Category: Credit Cards

  1. New American Express Pay-over-Time 20,000 Membership Rewards links, make sure to leave Pay-over-Time enabled for 120 days to avoid any penalty boxes:

    – https://americanexpress.com/activatenow38
    – https://americanexpress.com/activatenow39
    – https://americanexpress.com/activatenow40
    – https://americanexpress.com/activatenow41
    – https://americanexpress.com/activatenow42

    Any guesses about what the next link will look like? Yeah, me neither.

  2. Check your American Express offers for $50 off of $100 or more at Dell for purchases through October 20. You can stack this with another offer for 10% back, and with the Business Platinum’s $200 credit for a net of $275 in spend.

    As of this writing Dell is also 10x at Rakuten, meaning you’ll get 2,750 Membership Rewards or $27.50 cash back on top of the credits.

  3. Do this now: Register for Hilton’s Q4 double elite qualifying night promotion.
  4. The Chase Ink Premier card is now available for online applications. The sign-up bonus is $1,000 after $10,000 spend in three months, and the annual fee is $195. The card earns:

    – 2.5% cash back on purchases of $5,000 or more
    – 2.0% cash back otherwise

    Unlike other ink cards you can’t transfer the points as Ultimate Rewards to another premium Chase card, so this is a pure cash-back play. The Bank of America Cash Rewards family of cards are effectively 2.625% everywhere cash-back cards with Preferred Rewards, so in general those are better options for anything other than the sign-up bonus.

  5. Simon.com/volume has 72% off of purchase fees on Visa and Mastercard gift cards. The usual warnings with these: these are Metabanks, American Express won’t award cash back or points for Simon transactions, and never feed the mogwai after midnight.

For some reason my computer isn’t giving good results when I try and compute the pattern of Pay-over-Time links.

  1. According to an American Express Aspire Hilton credit card statement shared by Kyle (K), the COVID-era policy that Hilton Free Night Certificates are valid for any night, not just weekend nights, is now permanent.
  2. Office Depot OfficeMax stores have $15 off of $300 or more in Visa gift cards through Saturday. As usual:

    – Try for multiple transactions back-to-back to optimize your time
    – Link your credit cards to Dosh
    – Add a pen, paperclips, or some other item to your transaction for Dosh longevity
    – Buy the “Everywhere” cards for a lower fee and usually easier in-person liquidation

    These are Metabank gift cards, have a liquidation plan in place before buying a bunch. (Thanks to DoC)

  3. Staples has fee-free $200 Visa gift cards, limit eight per transaction. If you encounter staff that wants to limit you to fewer than eight, pull up the linked add and show them the bottom of page 9.
  4. Marriott is running a lame promotion through Thursday in classic Marriott fashion, and of course they’re also pushing it like it’s the best deal in travel. It’s largely forgettable, but some properties are offering discounts on cash bookings and others on award bookings, so double check anything you’ve got on the books for price drops. (Thanks to VFTW)
  5. IHG has an interesting fast track to elite status offer, registration required:

    – Stay two nights before December 23 for Gold status
    – Stay three more nights before December 31 for Platinum status

    This is very easy, low-hanging fruit for Platinum status, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to earn it either because, well, let’s say Holiday Inn Express.

Marriott’s special Oktoberfest promotional meal, also available through Thursday.

  1. Southwest is having a nationwide fare sale for travel from November 29 through February 15 until tomorrow. It’s worth double-checking any bookings you’ve got during that time too, I had one particular flight drop from approximately 4,800 points to 1,111 points. The new price is the equivalent of a $16 fare, which frankly is bananas. (Thanks to Javier via MEAB slack)
  2. Bask bank accounts increased the earning rate on deposits to 1.5 AA miles per dollar on deposit. That’s nice I guess, but with interest rates climbing above 3% (or much higher with a little effort) I’d take this news item as a good point to evaluate whether or not your money is still best parked at Bask. I’d say it’s probably not.
  3. With the new month, there are new airline transfer bonuses running:

    – 30% Ultimate Rewards to Virgin Atlantic, use for business class to Europe or ANA business and first to Southeast Asia through November 12
    – 25% Membership Rewards to Choice Hotels (targeted), use Citi points instead for the Ascend collection through October 31
    – 20% Membership Rewards to Marriott Hotels (targeted), don’t bother. Instead, cash-out and use that to pay for your stay.

