing business Delta American Express cards. I can only assume this is because something happened to the IT person in charge of turning this off when the other versions of the offer were discontinued. I’d guess this week is very much the last shot at this offer, so if you’re going take advantage of it make time to call today.

With that out of the way, here’s your Monday update:

  1. United TravelBank $100 credits from January Clear promotion posted on Friday for me, and for others too. If you were reticent to take advantage of the current 15,000 MileagePlus miles promotion because nothing had posted, perhaps it’s time to reconsider that position now.

    Exchanging a possibly redundant $179 AmEx credit for 15,000 miles isn’t the worst idea in the world.

  2. Marriott’s has a promotion running for 100,000 Bonvoy points and a free Westin Heavily Bed. To enter, open the Bonvoy app, scroll down to “Featured Offers”, then click “Win with Westin”. It’s worth entering just for for the fact that you can say “I #bonvoyed Bonvoy” to win friends and influence people. EDIT: Reader Justmeha sent a direct link for entering the contest.
  3. A site update: I’ve moved to a different email service for the daily newsletter that’s a little less janky and is also easier to customize. Please let me know if you see anything weird with the service over the next week.

Happy Monday!

This crash was spotted just outside the American Express IT campus last week. Perhaps that’s why the Delta business offers are still around?

Employee Card Bonuses

First, let’s start with a bit of sad news: The various American Express sky-high bonus offers for 1.98 million Membership Rewards, $19,800 in statement credits or, 495,000 Delta SkyMiles on business cards (EDIT: the 495,000 SkyMiles offer still exists according to multiple sources!) for adding 99 employees all seem to be nerfed as badly as Russia’s ability to trade with US Dollars. The small bright side is that the offers still exist, but are limited to a bonus for up to 5 employee cards as of around Monday.

(In case you missed it and don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, from fall of last year all the way up to the past weekend you could call American Express’s customer service team for your Membership Rewards earning or co-brand business cards and ask, “are there any spend offers for adding employees to this card account?” The answer was almost always yes, and the offer was almost always a per-employee card bonus for up to 99 cards.)

Employee Card AmEx Offers

Now let’s parlay that into some happy news for those of us with stacks of employee cards on our desks: Employee cards can have their own American Express online account, and American Express offers like the current $80 off of $200 at JetBlue offer exist on employee accounts too. They’re treated as completely separate from the main account’s offers as long as the employee cardholder is a different person than the main accountholder.

So if you’re sad that you’ve burned through the employee card bonanza, consider setting up online profiles for each employee and maximizing your offers as a small morale booster. (Just think of all the blue colored corn chips you could eat with 99 JetBlue $80 discount offers. Also, consider your heart and probably don’t actually eat all of those chips.)

Pictured: Results from a governmental case study on excessive consumption of blue corn tortilla chips.

Let’s wander through a few loyalty programs today:

  1. ITA Airways has a status match promotion running through April 15. The status is good through mid-April 2023 and recognized by the SkyTeam alliance. The major benefits of SkyTeam Elite status are free checked bags and preferred seating access on SkyTeam carriers like Delta, and SkyTeam Elite Plus members also get lounge access (including a guest) when flying internationally too.
  2. IHG is running an award sale for 20% off of stays through May 25, provided you book by April 5.

    Conventional wisdom says that buying points rarely makes sense (and I have plenty of thoughts on that for another day) — but IHG is often an exception to that rule. You’ll often find that buying points using the cash+points trick if needed and redeeming them will save you 25-50% off of cash rates at nicer properties; just don’t expect a huge discount at the Holiday Inn Express in Lubbock, Texas.

  3. Qatar Airways joined the Avios program, and to celebrate they’re currently offering 2,000 2,500 (thanks to just meer for the correction) Avios for signing up for Privilege Club with code FLYQR3. You can transfer these to British Airways Avios (or Iberia Avios) where there’s a nice economy award chart for short-haul flights (redemptions start at 4,500 miles outside of the US and 7,500 miles inside the US on AA or Alaska.) That means this bonus is:

    – 55.5% of an economy short haul ticket redemption outside the US
    – 33.3% of an economy short haul ticket redemption inside the US

    Not bad. (Thanks to crowd79)

  4. Point.app has a new streak for a 1,000 bonus points after making a purchase five days in a row before March 31, provided the sum of the purchases is at least $50. Debbit is a good way to knock these out with automation, and combine this with other Point store boosts when possible.

