Category: MS Hints

Before we dive in today, a cautionary note: Plastiq has started charging higher fees for some payment types. If Plastiq is part of your arsenal, make sure you’re double-checking what’s being charged before you submit.

Now, let’s talk about a few happier topics to jump into the middle of the week:

  1. Hyatt is having a “private sale” which is open to the “public”, yay marketing. They’re advertising it as 25% off of paid rates at “more than” 975 hotels, which to me means 976 hotels (again, yay marketing). To see the rates, use promo code PRIVATE, book by March 22, and stay in April or May.

    Despite the snark there are a few good options so it’s worth checking any paid bookings you’ve got to see if you can lock in a lower rate. (Thanks to iheartpoints via the MEAB Slack)

  2. Do this now: Register for Choice Hotels’ newest bonus offer for between 5,000 and 8,000 points after two stays by May 8. Despite my warranted misgivings about Econolodge there is value to be had in the Choice Hotels program, largely with stays in the Ascent Collection booked on points from Citi ThankYou Point transfers.
  3. Coin season 2022 is starting tomorrow at the US Mint with the 2022 American Eagle Gold Proof Four-Coin Set (22EF). Right now the cost of the coin will be somewhere around $5,000, and commissions are likely to be in the $300 to $400 range. The play is to order a coin-set to your house and resell it to a dealer for more than it cost; typically you lock the price and commitment in before you order.

    These are good manufactured spend opportunities, especially because you’re being paid approximately a small credit card bonus sized commission for your trouble. I’m not specifically endorsing any buyer, but the following are reputable and you may want to onboard with them today if you want to take part tomorrow:

    – Amit’s Coin Buying Group (email or WhatsApp)
    – Boxy’s Resale Group (Discord, paid group, but the trial lasts through the coin sale)
    – DCB’s Buying Group (email or WhatsApp)
    – Vinh’s Coin Buying Group (Web)

Good luck out there!

Plastiq.

It’s time to register for Q2 rotating category bonuses, and you should probably register now so you don’t forget to do it later:

Manufactured spend strategies for each:

  • Target:
  • Gas stations:
    • Buy Visa or Mastercard gift cards at Speedway, 7-11, or another friendly chain
    • Watch for bonus rewards points at Speedway and buy BestBuy gift cards for resale
  • Drug stores:
  • Grocery stores:
    • Buy Visa or Mastercard gift cards
    • Buy third party gift cards for resale when they’re earning good grocery rewards
  • Utilities:
    • Overpay your electricity, power, or gas bill and ask for a refund check
  • Electronics stores:
  • Amazon
    • Buy Visa or MasterCard gift cards
    • Buy items to ship to buyer’s clubs for reimbursement, especially Apple products at Amazon

Of course there’s always the boring way out, spending on things you need at stores you’d normally go to anyway. But that’s not very (as my daughter would say) #girlboss now is it?

Digging for gift card deals at Walgreens, otherwise known as Tuesday.

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.

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.

Targeted.

Let’s get a little meta today:

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:

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.

Introduction

Stockpile has been a bastion of manufactured spend opportunities since at least 2017; let’s count some of the ways:

Underground MS

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.

A car bumper that's broken but held together with shoelace stile stitching.
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.

(Thanks to DoC)

I meant “monster credit card offer”, not “scary monster credit card”. At least you can distract it with a Gift of College card.