Category: Credit Cards

  1. You’ve probably heard that Chase Pay Yourself Back (PYB) has been extended through June 30. What you probably haven’t heard, or at least it’s received less attention:

    – Office Supply stores have been added to Ink Cash and Ink Preferred for PYB
    – AirBNB bookings have a limit of three cancelations per year which limits PYB, but all you need for a new AirBNB account is a new email address so there’s that

  2. Bank of America is sending targeted elite qualifying miles offers to Alaska Airlines personal and business cardholders. (I didn’t get one despite holding six Alaska cards). The offer is for 1,000 elite qualifying miles for $5,000 in spend. You can find Alaska tiers and benefits here, and without earning another elite mile in any way, you can reach:

    – MVP with $100,000 in spend
    – MVP Gold with $200,000 in spend
    – MVP Gold 75k with $375,000 in spend
    – MVP Gold 100k with $500,000 in spend

    If you don’t fly Alaska a lot, this probably isn’t worth your time. If you want oneworld status, an AA credit card will get you there with quite a bit less spend and you don’t need to be targeted.

  3. PSA: Brex is closing dormant accounts. I personally use it for 8x on rideshare. I like to churn these accounts too (which requires churning real businesses, which is actually not hard in most states) so if they close one out, I’ll just open another one (or let’s be honest, I’ll probably just open another one anyway).
  4. Friday’s deal for $750 in gift cards for $730.35 and hopefully some extra cash-back or miles through a shopping portal is back at GiftCards.com with new promo codes: SPRINGSALE, SPRINGVISA, and SPRING. The catch? They’re Metabank gift cards so have a liquidation plan.

Happy Monday!

A few simple mods and this churner for making butter turns into a churner for making companies.

Let’s slide into the weekend with an abnormally wordy post:

  1. There’s a new no-lifetime language (NLL) link for the no-annual fee American Express Blue Business Plus credit card with a bonus of 30,000 Membership Rewards after spending $5,000 in three months and another 10,000 Membership Rewards for adding an employee card and spending another $1,000 on that card in three months. To see if you’re targeted, login to your American Express account and then click this link. (Thanks to Parts_Unknown)

    This card is basically an American Express Membership Rewards earning version of the Citi Double Cash card with a cap of $50,000 in spend per year at 2x. Starting in December and running through February, the card was amazing because you could get up to 1.98 million Membership Rewards for adding 99 employee cards. Unfortunately now the offer is only for 20,000 points after spending $2,000 on an employee card with a limit of five employees.

    Side note: The 99 card offer is still alive in various forms on co-branded American Express business cards (Marriott, Hilton, Delta). I’m guessing they’ll die in the next week or two, so call American Express and ask if there are any offers for adding employee cards to your account sooner rather than later.

  2. The American Express Personal Gold card has a new 90,000 Membership Rewards after spending $4,000 in three months, and 20% back at restaurants (or with transactions that look like restaurants), up to $250 back. Try your luck at this link, and if it doesn’t work the first, time, try incognito, using a referral, or by searching for the card through a search engine. It may also work via a referral link, but I’ve yet to see an example. (Thanks to DoC)

    As I’ve said before, I can never have too many Personal Gold cards (4x on grocery on up to $25,000 in spend can be knocked out in a day or two), and while the monthly Uber Eats and GrubHub/ShakeShack/Cheesecake Factory aren’t worth face-value, they do provide additional incentives to hold it.

  3. Giftcards.com has 5% back on Virtual Visa gift cards with promo code SPRINGVIP. I believe the maximum purchase is three $250 cards, which brings your total cost to $730.35 for $750 worth of virtual Visas. They’re Metabank cards so have a liquidation plan.

    Make sure you go through a portal, it tracked for me. At the time of this writing, AA is at 3x and is offering 1,000 additional bonus miles for spending $300.

The long slide into the weekend, paid for with giftcards.com Visas at a 5% discount.

It’s the second time this week for a grab bag of topics post. Hooray I guess?

  1. Do this now: Register for Wyndham’s current promotion, which gives you 2x on two night stays, 3x on three night stays, and so on up to 5x on five night stays.

    There is great value in Wyndham outside of the US (and a few properties in the US), and excellent value with Vacasa rentals booked with Wyndham points. As a reminder, Citi ThankYou Points transfer to Wyndham directly at a one-to-one ratio.

  2. If you have a Citizen’s bank account, check your email for a targeted offer of $150 back after two $500 direct deposits. As usual, use a business account that supports setting a memo field and set the memo to “Payroll” if you want to emulate a direct deposit. (Thanks to AbjectRaise)
  3. Kroger started a 4x fuel points on third party gift cards promotion yesterday and is running it through Tuesday, March 22. Fortunately, we’re past the beginning of the year lull in gift card reselling and spot-rates on major bulk gift card brands have crept up to make this a break-even deal or better, not including credit card rewards.
  4. You’ve got until Monday to apply for the $3,500 Capital One Spark offer (no link, you apply through any Capital One business relationship manager), or for the 100,000 point Capital One VentureX card. Believe it or not the first of those is much easier to get than the second.

