Category: MS Hints

We’ve talked about Point.app on this blog more times than I’m comfortable with (I don’t think a single topic should get too much coverage), but given their propensity to transfer money from Venture Capitalists’ funds to your wallet via their app, it’s been a regular topic despite that discomfort.

What never made it onto this site, or any other public site that I know of, is that for a brief, amazing, short window, Point let you fund your account with any credit card with no fees, and you could then withdraw your cash via ACH or through other easy manufactured spend right away, given that it’s a debit card. The limits were high too at $10,000 per month, all fee free from Point. There was a rub though: while American Express cards didn’t cash advance, some Mastercards and Visas did.

How did it work? In April, they added an option to fund your account with Apple Pay, an option which still exists today with new restrictions. When that feature showed up in the app, they had language to the effect of “Instantly transfer up to $2,500 per day using a debit or credit card from an existing bank — for no fee.” They weren’t even trying to hide it!

With the help of a fellow hooligan, we tested several small loads with different credit cards and found which ones charged a cash advance for loading. Looking at the charge on American Express’s activity view showed that they were using Stripe to process payments, which is an interesting datapoint to keep in your pocket for looking at similar deals. After that, I maxed out the monthly limit and waited for the month roll-over for even more spend. Then sometime in June, credit card charges stopped working and eventually the language in the app was updated to remove “credit card” from the Apple Pay description.

Lessons to learn from this:

  • New financial technology companies and their cards often allow shenanigans because they haven’t thought about blocking them
  • Shenanigans don’t always work right away, sometimes a new feature enables them
  • Explore each funding opportunity available in a FinTech platform
  • Make a small test payment to see if something causes a cash advance when you find something that works
  • Use the information on your credit card’s activity view for your test payment to discern the likelihood of charges working on other cards, and cash advances aren’t always the cards that you expect
  • Go big before it dies, provided you don’t care if you’re eventually shutdown (I didn’t care with Point, though I wasn’t ever shut down)
  • Keep track of which payment processors are used to discern patterns for future plays

I can definitively say that there are other FinTech companies out there right now that let you fund with a credit card. Get out there and explore, and when you see a new product consider getting it to see what it can do.

Be like Dora, go explore!

1. Meijer MPerks has a new gift card offer, $10 off of $150 or more in Visa Gift Cards through Saturday. Meijer stores carry either or both of Sunrise and Metabank gift cards. The former are easier to deal with in person but there are options for liquidation of both. How many MPerks accounts do you have?

2. Southwest has a double tier points promotion available to everyone, register here before November 30, and book your travel before then too. This will fast track you to status on Southwest, which can be valuable. The downside though? You have to fly Southwest to get the status and unfortunately you’ll never get a first class upgrade, it turns out those seats are always sold out.

3. Chase wasn’t satisfied to let AmEx have all the fun, so they’ve added a 30% bonus for transferring Ultimate Rewards to British Airways and Iberia Avios. The Lazy Traveler has an interesting tip: Iberia is currently pricing as off-peak for the whole year of 2022, so take advantage. (And remember that the AmEx transfer bonus is 40%.)

4. It’s been circulating in several private groups that Kroger has another 4x fuel points promotion for buying gift cards running between Wednesday and the following Tuesday, September 21. No link yet, but watch for the ad in your mailbox this week. The longer running promotions like this are better than the short weekend ones (They’re not better just because they last longer, get out and try some things!)

On a semi-related note, the March American Express Platinum upgrade 10x at gas and grocery has started posting for everyone I know and for me too. You’ve still got a few days left to max out the $15,000 spend from that deal if you haven’t already.

The old school Southwest first class upgrade. IYKYK.

There’s a lot of opportunity kicking off the week, let’s hope it continues through Labor Day weekend (which, by the way, will likely be a great weekend for gift card reselling). Let’s dive in:

1. Office Depot/OfficeMax is back with my favorite promo: $15 off of $300 or more in Visa Gift Cards, now through Saturday. This is a $1.10 money maker when buying two regular $200 Visa Gift Cards. If you try slightly harder, say with the Everywhere variety of Visa Gift Cards and by linking your card to Dosh it becomes a $15.10 money maker without considering credit card rewards. If you go for the Everywhere cards note that they’re locked to specific merchants, but some of them are broad enough to make liquidation a breeze.

Do you have any burner cell phone numbers? Perhaps at least one for each credit card you have that bonuses at Office Supply stores? Create a Dosh account for each of them so you can scale the daily Dosh $10 max.