  4. Barclays has again increased its sign-up bonuses on business co-branded airline cards, including a statement credit that offsets the annual fee:

    – JetBlue 80,000 TrueBlue miles and a $99 statement credit after $2,000 in spend in 90 days
    – AA 80,000 AAdvantage miles and a $95 statement credit after $2,000 in spend in 90 days

    The Hawaiian business card also has an elevated 90,000 mile sign-up bonus after $8,000 in spend, but no statement credit. Don’t forget to read about clowning with Barclays to maximize your applications.

Happy Wednesday!

An airline frenzy — given the state of the airframes I’d guess these are meant to be Allegiant planes.

  1. Morgan Stanley has announced that they’ll no longer accept applications for new Access Investing accounts starting on December 1. We care because the Access Investing account is a cheap, backdoor way to get access to the American Express Morgan Stanley Platinum card. That particular variant is interesting because:

    – It gives a free Platinum authorized user card, which also gives that authorized user access to Delta SkyClubs and a Priority Pass membership
    – It usually has retention offers
    – It’s mostly churnable

    In other sort-of-related news, Credit Suisse account holders with the co-branded Credit Suisse American Express Platinum may lose everything at around the same time 😬, so I guess cash out those airline credits?

  2. October’s AirFrance/KLM FlyingBlue promo awards have been released for travel through March 31, 2023. This round has discounted economy with good availability and some spotty discounted business class redemptions too. The awards are for travel to and from Europe and LAX, JFK, MIA, IAD, SFO, or SEA.
  3. Chase’s credit card IT systems are currently preventing product changes. This should be cleared up quickly, so don’t lose sleep over it. Update: We now have reports that some product changes are working again, no surprise (like Credit Suisse?)
  4. Check your AmEx offers for 20,000 Membership Rewards or $200 back on $1,000 or more at AirFrance/KLM. Normally I’d say that you should buy in a foreign currency to break the correlation thanks to variable foreign exchange rates, but the T&C specify that the transaction has to be in US Dollars so you’ll need to use another method, and believe me they offer plenty.

Exclusive picture of the Credit Suisse American Express Blue card, as seen in December, 2022.

Introduction

A new credit card that offers uncapped 6% in cash-back at grocery stores through the end of 2023 issued by USAlliance Credit Union surfaced early in the weekend. When a great opportunity like this rolls around, there are two ways to play it:

  • The prudent method: Ramp-up spend and focus on longevity
  • The hog method: Going ham by hitting the deal as hard as possible, anticipating an early death

How do you decide which method to use?

Prudence

Sometimes you’ll make more over the long-term by exercising some restraint and caution as you play the game. That usually means:

  • Not cycling credit lines until the bank’s patterns are better understood
  • Ramping up spend over the course of a few months
  • Varying transaction sizes and patterns to obscure manufactured spend
  • Doing no more than one transaction per day

When you’re being prudent, you’re implicitly deciding that a deal will probably be around for a long while and you’ll make more and have less frustration by nurturing it throughout its life.

Hog

Sometimes a deal almost certainly won’t last for more than a few months, and your best return will come from hitting it as hard as possible. That looks like:

  • Cycling credit lines immediately
  • Overpaying to create a negative balance for more total spend
  • Hitting the deal as many times a day as possible

Getting shutdown after months of doing the above is almost inevitable at any bank, large or small; so don’t be surprised when the axe comes down.

Which Method to Use with USAlliance?

Back to the 6% uncapped cash-back at grocery card, let’s discuss where we are:

  • The deal went mainstream yesterday
  • USAlliance is a medium sized credit union with slightly more than $2 billion in assets
  • USAlliance is losing a lot of money on each grocery transaction (The interchange fees on grocery are going to be between 1.40% + $0.05 and 2.10% + $0.10, depending on the store’s coding and transaction volume; see page 9 of the Visa interchange fee reimbursements PDF)
  • Some heavy hitters are going to go big on this deal

When deals like this happen at a medium sized bank, you’ve typically got a good shot at longevity because your activity is drowned out in the noise. USAlliance is losing somewhere between 3.9% and 4.6% on a grocery transaction though so I don’t think it’ll take much activity to rise above the noise. To me that means the right choice is to hit this one as hard as you can and expect that it’ll die in several months.

Good luck friends!

This car chose hog.

