Category: Credit Cards

Warning: There’s a lot of math in today’s post, but don’t worry, it’s the easy kind that doesn’t cause my P2 to break out in hives.

  1. PenFed has a $750 new savings account bonus for depositing $50,000 by the end of the year and holding it through April 30, 2024. The account earns 3% APR, and the bonus is effectively another 6% 4.5 APR. Last I checked, 3%+6% 4.5 = a good savings rate for cash. (Thanks to DoC, and Anthony)
  2. The American Express Business Platinum card has heightened bonuses via referral, now up to 25,000 Membership Rewards for the referrer and 150,000 Membership Rewards for the referred.

    Obviously 150,000+25,000 is less than the current sporadic offer of 190,000 Membership Rewards, but the referral offer is much less likely to give a pop-up. (Thanks to Gasongasoff)
  3. Capital One Shopping has a targeted $50 or $75 referral bonus for both the referrer and referee available, for a total of $100 or $150 in bonuses. A couple of reminders:

    – You don’t have to have a Capital One account to use Capital One Shopping
    – After approximately $1,000 cash back you should switch to a new account

    So, I guess connect the dots on this one.
  4. Based on news headlines in the space, affiliate credit card bloggers evidently have new access to a new Alaska Airlines Visa 60,000 mile sign-up bonus. As a friendly reminder, VPN into Southern California and use a link that has an embedded Google referral for a 70,000 mile offer if you’re going for the card, and probably go for some business cards at the same time too.
  5. Citi has a new targeted offer by email for a $30 statement credit with $350 or more in hotel spend through December 20. Check your inbox for the subject: “[NAME], Activate your offer today and start earning now!”
  6. Qatar Avios has a 25% bonus for incoming bank point transfers through November 30. For most of us, bank points with Qatar as a transfer partner means Citi or American Express.

    Typically these bonuses post in a week, but the T&C gives them 45 days of wiggle room.

Happy Tuesday!

Ok, this one might actually be hive inducing, sorry.

Today, MEAB features a special guest who will respond to each news item: Your annoying Uncle Kyle that always seems to have a take that’s tangential to reality but not grounded in reality. Why? Practice my friends, practice – because you probably only see Kyle at Thanksgiving and Christmas and it’s time to gear up.

  1. Southwest flights are now bookable through the Chase travel portal, but only Wanna Get Away and Wanna Get Away Plus fares.

    Kyle’s response: WGA+ fares as a 1.5 cent per point booking with low friction means that brokering of Southwest flights is going to skyrocket. Watch out!
  2. Office Depot/OfficeMax stores have $15 off of $300 in Mastercard gift cards through Saturday, limit eight per transaction. As usual, link your cards to Dosh, liquidate your American Express Business Gold $20 monthly credits, try for multiple transactions back-to-back, and experiment with different purchase amounts.

    Kyle’s response: You’re waiting in line behind someone arguing about a $0.45 coupon at a store with staffing levels lower than the half-sized aisles of InkJet toner to buy a Mastercard with a Visa? Are you even listening to yourself talk?
  3. Chase Offers has 13% back on at least $50 and up to $307.69 in airfare booked by tomorrow. (No, I didn’t make that number up, why do you ask?) This is gamable in multiple ways.

    Kyle’s response: I haven’t known anything about gaming since Tetris, but you know that booking airfare means flying Southwest right? Their boarding process is a mass psychological experiment and you’re the subject!
  4. UPDATE: Dead! There have now been at least a half dozen reports of successfully transferring the pseudo Ultimate Rewards with a fixed 1.0 cent per point from the Ink Business Premier to real Ultimate Rewards accounts from other premium cards, but only by phone.

    It’s unclear if this is a bug or intentional, but either way the 150,000 pseudo Ultimate Reward sign up bonus for $10,000 spend in three months available in branch or perhaps via Green Star offers looks extremely attractive right about now, especially if you can earn it quickly.

    Kyle’s response: You know that those pseudo Ultimate Rewards points are how the government tracks your spend, right? Converting them to a variable value point throws them off because they can’t know exactly what you spent.

Have a nice Monday!

Kyle’s response: You do know Mondays suck, right? Everyone knows that because Garfield taught us. Stop being so chipper.

Even the Thanksgiving pie will be fed up with Kyle.

  1. The Citi Shop Your Way Rewards card has mid-month offers for online spend by December 14. Reported offers, and this stacks with other offers sent at the beginning of the month for spend at utilities:

    – $40 off of $600 in spend
    – $50 off of $750 in spend
    – $80 off of $800 in spend
    – 200,000 Shop Your Way Points for $600 in spend
    – 7,500 ThankYou Points for $750 in spend
    – 12,000 ThankYou Points ofr $800 in spend

    (Thanks to irieriley, David 99, Greyo, Dave 37, Fish, Bryan G, and Charlie)
  2. Chase Ultimate Rewards has a 25% transfer bonus to JetBlue through January 20, 2024, which for the right redemptions beats booking with a Sapphire Reserve through the Chase travel portal at a fixed 1.5 cents per point, but make sure to run the numbers first.