    When I applied for the $3,500 Spark offer, the business relationship said to me: “We’re not like Citi, we don’t care if you spend, pay, spend, pay, spend, pay. We want you to spend as much as possible, then you make money and we make money.” I wouldn’t take that as gospel, but it’s definitely an interesting data point.

    Thanks to Allen and nutella via Slack for the reminders.

  5. Southwest has been rolling out schedule changes for June the last couple of weeks which means their schedule changes for July are likely to start next week. If you have a trip you want to book in July, you can pull the following stunt to try and get it for cheap:

    – Find the cheapest fare between your city pairs +- 2 weeks of your date of travel
    – Book the cheapest fare, and watch next week for a schedule change
    – Switch to the flight you actually want for no additional charge

    For a better shot at making this work, look for flight times that don’t exist in May or June but are still on the schedule for July.

Have a nice Thursday!

A Capital One business relationship manager coaches us on credit line cycling before going to jail.

Let’s wander all over the place today:

  1. The new US airline Breeze airways is adding new routes on its Airbus A220 fleet, and currently the new routes have one-way economy fares of $49 and one-way first class fares of $99. Their press release is the easiest way to see the new routes that I’ve found. The A220 is a very comfortable aircraft, especially in first class, so it’s worth looking into if their routes align with your travel patterns.

    In case you’re not familiar with Breeze, it’s founded by JetBlue and Westjet founder Dave Neelman. The airline is headquartered in Utah, but doesn’t operate flights to or from Utah because reasons.

  2. CashApp has a boost for 10% off of all Sam’s Club online purchases with a maximum discount of $20. It’s valid once a day for the next four days and works with gift cards including Disney, Visa, and Mastercard.
  3. DoC notes that the Paceline credit card has changed its structure, and now offers:

    – 5% cash back at groceries and drugstores (uncapped)
    – 3% cash back everywhere else (uncapped)
    – A $60 annual fee
    – An Apple Watch series 7 as a sign-up bonus ($429 in statement credits spread over the first year)

    There’s a catch of course, and depending on your personality the catch is untenable or is a home run: If you don’t have 150 minutes per week of elevated heart-rate, your cash-back rewards are cut in half to 2.5% at groceries and drugstores and 1.5% cash-back everywhere else.

If you’re lucky enough to live in Southern California, 150 minutes per week with an elevated heart-rate is called your weekday commute.

Let’s ketchup catchup on a few deals from the weekend (err, and yesterday):

1. Office Depot/OfficeMax has $15 back on $300 or more in Visa gift cards until Saturday, which makes your net cost $398.90 for $400 in gift cards or $394.90 for $400 gift cards if you buy the “Everywhere” variety. To maximize:

  • Link each of your cards to Dosh for an extra $10 back, but watch out for shutdowns for repeated gift card transactions
  • Try and run multiple transactions back-to-back with the same cashier

Thanks to reader Jim for the tip.

2. US Bank has a $400 sign-up bonus for opening a personal checking account and adding $5,000 in “direct deposits” in the first 60 days through March 28. Taking the bonus could be even more useful because having a checking account with a balance of at least $1,500 is a good way to get approved for lots of US Bank credit cards at once.

3. Another offer for 20,000 Membership Rewards for adding an authorized user to an American Express Platinum card and spending $2,000 within six months has surfaced. To see if you’re targeted, login to American Express and then check this link.

4. In addition to the increased Delta American Express card offers last week, another has surfaced for the Gold card and it’s interesting because the sign-up bonus is:

  • A $400 statement credit
  • 50,000 SkyMiles
  • A waived first-year annual fee

To get the offer, you’ll need to make a dummy airfare booking at delta.com and you’ll see it on the checkout page. To make things annoying though, sometimes the offer shows as a $300 statement credit and other times a $400 statement credit, so you may need to try different browsers or routes to find the $400 offer. Also, don’t actually buy the ticket. As Sam says, “it never pays to play it straight”.

Are we kaughtchup caught-up now?

Crimes against humanity in pasta form.

We’re all over the map today, but it’s good stuff so hang in there.

