Category: Credit Cards

  1. The American Express Business Platinum’s Dell and Adobe credits are changing starting on July 1:

    – The Dell credit will be $150 annually, plus another $1,000 after $5,000 in spend at Dell
    – The Adobe credit will be $250 off of $600 in Adobe products

    You can take advantage of the current credits before July 1 and still be eligible for the updated credits when they come. I’m personally disappointed that Dell isn’t gone so that I don’t have to think about it any more, but for people playing Dell buyer’s groups games, the new structure is probably better.
  2. Zift Zillions cards earn 12x points at Giant, Martins, and Stop & Shop through Wednesday Thursday (Thanks to Eugene for the correction). Note that Giant Food stores are owned by the same conglomerate but are only paying 4x.

    There’s a Citi Merchant offer for 5% back up to $30 at Stop & Shop too. (Thanks to GCA)
  3. The best and worst performing major US airlines as measured by the stock market have Q2 shopping portal bonuses:

    – AA eShopping: 500 miles after $200+ spend through April 14
    – United MileagePlus Shopping: 500 miles after $100+ spend through April 14

    An obvious choice is giftcards.com.
  4. Chase Offers has an offer for 5% back at giftcards.com, and it’s potentially available on multiple cards for the same cardholder too too. (Thanks to Carl)
  5. The Chase Sapphire Preferred 100,000 Ultimate Rewards bonus is now available via referrals.

  6. US Bank’s business checking bonus for Q2 is here using promo code Q2DIG25. For both tiers of bonus, you need to maintain a minimum balance and have five transactions within the first 60 days. Last time I knocked this out, I scheduled five $1 ACHs. The tiers:

    – $500 for bringing $5,000 and maintaining at least that between days 30 and 60
    – $900 for bringing $25,000 and maintaining at least that between days 30 and 60

    Both are interesting if you time it right, and holding $5,000 in a business checking account with US Bank is a great way to shake-loose credit card approvals. If you’re not in the US Bank footprint, opening a brokerage account or CD first will get you in the door.
  7. United has an economy award sale for co-brand card holders with travel booked by tomorrow night for flights to Latin America through September 30. One-way fares:

    – 9,000-11,000 for Mexico
    – 18,000 miles for Central America
    – 30,000 miles for South America

    If you choose your route correctly, lie-flat business class cash upgrades can actually be quite reasonable and there’s no cancelation fee so you don’t have to slum it in the back if the cheap upgrade doesn’t materialize.

Happy Tuesday!

Eight cardboard computers at Dell will soon earn a $1,000 statement credit.

Major US Airlines are all targeting Southwest elites with extremely generous “twist-the-knife while they’re dying” style status matches, and that means you’ve got a unique opportunity for manufacturing a ton of airline status with a single swing. Let’s start with earning A-List Preferred using a Chase Southwest credit card:

  • $5,000 spent = 1,500 tier points
  • 35,000 tier points = A-List
  • 70,000 tier points = A-List Preferred

In post-mathematics words, $230,000 in real or manufactured spend takes you from zero to A-List Preferred, or if you’re an underachiever $115,000 spend takes you from zero to A-List. Now, once you’ve got that status, combine with:

So, for $230,000 in manufactured spend you can hold status with all of the top five US airlines and also status in every major airline alliance in the world, MEAB style.

Happy hunting!

Next time: taking it to the next level.

Background

The Chase Sapphire Preferred has had an increased sign-up bonus of 100,000 Ultimate Rewards after $5,000 spend in Chase branches since Monday of last week, and now the same offer is available directly from Chase.com. But there was another new development yesterday: Affiliate bloggers now also have links for the card.