    Side note: if you’re paying close attention to the arbitrage opportunity for the JetBlue/Spirit anti-trust case and want to collaborate, please reach out to me.
  3. The American Express Business Platinum card has a targeted 190,000 Membership Rewards bonus link that’s been floating around for a few weeks and various ways to pull up that version of the offerhave come and gone and have had limited success. There seems to be a new repeatable way to pull it up: Open the application page from Dallas, TX. Geographic targeting has been more prominent over the last year, and it may be worth getting a VPN with multiple city endpoints as part of your churning toolkit.
  4. American Express offers has a targeted promotion for 17,500 Membership Rewards after $700 or more in spend at Princess Cruise Lines through February 15, 2024. Lately it seems like we might need to say ‘gamers gonna cruise’ instead of ‘gamers gonna game’? (Thanks to Rich)
  5. The Capital One Spark Cash Plus Select business card, which probably is missing at least three words in its title because clearly the marketing team is slacking, has a $750 sign-up bonus with $6,000 spend in three months. The card has no annual fee, but earns only 1.5% cash back on spend, which I guess means those three missing words should be “sock drawer bound”.

The NordVPN Dallas, TX datacenter.

  1. Clear has a $75 Uber credit for new accounts with promo code WBTGUBER23. Incidentally Clear only requires a new email address to be considered a new account. Assuming you have a few AmEx Platinum or Business Platinums under your belt, this is a backdoor cash out. You may need multiple Uber accounts to take advantage of the promotion multiple times though, the jury is still out.

    The expiration date isn’t specified, but I assume it won’t stick around past black Friday. (Thanks to caseyrobinson2)
  2. Target will have its annual promotion 10% off of up to $500 in Target gift cards on December 2-3, limit one per Target Circle account. Normally I’d wait until near that date to write about the offer, except having seasoned Target Circle accounts is the way to scale and if you want to scale it, you should start seasoning approximately [checks notes] now. (Thanks to DoC)
  3. Kroger has a new promotion for 4x fuel points on third party gift cards and fixed value Visa and Mastercard gift cards starting today and running through December 5. Secondary market fuel points rates have recently been sky-high because:

    – Gas is expensive
    – There are fewer suppliers
    – There hasn’t been a long-running 4x promotion for a while

    I expect though that a week or two into this promotion we’ll see rates come back down to recent norms. As usual, make sure you’re working with a fuel points broker or end-user that assumes liability for frozen accounts within a day or so.
  4. Hy-Vee stores have $10 off of $150 or more in Visa gift cards through November 23, limit one per transaction. If you live in Hy-Vee territory this one is almost certainly worth your time. (Thanks to GCG)
  5. American Express offers has a targeted $50 back on $200 or more in JetBlue airfare through December 31 (or travel wallet funds if you book a non-Blue Basic fare and cancel it after 24 hours).
  6. For some reason the second tier airlines are colluding to run fare sales for travel booked by tomorrow night:

    – Southwest for travel from December 5 through May 22 with surprisingly few blackouts
    – Alaska for travel to and from Mexico
    – JetBlue for travel from December 3 to January 31

    The Alaska sale in particular has some great rates, assuming of course that Alaska serves your airport.

Ok, which one of you is responsible for this ending up in my inbox yesterday? 😭

It’s common for card issuers to offer bonus points for keeping a card open (retention offers) and for converting your card to a more expensive version (upgrade offers), but a new type of bonus just dropped in exactly the way that Taylor Swift’s Reputation (Taylor’s Version) didn’t last Friday: Downgrade offers.

We’ve now seen multiple reports of instances where an AmEx cardholder had no retention offers available and wanted to close a card, but were instead offered a bonus to convert the card to a lower annual fee product. The linked datapoint downgrade offer was 25,000 Membership Rewards after $1,000 spend in three months for converting a personal Platinum card to a personal Gold card (which I’d generally rather have anyway).

Unlike nearly all other banks, American Express’s primary business is credit cards so outstanding card count matters to their bottom line disproportionately, at least compared to most other card issuers. Now we just need to wait for the “offer final frontier”, or a statement credit or bonus points for closing a card.

Discover’s poorly thought out upcoming product conversion bonus, foil included.

