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.
There’s a deal that’s been floating around the travel hacking and churning underground since fall, and while it’s a bit fragile for public consumption, I have no doubt a handful of you are taking advantage of it to generate real cash-back (especially Patreons). One of the problems with the play though is that volume eventually gets you shutdown, and because the deal involves a real bank, it’s natural to assume that a shutdown applies to a person and not just to that account.
You can see where this is going from a mile away, right? Sometimes a shutdown is only tied to a particular account login, and all you need to get going again is another login. There’s rarely harm in trying to open a new account after you’ve been shutdown, so don’t be afraid to probe. You might end up with a new account and new spend limits.
This image should really be the site’s mascot. Anyone wanna print up a few mousepads?
I guess I should expect this because rare things happen closely together more often than not, but everything today is targeted. I blame Poisson.
1. Check your account dashboard for your American Express Green and Gold cards for a pop up offering either a new Business Platinum card with a 150,000 Membership Rewards sign-up bonus, or for a new Business Gold card with a 90,000 point sign up bonus. These are no-lifetime language (NLL) cards so you should be eligible for the sign-up bonus regardless of your current or past card portfolio. (Although they won’t bypass the 2 Platinum cards in 90 days rule, or the 3 credit cards in 30 days rule either. Thanks to Jim for the note.)
2. Check your Chase offers for 10% back at BestBuy online or in-store up to $250 in spend. Of course I’d buy a BestBuy gift card online through an obscure portal and sell the card, but I wasn’t targeted so here we are.
3. Reader @nutella shared a targeted upgrade link for 5,000 Rapid Rewards for upgrading a personal Southwest Plus Visa card to the Southwest Priority Visa card and making a single purchase by April 30. This is the first I’ve ever seen of a Chase upgrade offer like this. Now, we just need them to push the upgrade offers into the six figure points range like AmEx.
4. Reader Matthias shared that there’s a highly targeted discount at Simon for 50% off of Visa and Mastercard purchase fees with promotional code 22HAPPY50. There’s also a targeted code for 100% off of American Express gift card purchase fees with code FEB22AMEX100. Now, we just need a 22LOL150 to surface I guess.
5. Reader SideshowBob233 shared a landing page for targeted no-lifetime language American Express Delta cards. You can check eligibility here with your SkyMiles number and last name.
1. In manufactured spend, usually deals don’t outright die. If they do die, they usually come back in a subtlety different way, like Season 6 Buffy. In just the last couple of weeks we’ve seen several examples:
A payment anonymizer product started working just about everywhere after failing in all of the same places for a year
In fact, most of my best plays have been taking advantage of a deal after it died, or at least after everyone said it did (and some time passed). Always be probing.
2.Emirates devalued their business class awards without warning yesterday. Any time your points currencies are parked outside of a flexible bank ecosystem like Ultimate Rewards, ThankYou Points, or Membership Rewards, they’re subject to unannounced devaluations that can make US dollar inflation look extremely tame in comparison.
At this point, the only time I’m directly acquiring airline miles other than by flying on a paid ticket are:
Credit card sign-up bonuses
As a byproduct of spending for status
Shopping portals
The devaluation risk of collecting them through any other method is too high for me. Because banks are subject to banking regulations and enforcement action from the Federal Reserve, FDIC, New York state, and potentially the SEC (to name a few), the likelihood of an overnight devaluation by 35% is small, and if it were to happen we’d likely see changes previewed months in advance.
Happy Wednesday!
Goggles to help you find deals that aren’t really dead. Ok, they’re not strictly necessary but they make you look cool, trust me.
Even when all of the above died there were still several non-public ways to load Stockpile, including:
With a credit card masked by some digital wallets (when correctly configured)
Using certain widely available gift cards that Stockpile treated as debit
With the above methods, you could load $6,000 per week per payment method per player, and you could do even better if you bought anonymous Stockpile gift cards too. Well, all of that came crashing down earlier this week like it was BeachBody stock, with a new $100 per rolling 24 hour purchase limit with any card for funding your account. Currently the only way I know of to get more volume is via ACH, which obviously is a non-starter for manufactured spend.
Lessons
It’s no secret that I love FinTechs for manufactured spend, and lessons from Stockpile apply to other companies:
Try everything when a platform takes cards (Credit cards, gift cards, rewards debit cards, digital wallets, crowbars, etc)
Limits can be per-funding type
Limits can be different than advertised
There are often backdoor ways into scaling
When a company has been good for MS and something dies, that doesn’t mean stop probing, a very patched ship probably still has a leak somewhere
Have a nice weekend and go pound those FinTechs like you’re Gallagher and they’re watermelons.
Stockpile’s repair job to keep credit cards and gift cards out of its system.
1.Do this now:Register for Marriott’s stupid targeted promotion. You’ll earn 1,000 extra points and an extra elite qualifying night for each night’s stay between February 8 and April 20. The points are worth about an extra $5, and you have to stay in a Marriott to get them so there’s that.
2.Do this now:Register for Raddison Americas less stupid promotion. You’ll earn 30,000 bonus points for each three nights; stay through April 30. The promotion works up to three times for a total of 90,000 points.
