Category: Quick Hits

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.

1. Citi has a 15% discount on Apple gift card ThankYou Point redemptions and the spot rate for Apple gift card resale rates is in the 91-93% range, so there’s a spread to push your redemption value up by about 8% (100% / 85% * 93%). In other words, you’ll be getting about 1.08 cents per point by using Apple gift cards as a middle-currency.

2. Visible is at $50 cash-back or 5,000 Membership Rewards points on Rakuten as of this writing. With a Ting SIM card and Visible’s $50 back on bring-your-own-device, you can get a new burner phone number for shenanigans and get paid to do it.

3. The Point debit card currently has 5x on Walmart up to $1,000 in spend in both February and March, which makes this $100 back on $2,000 in money orders spread over a couple of months. (In the past money order purchases have triggered Walmart spend bonuses, so likely that’ll be the case again.)

As usual, if you don’t have the Point card and you’re considering getting one, use a referral link to sign up because the sign-up bonus is much higher than the public link at $100 back after spending $50.

Happy Tuesday!

A Tuesday triple threat for reader @BlueCat: a peanut-butter, cheese, and canadian bacon omelette. Yummy I guess?

Note: I’ll be on a mostly disconnected vacation next 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.

1. Check here for a targeted MilePlay offer from United. I was targeted for nothing on this round, but several offers have been seen for between 5,000 and 20,000 miles for taking one or more trips, sometimes in a premium cabin, sometimes one-way, and sometimes round-trip.

Of course there’s always the United offer for a complimentary delay out of SFO, no registration required, available to everyone.

2. In case you missed it like I did, last week Robert at Milenomics wrote that JetBlue now has a public policy for extending Travel Bank credits that expire between February 2020 and September 29, 2022. The extension will last through October 1, 2022. A Twitter direct message is likely the easiest way on this one.

3. Bank of America has an increased sign-up bonus of 60,000 miles on the Virgin Atlantic Mastercard after spending $2,000 in three months, and another 20,000 miles for jumping through some modest hoops. The annual fee is $90 and is not waived for the first year.

Of course because this is Bank of America, you can play a few games and end up with two or three of these cards with just a single hard pull if you’ve got a BoA checking account and you’re at or below 7/12. Two of these bonuses are enough for a round-trip to Japan in ANA First Class (110,000-120,000 points). UPDATE: Reader @nutella noted that the BoA Virgin Atlantic card is 7/12, not 5/24.

Happy weekend!

A churner preparing to navigate Bank of America card approval standards.

1. Hyatt announced their category changes and they’re not pretty for many flagship properties. Take a look here, and book before March 22 to lock in the current rates.

2. Office Depot/OfficeMax has $15 off of $300 in Mastercard gift cards. It’s not as nice as the Visa deal because the “Everywhere” cards don’t exist with Mastercards as far as I know, but still a useful sale. As usual:

  • Try to repeat the deal with multiple transactions in a single trip
  • Link your cards to Dosh for an extra $10 back
  • For advanced readers, have each card linked to a different Dosh burner account

3. Do this now: Register for Radisson’s newest promotion that gives a 30,000 point bonus for every three nights stayed through April 30, 2022, up to 90,000 total bonus points. I’m surprised to say it, but Radisson has been ahead of the pack on Hotel promotions recently. Let’s hope they keep it up.

4. Frequent Miler points out that the Nearside debit card has a sign-up bonus of $40 after depositing $200 in the bank account, and you get a normal $50 when using a referral link. The card is interesting because it’s a 2.2% cash back debit card in 2022 without a hard pull on your credit report. Of course it can be quite lucrative with the right plays, so if cash-back is your bag you may want to take a look.

5. The Point debit card was great in 2021 for quite a few reasons (including $10,000 per month in free credit card loads), and it’s been decidedly meh in 2022. The annual fee also used to be $49, but now it’s higher at $99 and the spending offers have been lamer than they used to be, which could be a function of Q1 2022 being slow, or it could be that the company has dialed back its budget.

Nonetheless, for “this week only” (lol), the card has a $100 sign-up bonus when using a referral link and another $100 for the referrer. I’d suggest getting one for your P2 if you already have one for a net $100 win. Just like with Nearside, there’s no hard pull on your credit.

Point was able to lose half their money without even touching crypto.

1. Yet another no lifetime language (NLL) American Express Business Gold link has surfaced, and this one doesn’t have an offer code attached to it which likely means it’s more broadly available than the two from Friday. The sign up bonus is 90,000 Membership Rewards after spending $10,000 in three months.

As always, as long as you have an existing American Express credit card AmEx almost certainly won’t pull your credit, and because it’s a business account it won’t show on your credit report once opened either. In other words, lobbing in an application shouldn’t affect anything whether you’re approved or not. (Thanks to Frequent Miler for the link)

2. There’s an American Express debit card and checking account that just about everyone is talking about, and as far as I can tell most of the talk is purely for novelty sake. Here’s my quick take:

  • Almost nothing is likely to recognize the card as a debit card
  • The earn rate is 0.5 Membership Rewards per dollar (just use a Double Cash instead to earn 2 cents per dollar)
  • If debit cards are really your bag, consider Nearside with 2.2% cash back rewards, or one of the other players

If a play does somehow emerge, I’ll write about it so no need to rush out and get it unless you want to be Don Quixote tilting at windmills FinTechs.

3. JetBlue is running some halfway lame deals this week. As of this writing I’m not sure what today’s is, but it’s supposed to involve JetBlue vacations which could mean a cheap way to get Disney tickets or a cruise.

Happy Wednesday!

Your favorite FinTech in the face of an American Express debit card.

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.

Let’s start today with a friendly warning: If you see headlines about thousands or millions of PayPal account shutdowns, don’t stress, you almost certainly weren’t involved and don’t need to follow the click-bait. The shutdowns were focused on accounts that generated thousands or tens of thousands of referral bonuses using bot-farms.

Here are a few things that are worth focusing on:

1. Hot on the heals of yesterday’s devaluation, we have, err, another devaluation. This time it’s ANA, which doubled its fuel surcharges for award tickets.

The ANA fuel surcharge is actually tied to the price of oil which turns out to be a novel concept in the airline world, and with oil prices jumping, the surcharge had a corresponding jump. So in addition to setting award alerts with ExpertFlyer, now apparently we should set crude oil price alerts with Yahoo finance.

2. American Express has a new targeted link for a 30,000 Membership Rewards bonus when turning on Pay Over Time. As always, consider shutting off Pay Over time on all of your charge cards to be targeted in the future. (Thanks to Matthew via DoC)

3. Check for a targeted spend offer on your Chase United cards at this link. This offer is very Citi Shop Your Way-esque in its detail: You earn 250 bonus miles for making three purchases over $50 each per month, for February, March, and April, and another 750 miles if you make all three months. (Thanks to DDG)

4. The offer for 70,000 SkyMiles, $200 statement credit, and first year’s annual fee waived for both the personal and business American Express Delta Gold cards is back. To trigger it, make a dummy booking for a cash domestic ticket in incognito mode and you’ll see it on the payment page. (Thanks to geauxcali)

Four fingers for the Thursday Quad.

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.

A few quick hits for today:

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.

A typical weekday at Econolodge.