2. Dean let me know that Brex is back with a 110,000 points bonus through a partnership with Peyd. These points cash out directly via Brex at a penny a piece, or you can transfer them 1:1 to eight different airlines, some of which are actually useful (FlyingBlue, Asia Miles, and LifeMiles all have a unique sweet spots).

I signed up for Brex when it was first available and my biggest surprise with it is that the account is actually useful on an ongoing basis, not just for the sign up bonus. I’ve been happy with it for payroll hacking and for MS in certain categories.

Reportedly Brex will also let you sign up with Sole Proprietorship businesses now, but they may ask to see a tax return with a Schedule C.

3. Stop & Shop and Giant stores have 3x GO Rewards on Mastercard purchases, and 10x on Apple gift card purchases this week. I really like the Apple angle with resale rates hovering at about 93%, especially when combined with a credit card that bonuses at grocery stores.

Waiting for the light to turn plaid to drive into the OfficeMax parking lot.

PayPal has a targeted deal running for 10% back from Target. As you saw yesterday, the Point rewards debit card has a 10x offer running at Target now too. An obvious question: Can these deals combine for 20% off? The answer is probably, though nothing is guaranteed until the data-points start rolling in. So, here’s how I’d play this:

  • Verify that you’ve got the PayPal Target deal (search for “Target” at this link)
  • Save the offer to your PayPal account
  • Add your Point debit card to your PayPal Wallet
  • Use cashbackmonitor.com to find a smaller, unknown portal (unfortunately it’s slim pickings right now)
  • Add one of the following to your cart:
    • A $500 gift card (Disney, Home Depot, and Apple gift cards are your best bet for resale)
    • Groceries and home goods that you’d buy anyway
    • Game consoles for resale if you can find them
  • Checkout with PayPal, using your Point debit card as payment

Ok, easy enough. We likely just got 20-21% off based on whether or not the portal tracks. (Hint: smaller portals still occasionally track on things like gift cards at many stores even when the big ones don’t).

I’ve kinda buried the lead here though: with these two deals stacking, you can get 20-21% off of Disney park tickets (via a Disney gift card). That’s honestly almost unheard of and if Disney is in your future in the next couple of years, I’d hit this one. If you open multiple PayPal accounts, a personal plus one for each of your “multiple businesses”, you can scale this deal even more; but after the first $500 it’ll turn into a 10-11% back offer because you’ll use up your Point spend capacity. Of course you will be able to get some credit card rewards in place of Point.

As always, if you don’t have the Point debit card and want to get it, make sure you use a referral link for a higher sign-up bonus. (The best that I know of is currently $100 after spending $1,000.) I’d rather you use a friend’s referral link, but if you don’t know anyone who has one feel free to reach out to me and I’ll share mine.

Targeting Target: Just one step away from this nonsense.

A few of items to watch for this weekend:

1. Ready for another week of treadmill running with $200 Mastercard Gift Cards? Staples has your back with another fee free offer, limit five per transaction. I like it, but I don’t like it as much as the Office Depot/OfficeMax version which ends tomorrow because that one starts out as negative cost and gets even better with Dosh. The Staples one is “just” at-cost spend.

Related side note: Another card linked program, Ibotta, has worked with Staples online purchases in the past but seems to have died for anything useful (thanks to SideshowBob233).

2. The Citi Shop Your Way Mastercard has sent new targeted offers for the second half of August. I got one for $50 off of $750 in spend with the subject “Matthew, open now to unlock your special limited time offer! 🌟“, and there are reports of other offers for 15x on utility payments, which are honestly among the easiest categories of payments for manufacturing spend. Never heard of this card? That’s probably because as far as I know it doesn’t pay anyone a commission so you won’t find much written in the usual places.

Incidentally, the Citi Shop Your Way Mastercard is one of the next Miles Earn and Burn Unsung Hero cards thanks to its gameablity, monthly spending bonus offers that stack, and no-annual fee. This card is smoking hot.

Sam from Milenomics reminded me that the best sign-up bonus for this card is in-store at Sears and includes a free two-liter bottle of soda 🤣 in addition to the regular $40 bonus.

3. You might be pleasantly surprised to find that your Hyatt status was extended to Feb, 2023. Here’s to hoping it sticks for those of you that got it!

The smoke you’ll be dealing with today, probably a coming from the smoking hot Citi Shop Your Way Rewards card.