According to recent airline earnings calls, the demand indicator for domestic, low-cost travel has an indicator light and it’s blinking red. That means (1) there’s opportunity in the stock market, and (2) that we’re going to see airfare and award deals over the next couple of months. In fact, today’s news items are dominated by them:

  1. United has an award sale for flights to Maui booked by this evening for travel between November 12 and December 16. I’m seeing one way fares of approximately 16,000 miles and round-trip fares of 30,000 miles, even on Thanksgiving week.

    Unfortunately first class seats don’t appear to carry any discount, so you’ll fly in the back and you’ll like it (or else).
  2. Turkish Airlines has an award sale for half off of flights to and from Chicago for travel either in the next three days or between January 16, 2024 and March 31, 2024, but again, only in economy. Sorry bourgeoise. (Thanks to FM)
  3. Breeze Airways has 35% off of base fares booked by tomorrow night for travel all the way through September 3, 2024 with a few blackout dates around Thanksgiving and Christmas using promo code BENICE. This discount includes spring break and summer travel 👀.

    As always when a Breeze fare sale comes up, it’s time to highlight another route on the “Breeze Dartboard of city pairs”. Today’s winner is CAK-ORF, or Akron Ohio to Norfolk Virginia.
  4. Southwest has 30% off of base fares to and from Hawaii booked by tomorrow with promo code SAVE30. There are blackout dates around Christmas, President’s Day, MLK Day, and lots of March. (Thanks to David 99)
  5. GiftCards.com has 5% off of $100 Visa gift cards through November 19 using promo code HOLIDAY5 or GIFTVISA5. As usual, go through a portal and don’t forget the current round of portal spending bonuses. A few caveats though:

    – GiftCards.com emailed affiliates that commissions wouldn’t apply when codes were used on the last round, but apparently that email wasn’t sent this round
    – The back-to-school portal bonuses seem to have been delayed and haven’t paid out, whether or not GiftCards.com was involved
    – The maximum per-order discount is $15, so stick to three per order

    You’re all adults though, do what’s best for your situation.
  6. There are a few interesting American Express offers:

    – 50% off of Uber or Uber Eats, up to $25 spend
    – $90 statement credit with $350 spend at Hertz

    As usual, gamers can game. (Thanks to TeddyH)

The official airline demand annunciator panel is currently indicating softening demand for economy travel.

Editor’s note: My mail software was daylight savings naive and thus didn’t update yesterday’s delivery time with the time zone change, probably because it was developed by zonies according to reader Jim. You can access yesterday’s post here.

Chains popular with manufactured spenders often have limits on how many times a card can be used in a given time frame, for example, famously Kroger will usually decline a credit card after six swipes in a rolling 24 hours, chain-wide. That obviously means you’re limited in total manufactured spend at Kroger for a specific card, unless of course you aren’t:

  • Apple Pay looks like a different credit card
  • Many bank issuer’s authorized user cards have a different account number

A little creativity can go a long way.

Of course there is such a thing as being too creative.

  1. Staples has fee-free $200 Mastercards through Saturday, limit eight per transaction. As usual:

    – Don’t forget about the American Express Business Gold monthly $20 office supply credit
    – Try for multiple transactions back-to-back

    These are Pathward gift cards, and liquidation plays at major retailers often have a throttle of $480 every six minutes.
  2. There’s a new, targeted no-lifetime language American Express Blue Business Plus offer for 75,000 Membership Rewards after $15,000 spend in 12 months. It’s likely that you’ll also be targeted for 99 employee card bonuses after a couple of months too, so you can double dip spend bonuses.

    This is a credit card, and the limit of credit cards per social security number at American Express is either five or six, depending on, I dunno, I guess the color of the shirt you were wearing in your 5th grade glass photo.
  3. Meijer MPerks has $10 off of $150 or more in Visa gift card purchases through Saturday. This version requires that you clip the coupon in your MPerks account, and it can’t be clipped more than once in the same account. I wonder if it’s possible to create multiple MPerks accounts through some sort of internet sorcery? I guess we’ll never know.

    Meijer sells both Pathward and Sunrise gift cards. (Thanks to GCG)
  4. American Express offers has a targeted $100 off of $400 or more at Hyatt properties in Mexico, Costa Rica, and South America through January 31, 2024. Perhaps it’s time to re-read Breaking the Correlation because reasons.
  5. Citi ThankYou Points has a transfer bonus to Accor Hotels through November 30, which makes each ThankYou Point worth approximately 1.6 cents each depending on the USDEUR exchange rate.

    Accor Hotels are typically passed over in the points community, but I’ve had nothing but great experiences with Accor all over Europe.

Happy Monday!

All I can say is say for sure is that purple means six credit card slots and flannel means future Accor elite. I don’t make the rules.