    If you don’t have the Point debit card yet and want to get one, ask around for someone that can refer you for a sign-up bonus of $150 after spending $200. The public sign-up bonus is either $10 or non-existent depending on how their IT is behaving, so do seek a referral.

    MEAB Note: Normally 1,000 points (worth $10) would be below the threshold for showing up on the site, but in this instance the referral bump to $150 pushed it above the line. Was that the right call? Ehh, I’m not so sure but here we are. At least it’s at the bottom.

I can say with certainty that taking a picture of a shark without protective gear in open waters isn’t the right call.

It’s time for a companion article to Wednesday Wisdom: Shutdowns Aren’t Always Shutdowns. But this time we’re focusing on deal limits. Specifically, deals often have language like:

  • Limit $200 per month
  • Limit one per customer
  • Limit $50 per transaction
  • Only valid once per month

Never take those limits at face value. For over a month there’s been a profitable play with language similar to the above and the stated limits are actually stated suggestions. Keep in mind that experimenting could net you a few thousand dollars and just take a couple of minutes of your time. Remember ABP: Always Be Probing.

Am I being intentionally obtuse? Unfortunately yes and I apologize for not sharing more on this one right now, but we’ll give a recap at some point in the future to help find similar deals. Good luck!

A store as empty as the direct information in this post.

Let’s talk today about what’s going on with our collective zeitgeist: Getting $10 off at Amazon when using $0.01 in Discover Cashback rewards PayPal Key has been officially made redundant by its corporate overlords; the is product going away on either April 20 or April 21 depending on which PayPal communication you believe.

I’m not sure that there’s ever a good time to get bad news like this, but it hurts even more coming just a few short days after the zigening. Let’s discuss.

Background

PayPal Key was launched in late 2020 as a weird attempt by PayPal to get into the middle of your credit card transactions for data harvesting and product stickiness. It gives you a virtual card number to use in place of your credit card and you can choose which credit card you want to actually be charged when your Key is used. Of course gamers are going to game, and it was quickly discovered that:

  • PayPal Key generated virtual card numbers with one of two BINs: 558158 or 520593
  • Companies like FinTechs, payment processors, tax processors, rent collections, and others often treated one or both of these BINs as debit card BINs

Why is that useful? Fees vary greatly for processing credit cards as compared debit cards. In extreme cases, debit cards might be 0% while credit cards have a 3.5% or higher surcharge.

What I’m Doing Now

There are definitely still plays out there that work, like the more-or-less-public plays for Public.app funding and rent payments. There are naturally several non-public plays too. One of the obvious responses to this news is to hit all of your plays as hard as possible while you still can. Before doing that though, consider the potential collateral damage of turning your PayPal Key shenanigans up to 11:

  • Your whole PayPal account could be shut down
  • Your underlying credit card(s) may be shut down from cycling or bust-out risk
  • The service you’re hitting may shut you down, locking you out of future plays

My initial instinct was to go as big as possible on my PayPal Key plays between now and the end of April, but I’ve tempered some of that enthusiasm to try and find a middle ground that keeps my cards and accounts alive while maximizing PayPal Key before it dies. I’d encourage you to do the same.

Let’s hope we all find the right middle ground so that we’re alive when the next deal surfaces!

PayPal’s Executive staff taking care of its P&L statement.

Q1 is nearly complete, so now we can ditch our New Year’s resolutions about not eating cookies and instead focus on the increasing deal flow:

  1. United and Clear have teamed up to offer 15,000 United MileagePlus miles for a new Clear account. Of course you should pair this with your American Express Platinum Clear credits, and by going through United’s link you can get a membership for you and a family member for a total of $179, equal to the value of the Platinum credit; effectively liquidating the credit for 15,000 miles.

