Category: MS Hints

Q4 Wrap Up

You’ve got a short two weeks or so left to finish up 5x spend on existing rotating category cards. As a reminder, Q4 looked like this:

  • Chase: PayPal and Walmart
  • Discover: Amazon and Digital Wallets
  • US Bank: You chose these, for me it was utilities
  • Citi Dividend: Restaurants and most travel

Q1 2023 Preparations

Now that you’ve knocked out, it’s time to get ready for 2022.

Chase

Do this now: Register for Q1 5x bonus categories on Freedom and Freedom Flex cards. The categories:

  • Grocery stores that don’t rhyme with Saulmart
  • Gyms and Fitness clubs, or certain Sweat stores
  • Target

Manufactured spend recommendations:

  • Visa and Mastercard gift cards with liquidation via money order, BravoPay, or similar
  • The Sweat store
  • Bulk third party gift cards for resale (Best Buy, Apple, Home Depot, etc) during periodic promotions

Discover

Do this now: Register for Q1 5x bonus categories on the Discover IT card. Categories:

  • Grocery stores, even those that rhyme with Saulmart NM
  • Drug Stores
  • Select Streaming Services

Manufactured spend recommendations:

  • Visa and Mastercard gift cards with liquidation via money order, BravoPay, or similar
  • Bulk third party gift cards for resale (Best Buy, Apple, Home Depot, etc) during periodic promotions

US Bank

Do this now: Choose your Q1 5x bonus categories on the Cash+. Best options in my opinion:

  • Utilities
  • Electronics stores
  • Ground transportation

Manufactured spend recommendations:

  • Look for the Sweat company’s rideshare option
  • Prepay your utility bill, or maybe take that further

Citi

Do this whenever Citi feels like getting their Q1 act together: Register for your Q1 5x bonus categories. What could these be? No one outside of Citi knows yet, so let’s make some wild guesses:

  • Emu farms
  • Custom marble jewlery
  • Select specialty coaster stores

Manufactured spend recommendations:

  • Invest in SideShowBob233’s emu farm at sideshowbob233.com
  • Consider that maybe Citi is better on the demand side rather than the supply side and spend on whatever

SideShowBob233’s non-stock image emu farm, open for investments.

  1. Simon has a few new Simon discounted purchase-fee codes available:

    – DEC22FLASH35 for 35% off of Visas and Mastercards through December 14
    – DEC22FESTIVE50 for 50% off of Abstract Red or Abstract Emerald Visa gift cards through December 25
    – WRAP22UP for 50% off of Holiday Design Visa gift cards through December 31

    Different Simon codes (obviously) work on different types of gift cards, and for an added level of complexity, some work only on business volume accounts, and some work only on consumer volume accounts.

  2. Best Western has a promotion for a $50 bonus gift card with each $200 gift card purchased, limit five. The $50 bonus card expires on May 31, so it’s only useful for travel in the near future, at least to the extent that Best Western is useful for travel in general. (Thanks to DoC)
  3. Kroger.com has 5% off of the total cost of Visa and Mastercard gift cards through Friday with promo code HOLIDAYS22. These are fulfilled by Metabank, but are actually issued by US Bank. You’ll earn fuel points on the purchase too. (Thanks to Alex Z for making sure I got this right)
  4. Southwest open their booking window tomorrow for travel through August 14, 2023, which makes this one of your best opportunities to book placeholder summer air travel that may involve Southwest, especially if you check for price drops during future fare sales or in the weeks leading up to travel.
  5. A follow-ups from yesterday’s post: The Office Depot/Office Max $15 back on $300 or more in Mastercard gift cards deal still works as advertised, but the extra trick that worked on recent promotions for Visa gift cards isn’t working on this one.
  6. Meijer has a digital coupon for a $15 Meijer gift card with $100 or more in Happy, Choice, or One4All gift card purchases. Some of these can be converted to Home Depot and Best Buy gift cards for a nice profit. Be sure to scale with multiple Meijer accounts.

Pictured: Where the Office Depot/OfficeMax extra trick seems to have gone.

  1. Giftcards.com continues to award 5% off of virtual Visa gift cards with the promo code CYBERSAVE. It’s supposed to end today but often these keep going well beyond their stated expiration (and just as often they expire well before their stated expiration, because reasons). Make sure you bounce through a shopping portal first, and you may be luckier than you realize if your order is canceled.
  2. The Aegean Airlines free miles game has been kicking around since Friday, but it’s become quite a bit more interesting in the last 24 hours: many new accounts are seeing high mileage awards in the 20,000 miles or above range. Why is this useful? Two reasons:

    – 25,000 miles is enough for a roundtrip economy flight on United Airlines or Air Canada between any two North American cities
    – 90,000 miles is enough for a roundtrip business class flight on United Airlines or Air Canada between North America and Europe

