Category: MS Hints

  1. There are shopping portal spend bonuses at Southwest and United, and giftcards.com currently shows up on both. Coincidentally some types gift cards are again easy to liquidate at an old favorite payment processor with the right type of target.

    – Southwest: 2,000 bonus miles after spending $550 or more plus 2x per dollar
    – United: 2,500 bonus miles after spending $600 or more plus 2x per dollar

    Likely Alaska’s portal and AA’s portal will add similar back-to-school bonuses shortly, so keep an eye out.

  2. Chase is now giving out retention offers on even more co-brand cards. We’ve recently seen:

    – Hyatt $95 statement credit
    – Sapphire Preferred $100 statement credit
    – Sapphire Reserve $200 statement credit
    – Marriott Premier Plus: $100 statement credit
    – United MileagePlus Explorer: $50 statement credit

    It’s probably worth calling Chase when you’ve got a minute and saying something like: “I’m considering canceling my Chase Credit Card Type, and I’m wondering if there’s any spend bonus or retention offer available?” (Thanks to Sharky’s reports via MEAB slack)

  3. Kroger will do something this weekend that they’ve done every single weekend for the last month-and-a-half, and frankly I’m surprised they keep doing it: 4x fuel points on third party gift cards and fixed value Visa and Mastercard gift cards, Friday – Sunday.

    The continued Kroger fuel points promos have effectively killed most of the major buyers’ capacities for the first time in a very long time. I don’t expect much traction this weekend, and if you want to take advantage of the deal you may find that selling fuel points on ebay is your best bet, which is almost never the case in the normal, right-side-up world. (Thanks to GC Galore)

Cheering for the Tuesday Triple.

There’s a lot going on this week:

  1. Staples has fee free Mastercard gift cards running through Saturday, limit five $200 cards per transaction. They’re Metabanks, so there’s that. (Thanks to DoC)
  2. Citi ThankYou Points is running a 20% off redemption offer on Happy Treats gift cards through July 31. If you want to do a bit of legwork at a Gamestop and convert them to another gift card, you can get an increased redemption rate over the standard one cent per point:

    – Steam: Resell at 90%, netting you 1.125 cents per point
    – Vanilla Visa: After a $5.95 activation fee and ~$1.00 liquidation fee you’ll net 1.163 cents per point

    (Thanks to GC Galore)

  3. AmEx Resy increased card offers are back. The base Membership Rewards bonus must be met in six months.

    – Platinum: 125,000 Membership Rewards after $6,000 in spend + 10x at restaurants up to $25,000 in spend for six months
    – Gold: 75,000 Membership Rewards after $4,000 in spend + 20% back at restaurants up to $1,250 in spend for 12 months
    – Blue Cash: $200 statement credit after $2,000 in spend + 10% back at restaurants up to $1,500 in spend for six months

    Manufactured restaurant spend is actually not as hard as you may think. PayPal and Venmo don’t always code quite the way you’d expect, for example.

  4. The AmEx no-lifetime language links that have been floating around since the beginning of the year have targeted more people in the last week. The links:

    – Business Gold: 90,000 Membership Rewards after $10,000 in spend in three months, plus 10,000 additional points for adding an employee card and spending $1,000 in three months
    – Business Platinum: 150,000 Membership Rewards after $15,000 in spend in three months, plus 10,000 additional points for adding an employee card and spending $1,000 in three months
    – Business Platinum (alternate): 150,000 Membership Rewards after $15,000 in spend in three months

    (Thanks to iheartpoints via MEAB slack)

  5. Do this now: Register for ANA’s 1.5x points promotion on paid international flights in 2022. UPDATE: RabbMD points out that registration isn’t actually required, it’s automatic.

Have a nice Monday!

Maybe you could exchange a Happy Treats card for this, uh, treat if Gamestop doesn’t work out.

There have been a few significant developments in manufactured spend over the last week or so, and I think a quick summary is in order:

  1. Speedway is temporarily awarding 500 points per card on certain Visa gift card purchases, both advertised and unadvertised brands.
  2. Another Metabank liquidation channel vaporizes: the Play+ card stopped taking Metabank Mastercard gift cards last week, and Metabank Visa gift cards the week before.
  3. There have been sporadic reports trickling in for about a week that several US Bank gift cards compatible with paying Citi cards over the phone have stopped, well being compatible with paying Citi cards over the phone. It appears that this issue affects cards with an earlier expiration, so all is not lost.