    If you already have Clear and still have an AmEx with an unused credit, just sign up for a new Clear account with a new email address to take advantage of the offer. (Thanks to Gabe)

  2. Thursday’s Visible deal has a few updates and has gotten quite a bit better:

    – There’s now an offer that also includes a pair of Airpods which resell for around $125
    – As of this writing, the $200 Mastercard and Airpods offers stack with each other
    – Chase and Bank of America rewards both have an offer for $25 back at Visible

    When you stack all of these together you’re looking at $100 or less for the 2022 iPhone SE. (Thanks to MattD, Diana, and Austin via MEAB slack and email)

  3. Meijer MPerks has two great offers running to take us into Q2:

    – Buy $50 in third party gift cards through April 2 and get a $5 grocery credit deposited into your MPerks account up to 10 times. Or try a little less and get $50 back on a $500 gift card in a single transaction.
    – Get $10 off of $150 or more in Visa gift cards through Saturday. Meijer carries both Sunrise and Metabank gift cards, I’d go for the former if I have a choice. This one requires that you clip a digital coupon.

    As usual, scale this with multiple MPerks accounts.

  4. Staples is running a fee free promotion for $200 Mastercard gift cards through Saturday, limit 5. These are Metabank gift cards so have a liquidation plan in place. As always, try to run multiple transactions back-to-back to minimize your MS buying time.
We can even hack the definition of a cookie to stretch MPerks grocery redemptions. Who says it needs to be sweet?

A popular and eerily strange idiom says “when others zig, you should zag.” You know the advice is good because it’s shared on LinkedIn all the time by random strangers and also Gary Kelly. (In case you don’t know the phrase, zig-zagging is going back and forth, so a zig is going one way and a zag is going the other way.)

Let’s bring this into context with the current unfortunate zig at Plastiq (from now on, let’s agree to call this the zigening). There were definitely multiple games being played, but one obvious variation was combining the Nearside Debit Card 2.2% cash back with Plastiq’s 1.85% discount from its normal 2.85% fee on debit cards for a net profit of 1.2% on payments. On Wednesday though, Plastiq started charging 2.85% which killed any deal potential.

So, let’s take the advice of internet randos and consider this an annoying opportunity to zag. Remember:

  • Nearside is not the only card out there
  • Plastiq is not the only way to pay bills
  • Bill payments aren’t the only way to effectively use a debit card
  • Different BINs behave differently in general

Happy weekend friends!

Weekend puzzlers.

Unfortunately Plastiq continues to be running many real debit cards and several “debit” cards at the higher 2.85% credit card fee. If you have a real debit card that’s running at the credit card fee, I’d consider asking Plastiq to fix it in the hopes that everything else is also fixed.

Here are a few things to keep on your radar today:

  1. Do this now: Hyatt credit card holders should register for 20% back in points for award nights at Hyatt’s Thompson Hotel collection for stays starting April 1 and running through June 5.
  2. If you want the new third generation iPhone SE for churning and resale, or just to have, there’s a good deal at Visible right now. (Additionally, cell phone churners should look for a targeted offer from Visible for a $25 Amazon gift card on top of the normal $20 off of a monthly payment for both the referrer and the referred in their email inbox.)

    + $5 first month payment (use a referral link, ideally one of your own)
    + $25 second month payment (join any Party Pay party)
    + $25 third month payment (thanks to Austin for nothing the third month is required for the Mastercard)
    + $429 for the iPhone SE 3
    – $200 for a Mastercard gift card
    – $30 using a shopping portal

    = $254 net cost (or $209 if you refer yourself and get the Amazon gift card)

    Visible will automatically unlock the phone in 60 days, and the resale value will likely be around $400. In the mean time, you can use the phone number for all sorts of St. Patrick’s day hijinks, or maybe non St. Patrick’s day hijinks in a pinch.

  3. Check your Chase credit card offers for 10% back at Hyatt for up to $250 in spend.

Happy Thursday!

Make sure you’re sporting these babies for your St. Patrick’s day related hijinks.