Category: Points

It’s time for a companion article to Wednesday Wisdom: Shutdowns Aren’t Always Shutdowns. But this time we’re focusing on deal limits. Specifically, deals often have language like:

  • Limit $200 per month
  • Limit one per customer
  • Limit $50 per transaction
  • Only valid once per month

Never take those limits at face value. For over a month there’s been a profitable play with language similar to the above and the stated limits are actually stated suggestions. Keep in mind that experimenting could net you a few thousand dollars and just take a couple of minutes of your time. Remember ABP: Always Be Probing.

Am I being intentionally obtuse? Unfortunately yes and I apologize for not sharing more on this one right now, but we’ll give a recap at some point in the future to help find similar deals. Good luck!

A store as empty as the direct information in this post.

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.

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.

I’m sure you’ve seen it elsewhere but in case you haven’t, Frontier is buying Spirit. What color do you get when you mix Frontier green with Spirit yellow? I can’t imagine it’ll be pretty. Anyway, here are a few items for your Tuesday radar:

1. PSA: US Bank Visa and MasterCard gift cards have all had their PINs reset by US Bank, presumably due to rampant fraud. Plan on calling or registering the cards online to set a PIN before using them. These cards are versatile but holding them has always been like holding a live grenade; fraudsters are good at draining them after you buy. Hopefully this move helps. (Thanks to Put-Grouchy)

2. Simon Mall has 75% off of gift card fees (including the $1,000 denominations) using code 22HAPPY75. These are Metabanks so make sure you have a liquidation plan.

3. There’s a 20% transfer bonus from American Express Membership Rewards to Hawaiian airlines. Sweet-spots:

  • Coach awards between Hawaiian Islands (7,500 points one-way)
  • Virgin Atlantic Business Class/Upper Class to Europe 125,000 (points round-trip)
  • East coast to Hawaii in Business Class (40,000 points one-way)

Now, by show of hands how many of you still have Hawaiian miles left over from when their portal worked for all purchases at Amazon? Keep that in mind before deciding to transfer miles; they’re not worth anything if you never redeem them.

4. Check for an American Express offer for $100 off of $300 at Delta. For tips on turning this into a longer term airfare credit, see this post, the same techniques will apply.

Spirit yellow mixed with Frontier green, which coincidentally also demonstrates how I feel when I “get to” fly one of those airlines.

Kroger has been running a 4x fuel points promotion on Happy branded gift cards since about a week and a half ago, and mid-last week a promotion for 2x fuel points on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays showed up too. To everyone’s surprise:

  • 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.

After a legion of deals earlier in the week we’re off to a slow Thursday, but there are a couple of items worth looking at:

1. A new no-lifetime language (NLL) offer for the American Express Blue Business Cash has surfaced. This offer has a $500 sign-up bonus after spending $15,000 in the first 12 months which is quite a long time to knock out spend. The card is a 2% cash-back card for up to $50,000 in spend per year, which is a big shrug for me. Personally I prefer the Blue Business Plus card which earns Membership Rewards instead. (Thanks to SagittaandiEstVita on reddit)

2. I missed this in December but there’s a Best Western 50% back on hotel stays through February 6. Normally I consider Best Western hotels to be a slight step up from Econolodge hotels, in that I don’t expect a fire to break out during the course of a normal stay. That said, there’s value to be had in Best Western Premier and Signature hotels in high cost markets. The Lazy Traveller has a great writeup on more sweet-spots in the program too. If you have dangling Best Western points that you never think about (this very much describes me), now is a great time to burn them.

PS: Notice how I didn’t write about the Citi DoubleCash changes? That’s because there’s effectively no real difference so don’t waste your time reading long articles about it.

Happy Thursday!

A typical weekday at a Best Western. As advertised, it’s not on fire.

1. The American Express Business Platinum card’s annual fee is increasing from $595 to $695 starting tomorrow, so if you might want one of these cards in the next month, apply now even if you’re not currently eligible. If you’re denied you can always reconsider within 30 days with the original annual fee attached.

Note that reconsideration can bypass certain things and that American Express rarely pulls your credit, so don’t be afraid to probe.

2. A new version of the American Express Pay-Over-Time bonus has surfaced, this time for 30,000 Membership Rewards. You can check your charge cards for eligibility at this link. (Thanks to stillwaters23 on reddit)

3. There’s a $5,000 opportunity for from-home manufactured spend on Visa and Mastercards (Patreon subscribers have known about this play since August 1 of last year, but it’s now become more-or-less public with multiple threads on multiple forums including /r/churning):

Public.com is a stock trading platform that allows funding up to $5,000 total with a debit card. It also happens to treat PayPal Key as a debit card, so this is a one time $5,000 MS opportunity on Visa, Mastercard, and Discover credit cards (American Express credit cards don’t work with PayPal Key). EDIT: Rob let me know that you can fund $5,000 in a single transaction. The $1,000 per day limit no longer applies.

As usual, find a friend for a referral link to Public.com and make their day, but if you can’t find one, reach out to me and I’ll share mine. Be forewarned: the referral bonus is lame.

Wednesday thought: Is it ironic that the Public deal became public?

Because American Express is still on its New Year’s bender, it’s given us a couple of tidbits related to the crazy offer for up to 1.9 million Membership Rewards points that surfaced in fall 2021 for Business Platinum cards. (Refresher: $4,000 spend on an employee card gives 20,000 bonus points, and you can have up to 99 employee cards per Business Platinum card):

1. According to multiple AmEx call center representatives, the offer on Business Platinum cards is scheduled to be available through late April. Of course that could change at any time so don’t treat it that as your reason to procrastinate.

2. An anonymous friend let me know that there’s a similarly structured offer on his Delta Gold Business card offer for 5,000 SkyMiles for $1,000 in spend, per employee card. Chris let me know that an identical offer was present on his Delta Reserve Business card too, effectively making both of these deals 6x SkyMiles up to $99,000 in spend.

As we learned in the 2021 recap, this offer doesn’t show up online and you have to call and ask about it to enroll, because reasons. So, if you have Delta business cards or any other American Express business cards, when you’ve got a moment give the number on the back of your card a call and say “Are there any offers for adding employees to this card?”

I’m still not sure who’s actually running the show over at AmEx, but wow guys, keep it coming.

American Express’s CEO barking clucking out orders for new card member promotions.