There are still plenty of techniques out there, always be probing.

Look, I’m not going to say that all probing is good. Props to Henton’s for exploring what meals could be, but I’d chalk this one up as a failure.

Watch for a barrage of promotions over the holiday weekend, especially for the gift card resale markets. In the mean time, there are a few interesting promotions to kick off the weekend:

  1. Starting today and running through July 15, the OnJuno debit card has 10% cash back on spend of up to $1,000 provided that’ve set your spending source to USDC. Effectively any manufactured spend should work to meet this promotion.
  2. Many Hilton free night certificates are expiring today thanks to past COVID extension policies. Some customer service representatives will extend these for you, and I have multiple reports of successful reinstatement and extension of the certificates if you call the day of expiration and ask to use them.

    You may have to try a couple of different times to get a representative who knows how to extend though, and you shouldn’t sleep on this if you’re affected because it’s not likely to work after today.

  3. Yun was the first to let me know that the Upgrade rewards debit card has a new referral bonus program of $100 for the referrer and referred after three debit card transactions within 60 days. Upgrade’s debit card pays:

    – 2% at drug stores, gas, subscriptions, restaurants, and utilities
    – 1% everywhere else (including PIN transactions)

    Nearside’s 2.2% cash back debit card is currently more interesting, but at the end of 2022 their rewards rate will also be 1% so it may be worth grabbing a $100 sign-up bonus from Upgrade in anticipation of that if you’re in the rewards debit game.

  4. The Citi Shop Your Way Rewards Mastercard, a MEAB Unsung Hero, has a new targeted offer for 15% back in statement credits on gas, grocery, and restaurant spend up to $90 for each month between July and September. (I got and maximized the same offer for April through June too.)

    Check your inbox for email with the subject: “[NAME], activate your limited-time statement credits offer now”

Finally, I’m going to be like a normal blogger for a second and vent about something that none of you care about and isn’t related to the site’s mission — sorry in advance: The Crown City Classic is a 7.4 mile race for July 4 (7/4), and it’s something that P2 and I have participated in for years. This year though, they moved it to July 2 because reasons, and we didn’t figure that out until a week ago after our travel was already booked. Why do I bring it up? Always double check dates for events that you’re traveling to. I wish I had.

Have a nice holiday weekend!

The Crown City Classic race organizers trying to figure out exactly when 7/4 is.

Gift cards come in two varieties, roughly speaking:

  • Closed loop, which can be used only at one or a small hand-full of stores, for example:
  • Open loop, which can be used at essentially any US store that takes a credit card:

One of the least talked about unicorn factories in manufactured spend is a store that will let you convert a closed loop gift card to an open loop gift card, and even better if the closed loop gift card can often be bought at a discount. Some now-defunct examples from the past:

Unfortunately, now there’s another we can add to the list: Bed, Bath, and Beyond. First reported a couple of months ago by Stephen at GC Galore and now confirmed by multiple reports nationwide, Bed, Bath, and Beyond has removed all third party gift cards from their stores. BB&B gift cards can often be found for a 20%+ discount, so this is a big hit for a technique that’s been working for over a decade.

Not all hope is lost though, unicorn stores still exist. Maybe next time you’ve got a Happy Card or a random third party gift card, try and buy another gift card with it and see what happens. Good luck!

Ok, so technically Sears may still be working, but first you have to find a Sears that doesn’t look like this.

The Deal

Meijer is running its best promotion for a manufactured spender, an instant 10% discount on $500 in purchased gift cards after clipping the digital coupon. The sale runs today and tomorrow, limit one per MPerks account. The deal excludes a few major gift card resale brands like Apple and Amazon, but does work on others like Nike, Home Depot, Adidas, Best Buy, and Disney.

There are years where it’s been worth traveling to Meijer land just to take advantage of this deal, but thanks to effectively a month of crazy Kroger fuel points deals, rates and demand on major brands are at a local minima. As a result, it probably only makes sense to travel into the region if you’ve got quite a few 99 AmEx AU card offers to blow through or you can find a cheap way to get there.