1. American Express has a 30% transfer bonus from Membership Rewards to Virgin Atlantic through the end of March. Sweet spots:

  • ANA round-trip business class (90,000 miles) or first class (110,000 miles) awards to Japan
  • Delta one-way business class non-stop awards to or from Europe (50,000 – 65,000 miles)
  • Domestic delta economy and first class awards (various)

This transfer bonus pairs well with item #4 too. (Thanks to DoC)

2. American Express has bumped up the offers on Delta co-branded credit cards, and based on the deluge of articles about it they’ve likely bumped the commission paid to affiliates too. These offers are great for just the sign-up bonus if you’re not looking for Delta status:

They’re less great if you want status though, because typically you get MQM as part of the sign-up bonus for the Platinum and Reserve cards and it’s absent in these offers. If you are going to apply, check for a referral offer from P2 or another friend as a way to boost the sign-up bonus even more.

3. There are multiple reports of Public giving everyone a hard time after loading $5,000 with PayPal Key and then trying to withdraw their money a week or so later. If you’re still going to do this deal, I’d prepare to let your funds sit for a month before you try and withdraw unless you want to fight Public.

4. The 2021 DOT statistics for airline commercial operations came out two days ago. There’s plenty of useful data inside, but I’m most interested in the on-time percentage by marketing carrier:

  • Hawaiian: 90.14%
  • Delta: 88.22%
  • Alaska: 83.17%
  • AA: 81.58%
  • United: 79.81%
  • Spirit: 76.74%
  • Frontier: 76.64%
  • Southwest: 75.78%
  • JetBlue: 72.31%
  • Allegiant: 68.26%

Unless you live near LAX or JFK it’s probably interesting for you too. I’d save this list away for when you need a positioning flight to another airport for a big award redemption.

5. Reader Pavel shared a link for a no-lifetime language American Express Business Platinum 150,000 Membership Rewards after spending $15,000 within three months, and another 10,000 additional points for adding an employee card and spending $1,000 within the same timeframe.

Have a nice weekend!

Another day on Allegiant, or at least a (100.00%-68.26%) 41.74% chance of another day on Allegiant.

Note: I’ll be on a mostly disconnected vacation this week, and while I’m still planning on posting M-F, expect slower than normal responses from me. If you do write a note though I will get back to you.

Unlike most credit card issuers that deal checking accounts and mortgages, American Express’s main business is cards and it shows: They consistently have the highest sign-up bonus offers, weird authorized user offers, $19,000+ cash back offers, and of course coupon book offers galore. Let’s focus on the first of those today, sign-up bonuses.

When you visit American Express’s website to look at card options, they offer different sign-up bonuses based on:

  • Your browser (Chrome, Brave, Safari, Edge)
  • Your operating system (Windows, macOS, Android, Linux, iOS)
  • How you got to the site (direct, google, bing, baidu)
  • Your browser’s cookies (incognito)
  • Where you’re coming from (mobile network, residential, business)
  • Whether you clicked on an ad
  • When you visit
  • Maybe a dice roll?

If you systematically vary each of the above, you’ll almost certainly find a different sign-up offer. In my quick tests, I was able to see sign-up bonus offers for the American Express Business Platinum card of between 110,000 and 150,000 Membership Rewards by switching my browser and visiting incognito through a search engine on a particular week. But then the next week, no matter which option I chose, the minimum offer for the same card was 110,000 and the maximum was 120,000 Membership Rewards.

What’s the takeaway? When it’s time for a new American Express card, make sure you try several different methods to get the best sign-up bonus. This is true of both Membership Rewards earning cards and co-branded cards like Delta, Hilton, and Marriot AmEx cards. And a final note: never assume that a link from an article will be the best offer. Experiment!

Breaking: The American Express algorithm for sign-up bonuses.

Note: I’ll be on a mostly disconnected vacation this week, and while I’m still planning on posting M-F, expect slower than normal responses from me. If you do write a note though I will get back to you.

1. The Point debit card has 100x points (100% back) on payments to Hulu until March 20. Unfortunately the limit is $20. If you’re interested in the card, make sure you sign up through a referral link because otherwise the sign-up bonus is awful.

Related: The “one week only” sign-up bonus of $100 after spending $50 when applying through a referral link was extended through February 27, 2022, shocking absolutely no one. If you haven’t referred P2 for a Point app, that’s $100 for you and $100 for P2 for a $99 annual fee, so now is a good time to do it.

2. DDG reports that American Express Business Platinum offers are being widely mailed out across the US via USPS. The offers are for 150,000 Membership Rewards after $15,000 in spend within three months, and another 10,000 Membership Rewards for adding an employee card and spending another $1,000 within three months. These are no-lifetime language (NLL) offers to boot.

With AmEx physical mailers, it’s safe to use one for anyone at your address regardless of who the offer is addressed to.

Apropos of nothing, isn’t Your Name, Jr. a new hire at your company? No reason.

3. US Bank is sending targeted offers via email for 2,000 bonus points for adding an authorized user to your account and making a purchase. It was seen on an Altitude Reserve but could be on other cards as well. (Thanks to g2525)

Your Name, Jr.‘s employee ID photo.