  1. Do this now: Register for Southwest’s latest promotion for double tier points, and for award flights to count toward A-List and A-List Preferred status through November 20. As usual, you’ll still be flying Southwest so there’s that.
  2. Apparently not content to go more than two days without a fuel points promotion, Kroger has a new 4x fuel points bonus both in-store and online for Happy, Choice, and Giving Good cards through October 4:

    – Online portal
    – In-store coupon

    Most Krogers now carry physical St. Jude’s Giving Good cards which can be converted online to BestBuy, and there are also multiple options for converting to Home Depot. Fuel points resale rates have crept back up which can make these deals break-even or better before credit card rewards.

  3. Staples has fee free Visa $200 gift cards, limit 8 per transaction, starting Sunday and running through Saturday, October 1. Don’t forget to try for back-to-back transactions and to link your cards to obscure card-linked programs like Payce.

    These are Metabank cards, so have a liquidation plan in place before you buy a bunch of gift cards that turn into an unwieldy stack on your desk.

  4. Some American Express accounts have been producing Personal Platinum referral links with a sign-up bonus of 150,000 Membership Rewards after $6,000 spend in six months for several weeks. Reportedly more people are now targeted, so it’s worth checking again.

    The referrer will also get between 15,000 and 30,000 Membership Rewards on card approval, making this the best personal AmEx Platinum bonus that I’m aware of (unless you can take advantage of 10x points on $25,000 in restaurant spend and a 125,000 Membership Rewards bonus with the Resy Platinum card).

Reflecting on life after flying enough Southwest Award tickets to earn A-List Preferred.

  1. Do this now: Register for Radisson Rewards Americas’ promotion for 3,000 bonus points per night at Radisson family hotels in the Americas through December 15, 2022.
  2. The Rakuten 2% back or 2x Membership Rewards on Safeway purchases had new conditions added yesterday: Maximum $20 back per transaction, and a maximum of 10 transactions are eligible. If you were hitting it hard, double check that you’re not at the limit already before going again.
  3. AA has a bunch of lame deals celebrating its 35 year partnership with Citi, but two of them are mildly interesting (you can use your browser’s developer tools to see the upcoming deals before they’re unhidden):

    – 535 bonus AA miles when spending $135 through the shopping portal with a Citi AA card (hello giftcards.com)
    – 350 bonus miles for redeeming a SimplyMiles card linked offer between Friday and October 7

    Loyalty points for those of us chasing status, you ask? I don’t know for sure, but my guess is the 535 bonus miles won’t count but the 350 will.

  4. Simon’s volume site has 52% off of Visa and Mastercard gift cards through Sunday using promo code SEP22FALL52. They’re Metabank gift cards so have a liquidation plan.

A sampling of the Citi+AA marketing team’s other great promotional work.

Introduction

As we’ve discussed before in multiple instances, getting eyes an account ripe with shenanigans is a good path to a shutdown of at least that account, and probably all accounts held at an institution. So you should place a high priority on avoiding the prying eyes of an analyst when your account is filled with gift card purchases, payments by phone, money order deposits, anonymous payments, or anything else that banks don’t like in bulk.

Fraud Alerts

Perhaps the quickest path to an analyst from a bank’s fraud team looking at your account to do nothing when you get a fraud alert. That’s because when a fraud alert is generated, banks will put your account in a queue for manual review and (hopefully) notify you about the alert via a push-notification, text message, or email. Good banks will typically service that queue within 24 hours, while other banks like, I don’t know, Citi, can take up to a week to get through that queue. When an analyst pulls your account out of the queue, they may not like what they see and give you the axe.

If, however, you preemptively clear an alert, it’s almost always removed from the queue and no analyst looks at your account. Even better, fraud detection algorithms are usually trainable and a cleared alert means it’s less likely that you’ll see another alert in the future.

So when you get a fraud-alert, the action item is obvious: Don’t procrastinate. Just clear it as quickly as possible to keep anyone from looking at your account, either by responding to the alert or by calling the bank’s fraud line and hopefully doing it with an automated system. Bonus tip: if you can’t clear an alert with an automated system, calling outside of normal US working hours is more likely to get you to a customer service representative that lives in another country and is generally more apathetic about what happens in an account.

MEAB Scaremongering

So that we can appropriately calibrate urgency here: There’s buying a gift card or two and depositing a money order once a month, and then there’s going ham. If you’re not in that latter category I wouldn’t worry too much and just keep doing what you’ve always done. If not though, keep the bank’s analysts out of your accounts!

A captured screen shot from Citi’s soon to be released fraud alert verification system.