A Reader Report

At the last of these Meijer sales in November, 2021, reader Mike booked a roundtrip flight to Ohio for a Saturday day trip. His experience:

  • He had a little over seven hours between his outbound and return flights
  • He made 15 MPerks accounts the night before, but that only lasted him a couple of hours
  • He traveled to six stores over the course of his time on the ground
  • He bought 36 $500 BestBuy gift cards for $450 each
  • He took his time but believes he could have been much more efficient with a plan

At the time resale rates for BestBuy were about 97%, so with $35 per BestBuy card in profit, he netted about $1,260 in cash and $18,000 in grocery store spend.

A favorite trope in the manufactured spend community is that “all manufactured spend is local”. The good news is that we can just redefine local with a quick trip.

Fly-over country becomes fly-to country. If not for Meijer, it’s for, err, whatever this is.

First, a note: if you’re playing the Kroger gift card resale game, always make sure you clip any coupon that could be, even remotely, related to what you’re buying.

And with that out of the way, let’s dive into the week with a few above-average offers and a below-average offer to balance it out.

  1. Forums lit up over the weekend with news of the Capital On Tap business credit card increasing the sign-up bonus to $750 for $7,500 in spend.This is interesting because:

    – Capital On Tap isn’t performing a hard-pull on your credit
    – The card doesn’t report to credit bureaus
    – Credit lines are typically large
    – They support payments with debit cards from their payment portal

    There are a few downsides too: This is only available by a TPG affiliate link and reportedly it’s tough to get approved without a corporation, LLC, or other registered entity.

  2. Bank of America has been emailing targeted, uncapped bonus spend offers through December 31 for:

    – +2% bonus cash back on Customized Cash Visa
    – +2x miles on the Alaska Airlines Visa
    – +2x miles on the Travel Rewards Visa
    – +2x miles on the Amtrack Visa

    Check your email for any messages from Bank of America from the weekend, especially in your spam folders. I wasn’t targeted sadly, so I’m going to have to live vicariously through you on this one.

  3. Jim was the first to let me know that OfficeDepot / Office Max has a $15 instant discount on $300 or more in Metabank Visa gift cards through Saturday. To maximize:

    – Buy the “Everywhere” cards which have a lower fee and are typically easier to liquidate
    – Link your credit cards to Dosh
    – Try and run multiple transactions back to back

  4. Meijer MPerks has a $5 Meijer gift card with the purchase of $500 in Happy Gift cards through May 28, but you have to clip the coupon first. (Thanks to GC Galore)

    Normally I wouldn’t write about a $5 back deal but it gives an opening to talk about a Happy Gift Card that’s now available in both physical and digital form (EDIT: Thanks to yehuda for the corrected link): The St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital Happy card, which can be swapped to BestBuy. This is great from a velocity, resale, and anti-fraud perspective.

The outline for this post.

We’re all over the place today:

  1. There’s a new option to cash out orphaned ANA miles. You can now convert them to Amazon gift cards at 0.83 cents per point. The value isn’t great, but if you’ve got miles sitting there from a COVID cancelled-trip with no prospects for burning them soon this could be a good way to temporarily exit the program. (Thanks to T C)
  2. There have been many reports over the last two days that more people are targeted for a 20,000 Membership Rewards bonus for turning on Pay-over-Time on AmEx charge cards. To check each of your cards, you’ll have to set the card to be the default, then check the landing page.
  3. Staples has fee free $200 Mastercard gift cards starting Sunday and running through the following Saturday, limit five per transaction. Coincidentally (or is it?), this deal starts the day after the Office Depot/OfficeMax variant ends.

    These cards are Metabank issued so have a liquidation plan in place other than buying a money order at Walmart, Kroger, or Safeway. How are other national retailers treating you though?

  4. The onJuno banking and rewards debit card, a favorite for some of you, is now paying a 3% annual bonus on Bitcoin and Ethereum crypto holdings. I guess that bonus helps offset some of BTC’s 36.6% loss over the last 365 days? (Too soon?)

Have a nice weekend!

In fairness, this car probably also depreciated 36.6% in the last 365 days.