  3. Reader H wrote in to let me know that American Express gift cards are fee-free using promo code HOLIDAY2022 (including gift cards well into the 5 figure range). There are two uses for this that I see:

    – Shift minimum spend
    – In conjunction with AmEx offers at amexgiftcards.com

  4. A new Kroger 4x fuel points promotion starts today (in theory), and presumably includes online gift card purchases too. They’re also selling several travel gift cards at a net discount, and you’ll earn at least 2x and possibly 4x fuel rewards on these purchases:

    – Uber: Buy a $200 gift card and get a bonus $25 Kroger gift card
    – Delta: Buy a $100 gift card and get a bonus $10 Kroger gift card
    – Airbnb: Buy a $200 gift card and get a bonus $25 Kroger gift card

    If you buy all three of these and use approximately 15 gallons when you fill your car, the fuel points are worth about $30. (Thanks to GC Galore)

  5. According to Doctor of Credit, Office Depot/OfficeMax stores have a promotion for $15 off of $300 or more in Mastercard gift cards. If this promotion is like other recent variants you may even be able to do better than $15.

A manufactured spender readies for the holiday grind on a United flight to Lubbock, TX booked with Aegean miles.

  1. BravoPay, now maybe known as Famigo depending on where you look, has increased fees for accounts created after September of this year to 10% + merchant processing fees, or about 13% all in. The good news is that using the app instead of the website currently works for the lower fee structure even on new accounts. (Thanks to Ben via MEAB slack)
  2. The major airline portals including Scrooge McDuck Delta have bonuses for downloading their browser extension and making a $25 purchase by December 11, and of course you can repeat this with P2, P3, … P(N-1) (for math inclined readers, N-1 isn’t a typo; Sorry, I don’t make the rules). These offers used to contain language requiring you to keep the extension installed for 30 days, but that’s now absent. Links:

    – Alaska: 1,000 bonus miles
    – AA: 1,000 bonus miles
    – Delta McDuck: 1,000 bonus miles
    – Southwest: 1,500 bonus miles
    – United: 1,000 bonus miles

    If you don’t have any actual purchases, happy cards at giftcards.com have a good resale rate.

  3. Reader Dean was the first to let me know that the Discover debit card is now behaving like a BlueBird or Serve card at Walmart in that it allows for fee-free “cash” loads at registers (who remembers action code 70?). The limits are $1,000 per rolling 24 hours and $20,000 per calendar month. Unfortunately Discover checking isn’t currently accepting new applications, so as Bill reminds us, reread yesterday’s post.
  4. The Barclays AA Aviator Red Mastercard is currently available with 60,000 AA miles after a single purchase and the annual fee is waived for the first year. Of course, spending $67,000 on this card for some Hyatt elites could mean nearly two years of AA Executive Platinum status too. (Thanks to DoC)

Delta’s newest airplane and captain pose for an upcoming SkyMiles devaluation poster.

  1. PayPal has a 4% cashback deal for six more days at Safeway with apparently no transaction size limit. Even better, according to brykupono at reddit, you can cycle the deal repeatedly for up to an hour by re-adding the offer to your account after each transaction.

    To trigger the deal you’ll have to checkout with a PayPal QR code from your mobile app which is interesting for other reasons too, like for hitting Chase Freedom Q4 bonus categories or for other less obvious games.

  2. Vanillagift.com has fee free physical and virtual gift cards with promo code cyberdeals22. These cards are usually easy to liquidate, but watch out when purchasing because lately they’ve been charging as a cash advance on American Express cards.
  3. Nearside, the King George III of banks, accidentally announced on Monday via email that part of their business operations were shutting down in the near future. They quickly followed up with an “oops, sorry, ignore that message”, then yesterday sent a message saying essentially “actually guys, sorry, lol, mah bad, we’re dying on December 23 for Christmas, lmfao”. I guess unlimited 2.2% cashback on debit transactions may not be a sound business decision, but what do I know anyway?

    If you have money at Nearside, I’d transfer it out sooner rather than later (I did the moment the first message came in, I didn’t need to wait for the rest of the drama to play out).

  4. Dell is 15x and Saks Fifth Avenue is 10x at Rakuten’s shopping portal for the holiday, so it’s a good time to liquidate American Express Platinum and Business Platinum credits. Even better, SideShowBob233 notes that Drop has 100 points per dollar or 10% back at Dell, and it stacks with portals too. If my math is correct that brings Dell prices down to about par with other retailers, except you still get the frustration of Dell’s order system for no extra charge.

Nearside wishes you a Happy Thanksgiving. No, wait, go away! Just kidding, Happy Thanksgiving.