The Impact

As you can imagine, this development means that the number of articles about the card shot up exponentially. Let’s sample a few headlines from the 12 hour period starting yesterday at 10AM Eastern and ending at 10PM Eastern:

  • “Is the Chase Sapphire Preferred worth the annual fee?”
  • “Who’s eligible for the Chase Sapphire Preferred’s 100,000 point bonus?”
  • “Record-high Bonus: Earn 100,000 points with the popular Chase Sapphire Preferred for a limited time”
  • “Chase Sapphire Preferred benefits: Everything you need to know”
  • “The best Chase credit cards to add to your wallet”
  • “10 best ways to use 100k Ultimate Rewards points: From first-class flights to all-inclusive getaways”

Affiliate bloggers can be insatiable. Now, can you guess how many different blogs it took to generate that many articles in 12 hours? The sad punchline is that it took exactly one blog. There were dozens of other articles from other blogs that could have made the list; but there was literally zero need. We got 1/3rd of a page of headlines from just a single blog.

The Motivation

Obviously the main goal for an affiliate blogger is to maximize revenue. There are two ways that they do this:

  • Maximize revenue in the short term by dumping articles incessantly to reach as wide of an audience as possible
  • Maximize revenue in the long term by being a “good neighbor” affiliate blogger that always [usually] gives you the best link, so you’ll trust them and keep coming back to use those links for months or years

The former strategy relies almost exclusively on creating urgency, and while it’s not directly required for the latter strategy, urgency still boosts revenue so the strategy is still a core tenet and at minimum a subtle part of the game.

The Defense

Urgency breaks our best plans, and a false sense of urgency leads directly to mistakes in the hobby, like:

  • Not waiting another week a referral offer to come up with the same bonus (it probably will)
  • Accidentally blowing through 5/24, 3/4/5, 2/90, or some other credit card rule because we’re worried about missing out
  • Forgetting to have your credit report in a clean state before applying
  • Not analyzing whether the Sapphire Preferred even makes sense
  • Being annoyed about the contents of your RSS feeds and writing an article about the deteriorating state of churning blogs

Look, affiliate bloggers aren’t inherently evil and you should use an affiliate link for someone that you appreciate and want to support when it’s the right card, the right time, they haven’t steered you astray, and no referral option is available. But until you’ve made that analysis consider whether you should avoid the noid noise. Also, ain’t no affiliate links ’round MEAB so that option isn’t ever real.

Taking time to consider problems before acting works.

  1. Southwest has a fare sale for paid and award travel between April 22 and August 27 with promo code TAKE30. There are some blackout dates, and the blackout dates seem more city specific than the terms and conditions suggest.

    Tickets booked before May 28 still get free checked bags and no change fees, and a small bright spot is that the variable Rapid Rewards redemption rates are more favorable on the flights eligible for the promo code too. For some bad analysis redemption values, compare the pre-sale cash price to the post-sale award price and marvel at how your math approaches TPG valuations.
  2. Chase’s Q2 2025 Pay Yourself Back categories for Sapphire cards are: gas, grocery (but not Walmart or Target, and probably not Han’s Deli either), pet supply and vets, charities, and annual membership fees. Charities pay a +25% bigger boost, and redemptions continue to be uncapped.

    They have co-brand card Pay Yourself Back on Marriott Bold, United, Southwest, and Aeroplan with relatively small limits, but the cashout typically only makes sense on Marriott Bold or Aeroplan.
  3. AirCanada Aeroplan has opened registration for a promotion for 3,000 bonus points on a one-way booking, or 6,000 bonus points on a round-trip booking made by April 13 for travel through December 15.

    News outlets have been parroting a 75% drop in bookings between the US and Canada since the trade war started which is likely extremely exaggerated due to flawed study methodology and sample bias. The real number may be closer to 10-20%, but either way it’s bad. I expect this promotion will be copied in spirit by US Airlines relatively soon.
  4. JetBlue and Icelandair have a new partnership, so I guess you can choose between poor redemption values from TrueBlue and poor (future) redemption values from Southwest Rapid Rewards.
  5. American Express Membership Rewards has a 20% transfer bonus to Etihad Guest and a 20% transfer bonus to AeroMexico ClubPremier. The former is a great backdoor way into short-haul AA travel.
  6. Chase Ultimate Rewards has an 80% transfer bonus to IHG through April 30, making it a 1,000:1,800 transfer ratio. In general you can do better by other booking games, but there are use cases where IHG points bookings have outsized value.

Deriving TPG point valuations.