3. Kroger.com now sells Gift of College gift cards for $200 each with a $5.95 fee. They won’t code as a grocery because they’re processed by Black Hawk Network. You will earn fuel rewards points though. The street value of Kroger fuel points is somewhere north of $19.00 per thousand and you earn 2x with gift cards. If you have a seasoned Kroger account to avoid insta-cancellations, this is a good manufactured spend opportunity:
Buy $1,000 in Gift of College cards for $1,029.75 with fees
Load to a 529 savings account in your own name
Use or sell the fuel points for around $38 (or more)
Withdraw the funds from your 529, which you can probably do without tax consequence (I’m not an accountant, and I’m definitely not your accountant, so take this as a starting point for your own research and not at as advice)
You’ll get $1,038.00 back on your $1,029.75 in spend, so $8.25 in profit plus credit card rewards
4.Capital One has a monster credit card offer for $3,000 after spending $50,000 in the first six months. There is an annual fee of $150 that isn’t waived for the first year. I’d care more about this except that it’s highly unlikely that anyone with recent credit card churning history will be approved for this card. I think yesterday’s $4,000+ in US Bank shenanigans is more attainable, it has a lower spend threshold even with five cards, and the annual fees are waived for the first year.
The 4x and 2x coupons stacked to earn a total of 5x on Happy gift cards
Variable Visa and Mastercard gift cards earned 1x
Money order purchases earned 1x
The 2x coupons aren’t new, they show up every couple of months and have standard language that excludes earning on gift cards and money orders (amongst other things). Typically that language is enforced, but obviously not always. There’s another piece of good news too: the current 2x coupon is running through January 30. That means you’ve probably got another Friday, Saturday, and Sunday for shenanigans assuming no one fixes it.
Lessons learned:
Always clip all coupons related to grocery points
Always enter your rewards ID at checkout even if you wouldn’t normally earn points
Pay close attention to the rewards earned on your receipt to spot anomalies
Finally, remember that this sort of thing isn’t just a Kroger phenomenon; it happens at other chains too (and there are gems to be found out there right now).
Clearly some of you have more fuel points than you know how to use.
1. Sign up for a free baby registry through Babylist via the AA shopping portal and earn 1,000 bonus miles. Of course you should do this for everyone in your family with an AAdvantage account too. The whole process took me about a minute and the miles posted the next day.
2. If you have an American Express offer on a business card for $75 back at Verizon after spending $75, sign up for a new Verizon Prepaid line via the AA shopping portal for 6,200 AA miles at a minimal cost.
The “Unlimited” bring your own device prepaid plan with Mobile Hotspot came out to just about $78 for me when taxes were included, so the net cost is about $3, and I got a notification from AmEx about redeeming my offer a few hours after the purchase. I’ll cancel the plan in about 15 days after the miles have posted. (In case you want a treatise on this deal, see Frequent Miler)
Bonus: I got a new phone number that I can port somewhere else as part of another deal, probably for an iPhone SE because, well, trust me when I say that you can never have enough Apple Wallets around.
3. There is a new targeted no lifetime language (NLL) business gold card offer at this link courtesy of the venerable @nutella. The bonus is 90,000 Membership Rewards after $10,000 in spend and another 10,000 Membership Rewards for adding an employee card and spending $1,000 on that card. As usual, if you get a blank page after logging in and clicking on the link, you’re not eligible.
4. Register at this link for a 8,000 Choice points after two stays by March 12. Yes, Econolodge is one of Choice’s brands and even if the nights were free I wouldn’t stay at an Econolodge twice for 8,000 points. I could however find myself staying at a hotel in the Choice Ascend collection now that Citi ThankYou Points transfer to Choice at 1:2.
I heard from quite a few of you this week and I appreciated your insightful questions and discussion. Thanks to all of you.
Now let’s sail into the weekend with a few items:
1. We’re far enough into 2021 to have good data-points on what’s working with American Express airline incidental credits and you can expect a writeup on that next week, but after a few positive reports we’ve gotten new reports yesterday that United TravelBank errors when you manually enter your credit card information.
It might seem like that avenue stopped working, but it didn’t. You can still purchase those United “incidentals” as long as you pay with a credit card that was saved to your MileagePlus profile.
This is very useful if you fly United domestically regularly because it gives you access to United Clubs while you have a same-day United flight, so you can drink yourself numb on cheap whiskey to reduce the pain of travel on your upcoming ERJ-145 or CRJ-200 United flight.
3. We had a nice three weeks without thinking about those pesky $200 MetaBank gift cards, right? Well, party’s over man. Staples is having a fee-free sale starting on Sunday running through the following Saturday for $200 Visa gift cards, limit five per transaction. To maximize:
Use a card that bonuses at office supply stores (duh)
Try for multiple transactions back-to-back, five per transaction
4. Related to the above? Maybe a little. The final payment date for Q4 2021 estimated taxes is Tuesday, and there are three major payment processors that accept debit cards. The IRS limit is technically two payments per quarter, but in practice they accept two payments per processor for each quarter at a cost somewhere around $2.50 each for using a Metabank debit card (EDIT: Thanks to Gary at VFTW for the correction on IRS limits):
Overpaying the IRS and getting it back as a refund was a nice manufactured spend technique in the before times, but now due to staffing shortages and tax code changes realize that refunds are now taking six months or more (though you do earn a 3.2% interest rate from the IRS while waiting for your refund).
Happy weekend!
The United ERJ-145 makes this cabin feel spacious and luxurious, but you won’t be focused on comfort after drinking the United Club’s “premium” Dewar’s Scotch.