  1. American Express gift cards are fee free through the end of the year with promo code BUYMORE, which is useful when combined with the current American Express gift card offer (Thanks to reader Hamed)
  2. Now that yesterday’s super-secret Target gift card ship has sailed, let’s recap what happened so you have an example for future probing. There was a particular three pack of $20 Visa gift cards with an $8.50 load fee, but when you balance checked the gift cards, each actually had $60. So, you paid $68.50 and had $180 in Visa gift cards.

    Lesson: Always balance check gift cards after you buy them.

  3. Do this now (if you hold a Chase Sapphire Reserve): Register for two years of Lyft pink:

    – Open the mobile app
    – Set your default payment card to the Sapphire Reserve
    – Click “Lyft Pink” under the menu
    – Check “I agree” and click Activate Now

    Set a reminder in your phone to cancel the service on November 1, 2024 too to make sure that they don’t auto-bill you in two years.

  4. Check for an email from Capital One Shopping for a targeted offer of 24% back at Giftcards.com, up to $2,000 in spend.

The Capital One Shopping portal 24% back deal. (iykyk)

Tuesday Gift Cards

Apparently this is the week of open loop gift card deals, what a time to be alive! Here are a few more because yesterday wasn’t enough:

  1. Gift Card Granny has free shipping on Visa and Mastercard gift cards through November 24 with promo code NOV22. These are Sutton bank gift cards and typically easy to liquidate in person.
  2. American Express has several offers for a discount at amexgiftcard.com:

    – $50 back on $1,000 or more
    – $20 back on $300 or more
    – $10 back on $100 or more

    These are American Express gift cards so money order liquidation and other typical in-store techniques are out. Also, yes, it’s safe to buy these with an American Express. (Thanks to DoC)

  3. I heard from many of you that there’s a special blend of gift cards for sale in store at Target that are quite rewarding for manufactured spend. Always be probing.
  4. Starting tomorrow and running for a week, Hy-Vee stores will have $10 back on $150 or more in Visa gift cards, and likely that means $30 back on a $500 Visa gift card so go nuts.

    Remember that if your family lives in flyover country Hy-Vee territory and you’re visiting for Thanksgiving, this might be a good money-making escape.

Liquidation

Since those American Express cards in particular are hard to liquidate, let’s discuss a few strategies that effectively always work on gift cards from home:

  • BravoPay (high fee though, effectively 3.5%)
  • Kiva (can be zero fee, but there’s a risk of loss and a time component)
  • Services designed for corporate bill payment

There are other options too, and they’re almost always a FinTech that’s trying to transfer money from investor’s bank accounts to yours solve a problem that didn’t exactly need solving, so look around.

Another form of liquidation, FTX’s FTT coin. (Too soon?)

  1. Discover bank has gameable savings account bonus promotion running through this evening. It’s interesting for three reasons:

    – The bonus posts within two or three business days
    – You can deposit and withdraw the same money multiple times but deposits are cumulative for the bonus
    – There’s no time requirement for holding the funds at the bank

    The downside? There’s once-per-lifetime language. The offers are $450 for $35,000 in deposits in 30 days, with code BONUS1022E, or $500 for $50,000 in deposits in 30 days with code BONUS1122D. (Thanks to DoC)

  2. There are multiple holiday shopping portal bonuses through November 21, though because today is election day let’s call them “politician upset over loss” shopping portal bonuses.

    – 5,000 United MileagePlus miles for spending $1,200 or more
    – 4,000 AA miles for spending $1,500 or more
    – 3,500 Southwest Rapid Rewards for spending $1,000 or more
    – 2,000 Delta SkyMiles for spending $800 or more
    – 1,500 Alaska MileagePlan miles for spending $650 or more

    These are somewhat gameable, one of several examples includes purchasing gift cards at GiftCards.com. On that note, Miles shared that the language in the terms and conditions at for GiftCards.com has changed on most portals from “Orders over $2,000 max per month per customer are not eligible” to “Orders over $2,000 are not eligible”. What does that mean? Great question, I’m so glad you asked. I have no idea what it means, but always be probing.

  3. Do this now (if you have an American Express Platinum card): Enroll for Hertz President’s Circle status.
  4. Chase finally increased the referral sign-up bonus on several cards to match the increased sign-up bonuses available on the public applications, so now’s a good time to refer P2 for a new card, or find a new friend and make their day by using their referral. You can generate referral links here. The cards:

    – Ink Cash: 90,000 Ultimate Rewards
    – Ink Unlimited: 90,000 Ultimate Rewards
    – Southwest Plus, Premier, Priority, and Business: 75,000 Rapid Rewards Points

    There’s also an increased sign-up bonus for the United Business card for 150,000 MileagePlus miles after spending $20,000 in three months. If this one is on your radar I’d wait a week or two to see if it also becomes available via referral before committing.

Have a quadruple decker slice of something in honor of politician upset over loss shopping portal bonus day.