  1. American Express has targeted more accounts with a bonus of 20,000 Membership Rewards for enabling Pay over Time on its charge cards. A few notes:

    – Set a reminder to disable Pay over Time after 121 days to be eligible to be retargeted
    – If multiple cards are targeted, activate quick on all of them

    What happens if you turn off Pay over Time before then? To the penalty box! (Maybe)
  2. American Express has a Q2 referrer bonus for 5x earning on up to $25,000 spend in travel and transit for three months in addition to the 15,000-35,000 Membership Rewards the referrer typically gets.

    The offers available to the referred haven’t changed, but referring to a business card that you close quickly without hitting a sign-up bonus is one way to play the game. (Thanks to mra101485)
  3. Kroger has fee-free virtual Visa and Mastercard $100 gift cards online with promo code NOFEEMADNESS through tonight, and these will earn Kroger fuel points too. This also marks the first time that I’ve seen Mastercards sold at Kroger.com since they transitioned from US Bank to BlackHawk Network for gift card fulfillment.

    These are Pathward gift cards.
  4. Chase’s Sapphire Reserve used to earn 10x points on all Lyft purchases, now that drops to 5x through September 30, 2027 which matches the earn on Inks and the Sapphire Preferred. There’s a new monthly credit of $10 towards Lyft rides for the Sapphire Reserve only through the same time period.
  5. As of today Fiji Airlines award tickets can be booked with AA AAdvantage miles joins oneWorld and uses AA as its currency for dynamic awards. On average, that probably means today is the best day for redemption availability, so I guess there’s no time like the present eh?

April Fool’s day is every day but April 1 at MEAB, so here’s a boring image as your feed cleanser for the rest of the day’s onslaught.

  1. Do this now: Register for Hyatt’s Q2 promotion for 777 bonus points per night on up to 20 nights between April 10 and June 9 at casino properties.

    We may not have The Dirty Castle™ any more for phantom spotting, but at least we have The Sad Samba™.
  2. Do this now: Register for National Emerald’s Q2 promotion for a free day with every two midsize or larger rentals of two days or longer between April 1 and June 22.
  3. Staples has fee-free $200 Visa gift cards starting Sunday and running through the following Saturday, limit nine per transaction.

    These are Pathward gift cards.
  4. This is your last weekend to figure out what to do with your Q1 American Express Business Platinum and Surpass Hilton credits. There are often local angles, but if you can’t find them or don’t want to deal with them, brunch at a corporate Hilton or Hilton Resort will almost always work in a pinch.

And let’s end today with a timely bit of weekend wisdom: In churning and manufactured spend the main goal is usually to take advantage of the spread between profit and loss, generally with very little risk, and turn that into a machine. Well, occasionally there’s a time where you know the spread is going to change for the worse at some point in the near future. When that happens, consider swinging for the fences taking to the extent that your risk tolerance allows.

Have a nice weekend friends!

Hilton Garden Inn breakfasts can be paid with AmEx credits (delicious breakfast not pictured).

  1. Do this now: Make any Hyatt award bookings today that fit your schedule before the award chart is retooled tomorrow and lots of hotels go up in redemption cost. Most award bookings have great cancelation policies, so even speculative bookings probably make sense.
  2. Turkish Airlines and Hilton have a promotion (registration required) for 1,000 bonus Turkish miles for stays through June 30, provided you set Turkish as your preferred travel partner in your Hilton profile. For new Hilton accounts, you earn 1,000 Turkish miles for each stay, but for existing Hilton accounts can you only earn the bonus once.
  3. The Chase IHG Premier Business card has an increased tiered sign-up bonus:

    – 140,000 points after $4,000 spend in three months
    – 60,000 points after $9,000 spend in six months

    The $99 annual fee is not waived for the first year.
  4. The Barclays Aviator Red Card has an increased sign-up bonus of 70,000 AAdvantage miles after making a single purchase and paying the $95 annual fee.