Let’s roll with the punches today:

1. It seems that GoBank will no longer be the new blue(bird) as of October 31; they’ve sent an email to multiple cardholders indicating that the product would be shutting down. I haven’t seen one yet for my account, but I do believe the reports are credible. Unfortunately the replacement Go2Bank card so far doesn’t seem to be amazing.

Hint: Allow me to be Alec Baldwin with the phrase: “Always be probing.” You should always be probing reloadable debit cards on sale at Walmart. The fact this this one died doesn’t mean that there aren’t other alive options.

2. There are also multiple reports that American Express has clawed back the 4x bonus points from a prior offer this spring for referring a friend to a new card. Some reports suggest that this is true even when AmEx didn’t have L3 charge data (showing what you purchased). It’s unclear why the AmEx RAT team chose this promotion as their flex, but so far I wouldn’t stress about it too much with respect to other MS activities on AmEx cards. I genuinely don’t think it will lead to any further shutdowns.

3. Cash.app reloads stopped counting for T-Mobile Money’s monthly ten transaction limit, which unlocks 4% APR on balances of up to $3,000. (Personally, I like the HMBradley deal for 3% APR up to $100,000 a lot better, especially if you’re good at manufacturing very small direct deposits.)

Channel Alec Baldwin and roll with the punches.

Office Depot OfficeMax (I literally never remember which parts of that store name are supposed to have a space and which aren’t) has another negative cost manufactured spend opportunity available: $15 back on a purchase of $300 or more in Mastercard Gift Cards. For the best bang for your buck:

  1. Link your credit card(s) to Dosh in the mobile app before heading to the store. You’ll get an extra 2% back, up to $10 per day
  2. Buy two $200 Mastercard gift cards
  3. Get two more $200 Mastercard gift cards, and go to step (2) with another transaction (if you’ve got a friendly cashier)
  4. Log in to Dosh a few hours after the transaction to claim your cash back

You’ll spend $398.90 per transaction for $400.00 in gift cards and you’ll get another $7.97 cash back from Dosh.

One of the frequent questions I get lately is “How can you liquidate these from home?” I’ve got a few answers that I’m glad to share publicly, and a few that are more fragile so I won’t share them here. I will however drop the generic tip that I encourage you to explore around — opportunities do exist. Start looking for payment processors and bill payment platforms because that’s where pay dirt usually lies. In the mean time though, you can liquidate from home via:

  • Bravo payment app: see the defunct Middle Aged Miles blog for more. Side note: do some great internet sleuthing and app hacking if you want better than 2.9% rates, but it’s fraught with peril and you should probably never take my advice about anything
  • Paying estimated taxes quarterly, two per payment processor (PayUSATax, PayTax1040, ACI Payments)
  • Micro-lending on Kiva
  • Reloading your Amazon balance
  • Pay your utility bills, most accept “debit” card payments

Good luck out there!

With this many major players involved in payment processing you’re bound to find loopholes. Let’s not forget that there are many, many more minor players too.

The frequency of US Mint coin deals has been turned up to an eleven recently as you’ve probably seen on a dozen other sites. I want to call out a few things that you probably won’t see everywhere else in anticipation of today’s deal at 12PM Eastern, which will be a nice manufactured spend and money making opportunity:

  • American Express has been awarding points on US Mint purchases despite scares about that wouldn’t after new language was added to the Terms and Conditions of personal cards
  • Using a Citi personal credit card will often trigger a fraud alert, and by the time you get that cleared up the coins will probably be sold out, so just don’t do it
  • You have a better shot of getting in on the deal if you’re logged in and ready 10 minutes before the deal goes live
  • Most of these deals will take about 15 minutes of your time to buy and you’ll earn $100 or more and some manufactured spend for the trouble, so do look into participating if it’s right for you
  • You can scale this deal with other trustworthy addresses, like perhaps those of your immediate family or your own PO Box, just use a separate US Mint account for each
  • If you’re even slightly techie, you can pre-construct the URLs for adding the coins to your cart and then load them right when the clock turns: Take the link for an existing product’s “Add to Bag”, then change the product id and quantity to match the new deal (todays product id: 21EMN)
  • Vinh at Miles Per Day consistently has the best offers I’ve seen. I consider him trustworthy, but do your own diligence and homework and then make your own decision

Before committing to any seller, shop around at Miles Per Day, PointsMaker, PFS Buyers Club, TheCardBay, and The Deal Buyer for the best deal, and make sure you choose a buyer that you trust.

An image of a mint/chocolate flavored treat.
Pictured: Mint coin.