Category: Gift Cards

A few follow up items:

1. The SoFi matched round-ups deal is back in March. A quick recap: You turn on round-ups in the mobile app, create a “vault”, then when you spend with the SoFi debit card the charge is rounded up to the nearest dollar and the difference is placed in your vault. SoFi will match those round-ups up to a total of $25 matched. Can you guess what I’m going to say next? Set up debbit to make 28 payments to XFinity of $0.10 in March. Of course, you can make payments with debbit to other stores and providers too if you don’t have XFinity.

Side note: It took me longer to type the above paragraph than to update my debbit config for $25. I wish I could always make $25 for 30 seconds of work; that’d be $3,000 per hour.

2. Reader Katie discovered that when you’re activating Ting burner SIMs, you won’t see port-out information on the account unless you set a password. Ting’s IT must be based on Citi’s IT; fortunately for them they probably don’t have $500 million to lose accidentally like Citi.

3. Another round of Amazon discounts is available for targeted Ultimate Rewards cards. Check for the offer here after ensuring that your Amazon account has at least one Ultimate Rewards earning credit card saved in your profile. As per usual, buy a non-Amazon gift card for resale and use a single point.

4. The promo code FLASH2020 is still going strong for buying fee free Vanilla Visa Gift Cards. These gift cards aren’t as widely discussed online as BlackHawk, MetaBank, or US Bank gift cards, so don’t treat them as behaving the same. Try some things with those Vanillas even if they don’t work with other gift cards!

The Citi wire transfer system user interface, soon to be adopted by Ting Mobile.

1. Check your AmEx offers for $100 off of $500 at Dell. You can earn spend, portal cash back, Dell rewards, and a few percent profit by buying XBox Gift Cards for resale and selling them on a reputable exchange. With XBox, the lower denominations sell more quickly.

2. Check here to see if you’re targeted for 1,000 free miles from Star Alliance member Aegean Airlines. You’ll have to click the present icon to redeem once you’ve logged in.

Michael Jordan sitting in an empty stadium pointing his index and middle finger at his eyes, staring at something with a determined look.
One deal for each eye.

It feels like everyone is talking about deals on Simon Mall $1,000 gift cards right now (40% off of prepaid Visa fees with promo FS21FEB40). Yeah, they’re good at stores that aren’t Walmart, they’re high denomination, and you can buy a bunch at once easily. There’s a big problem with them though: They don’t earn points when purchased with American Express cards because AmEx blocked earning on Simon purchases.

If you’re trying to put spend on an AmEx and get something out of it, use Vanilla Gift Cards with the promo code FLASH2020, which amazingly is still working. You’ll earn spend when you go this route, and the fees are almost non-existent. They still work at most grocery chains too, just like BlackHawk gift cards.

Bonus hint: Simon business volume accounts are better than personal ones, but that has nothing to do with AmEx.

A man passed out on a tan couch wearing a Mario costume.
A guy dressed up like Mario dreaming of earning Membership Rewards through manufactured spend.

Two quickies for today:

1. Do this now: Register for 5,000 bonus points with your World of Hyatt Credit card. To get the 5,000 points, you have to make 50 transactions of $1.00 or more this month. For me, this took exactly 4 minutes to knock out. In those four minutes, I added my Hyatt card to Amazon and Xfinity, and updated my Debbit configuration. With 50 $1 transactions, this is 100x earning, too bad it maxes out quickly. Have you configured Debbit yet?

2. Check for an AmEx offer for 10% off at Lowes (the store, not the hotel), up to either $50 or $100. Buy an Amazon gift card and sell at a +3% spread, or maybe you’re lucky and your Lowes sells Best Buy gift cards which will command a larger spread.

H/T: Garth Grawburg

An image of a Loews hotel backdrop with a palm tree peeking in to the corner.
I said Lowes, not Loews.