    The best ongoing use case for this card used to be converting it to an AAdvantage Silver after a year, but because Citi will be the exclusive card issuer in 2026, that ship has probably sailed for new applicants. Instead, the best use beyond the sign-up bonus is probably to get a higher (or initial) credit line at Citi after the takeover.
  5. The Chase Sapphire Preferred (100,000 Ultimate Rewards), United Explorer (80,000 MileagePlus miles), and United Business (150,000 MileagePlus miles) cards’ increased sign-up bonuses are live today.
  6. Staples has fee-free $200 Mastercards through Saturday, limit nine per transaction.

    These are Pathward gift cards.
  7. Since it’s launch in 2021, I’ve thought the Chase United Quest Card was stupid, but it just keeps getting stupider and I’m convinced the product development team for the card lives in an alternate plane of existence. The annual fee has increased to $350, and there are new stupid credits to, uh, justify (?) the stupid increase:

    – $5 monthly Instacart credit, plus $10 one time Instacart credit
    – $150 in credits at stupid Renowned Hotels and Resorts
    – $8 in monthly rideshare credits, except in December when it’s $12
    – $150 in stupid JSX purchases
    – Small TravelBank credits for your first two rentals with Avis or Budget, but only using the United AWD which has generally inflated prices

    This is probably a good change for exactly three cardholders on the planet, and bravo to you if you’re one of them.

An amusement park in the United Quest Card team’s alternate plane of existence.

Foreward

The churning community has a number of wanna-be-but-not-quite-seedy underbellies, and since early this week all of them circulated a hacked Chase Sapphire Preferred 100,000 point sign-up bonus link repeatedly. The hacked link beats the current public offer and is therefore somewhat enticing, but the public offer will be the same as the hacked link starting Monday. Its imminent irrelevance didn’t stop the link from finding its way in the last couple of days out of the underbellies and into the mainstream community via forums, reddit, and several blogs though (I’ve purposely not linked to any of them).

Hacked and Modified Links

Churning has a storied history with hacked links, and most of that history is buried in lore and old discussion forums that are partially or totally obscured from the public eye and google’s crawlers. We can pick a couple examples for the sake of discussion that are well known though:

We could also pick dozens of cases in which hacked or modified links shared in churning circles paid the bonuses as expected, never lead to shutdowns, and generally worked really well for plenty of people.

On Safety

Strictly speaking, nearly all hacked or modified links don’t lead to a shutdown; you’re probably safe to use them when you encounter them as long as you can stomach the remote probability of a bank adverse action.

But, what makes the difference between a hacked or modified link that will get you the axe and any other hacked or modified link? My guess is that a critical mass of applications, bonuses, or specific marketing campaigns showing up on a bank’s KPI dashboard when it’s not expected is often the trigger. Again, leaning on the two cases from above:

  • In 2016, the 100,000 point Platinum card sign-up bonus was one of the most pervasive events in the churning community, largely because a six figure Membership Rewards sign-up bonus hadn’t been available to the public ever prior to the leak. Blogs talked about it, forums talked about it, meetups talked about it; it was like a Woodstock event in the churning community.
  • In 2020, The unlisted Ink links had been used successfully by a small group of churners for nearly a year. When the link became public via reddit and major blogs though, the number of applications and applicants exploded and the bank took notice. (In a note of irony, the small group of churners made the link public to try and hide themselves in a mass of applications.)

So, I’d wager that the safety of a hacked or modified link is inversely proportional to the number of applications approved using those links as a general guideline.

Finding Bad Links

How can you tell if a link has been modified or hacked? It can be hard, but there are a few telltale signs that often are good indicators:

  • People call it an “unlisted” or “black car” link*
  • For American Express: The landing page doesn’t have a login request and the application doesn’t have a “Next” button, everything is on one page
  • For Chase: You can’t find the same bonus or offer on any public landing page, via advertisement, or co-brand website
  • Also for Chase: APRs are listed as fixed and no mailers with the same offer have been seen
  • A blogger says something like “this is a hacked link”

What about other banks? So far, they haven’t cared in a meaningful way, so I guess it’s fine?

Good luck friends, and have a nice weekend!

* Black car seems to have originated from a bad translation from Chinese churning forums, but somehow is now part of our vernacular. (The correct translation was probably “unlisted”.)

A hacker uses a black car to make a link.