Gamers can often find regular links with 250,000 Membership Rewards and manage to get approved despite lifetime language, but there’s utility in the easy game too. (Thanks to DDG)
Each promotion is limited to $10 cash back or 1,000 Membership Rewards per transaction, and each must be re-activated an hour after first use. Both stores sell gift cards.
– 1099-K reporting limits increased to $20,000 for 2025 and beyond – 1099-MISC reporting limits increased to $2,000 for 2026 and beyond
Manufactured spenders sending money to themselves should be particularly excited about the former. Bank bonus chasers may be happy about the latter, but you’re still required to report bank bonus income even in the absence of a 1099-MISC. As always, I’m not a tax professional and I’m definitely not your tax professional. Don’t take my advice about anything, ever. (Thanks to DoC)
– Book non-basic economy, cancel to your wallet after 24 hours – Book non-basic economy, cancel to an emailed wallet code after 24 hours, which is separately useful
– 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.
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.
I’m sure the rebooted Sapphire Reserve launch will be the noisiest in churning history, and I’m sure you can find a few dozen articles in literally less than a minute about why 200,000 points is the new black. The bonuses seem to be:
– Personal: 100,000 Ultimate Rewards + $500 Chase Travel after $5,000 spend in three months – Business: 200,000 Ultimate Rewards after $30,000 spend in six months
Let’s emphasize four points to help you wade through the impending onslaught of never-ending Sapphire Reserve crap:
– Offers are probably available via referral from another player, no need to use a blog link – 100,000 Ultimate Rewards is nice, but 250,000 Membership Rewards is probably nicer – $30,000 spend for 200,000 in Ultimate Rewards isn’t actually a great return – Newly launched business cards often bypass 5/24
Don’t let forced pseudo-urgency drive your decisions, be deliberate.
The Ramp business credit card has a $1,000 sign-up bonus after spending $1,000 and making a payment within 90 days. You’ve also got to have $25,000 in an “operating account”, which I believe only needs to be linked to Ramp but not held at Ramp.
The bonus is available only via affiliate links. I found a couple of random ones online for companies that I’ve never heard of and don’t know anything about, like this one for Fundrise (EDIT: Adds $1,000 to your Fundrise Innovation Account, thanks to Daniel G) or this one for some bank named “stifl”(EDIT: Adds $1,000 statement credit). Three things: (1) no, I didn’t make the name stifl up, but I wish I did, (2) I have no relationships with these companies, and (3) it’s entirely possible that these companies kill puppies, idk.
The post-Pepper gift card resale market is strong, looking much like the pre-Pepper gift card market.
Rakuten has $300 bonus for new SoFi accounts, and you’ll get another $325 from SoFi with two $500 deposits in the first 45 days. For those who can’t math, $325+$300 = a bigger number. Actually whether or not you can math, it’s a bigger number.
