Category: Quick Hits

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.

1. Still waiting on your American Express Platinum Clear $179 credit? Or maybe, you’ve got way to many of them like me? Well, there’s a slightly better membership deal that surfaced on reddit: Sign up at clearme.com with promo code AUG129GIFT and you’ll get a $50 discount and a $15 Amazon gift card, which is slightly better than what you’ll get by using a United or Delta general member discount. (Thanks to deakmania)

2. Point.app has a new streak going: Get 3,000 points or $30 back after using your card once a day for five days before August 20, though the sum of the purchases have to be greater than $200 for the streak, a 15% return on spend. (Last round it was $100 in total purchases, and earlier this year it was $5, so the trajectory is going super-lame.)

I’ll play this by setting up debbit to do an Amazon reload randomly between $40.00 and $41.00, once a day for 5 days. To help push some of you over the hump for debbit, here’s my config.txt for this one (obviously, you’ll have to put your own username, password, and Point card number in place of the ones in my stanza. Then, set a reminder on your phone to kill debbit in 5 days and remove this configuration block so it doesn’t keep spending.

point_debit_card:
  amazon_gift_card_reload:
    total_purchases: 20
    amount_min: 4000
    amount_max: 4100
    usr: [email protected]
    psw: SUPER-SECRET-PASSWORD-MEAB-RULES
    card: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
    min_day: 2
    max_day: 20
    burst_count: 1
    spread:
        min_gap: 86400
        time_variance: 180

If you’re new to Point.app, make sure you sign up with a referral, which will pay you and the referrer $100 after spending $1,000 (I don’t know of a better referral at this time, though referrals of up to $250 have existed in the past).

3. The Daily Churn podcast did an interesting, detailed episode on an Interactive Brokers sign up bonus. The podcast’s main argument for why this is a great bonus is because the payout is prorated based on how much money or stock you transfer in, rather than having fixed bonus thresholds. Your best bonus under a single player scenario will be $1,000, and under a two player scenario it’d be $2,200. This could be a nice way to move your 401(k)s or IRAs to a low-fee broker and get a bonus for doing it.

The Point.app streak bonus payoff curve as a function of time, trending toward a super-lame asymptote.

At face value, the no-annual fee Discover IT card gives 5% cash back on up to $1,500 spend in rotating categories every quarter, which works out to $75 cash back up to four times a year. It’s a boring card, and believe me I understand that sometimes it’s hard to get excited about pure cash-back plays.

That said, you’ve been able to do better than 5% cash back since July 2019 with the IT card. How? Discover gives you a 25% uplift when redeeming for Nike gift cards, and small (< $100) Nike gift cards have a high resale value at approximately 91% of face value. The math:

5% * 125% * 91% = 5.687%

America loves math, right? Don’t stress it too hard, but remember that the Discover IT card is really a ~5.7% cash back card in rotating categories with the Nike uplift. (Thanks to GC Galore’s post for reminding me to do a writeup like this)

A picture of a dog with about 8 helium balloons attached to its body.
Real-life reenactment of a the Nike 5.687% boost.

In a move straight out of American Express’s playbook, Chase stole the show in the last 24 hours:

1. The travel hacking blogosphere blew up yesterday with article heads like:

“ZOMG!!!! Aeroplan Transfers have come to Chase and they’re launching a MIND-BLOWING Aeroplan credit card soon too!!!1!!“.

It’s true, you can now transfer your Chase points to Aeroplan which is mildly useful and somewhat complimentary to Star Alliance awards with Chase’s transfers to United, especially when 1) used for domestic United flights and for 2) flights with a stop-over. Just make sure you run the numbers on both United and Aeroplan before deciding where to transfer your miles for an award. You’d never transfer miles without a particular award booking in-mind, right?

It’s also true that an Aeroplan credit card is coming to Chase, and at some point it may be something you want to include in your portfolio for the sign-up bonus. Toward that end, register here for a bonus 10,000 points on top of the normal sign-up offer at launch, in case you end up going for it. Just promise me you won’t buy into the hype, ok?

2. The referral bonus for Southwest cards has increased to 20,000 points per referral with a cap of 100,000 points earned from referrals per calendar year. Never refer yourself, but by all means refer a Player 2.

3. Check your Chase Southwest cards for a spending bonus of 1,000 Rapid Rewards points for spending $1,000 at restaurants, home improvement stores, and drug stores before October 31. (Thanks to DoC, though the link in his article doesn’t seem to be correct as of this writing.)

A picture of a drawing pad with a child's drawing of a girl on one side and practice words on the other.
The American Express playbook.

There are a few things to keep on your radar today:

1. Delta is having a flash sale to quite a few international destinations from the US, starting at 10,000 miles round trip. Check Dan’s Deals’ comments section for known routes, or just use the flexible date search with cities like AUA, PTY, SJU, EZE, PLS, CUN, UIO, MIA, and similar from your home airport.

2. Emirates Skywards has an interesting type of promotion that I haven’t seen before: Earn one mile for every minute you spend in Dubai between October 1, 2021 and March 31, 2022, up to 5,000 miles. Register here if you’re traveling to Dubai and note that you’ll have to book a paid ticket on Emirates ticket stock, which means tickets issued by Emirates that start with 176, to be eligible. (Thanks to planesurf on reddit)

3. This isn’t strictly related to manufactured spend or travel hacking, but I know a lot of you went in on the iPhone SE Xfinity deal last year so I’m going to let it slide into the blog for now (believe me I don’t want this blog to turn into a blog that posts about coupons for free bread or about deals on 12-packs of diapers):

Apparently Xfinity has a rewards program and your rewards are based on subscribed services and length of time with Xfinity. I’ve been told that having a Xfinity Mobile plan unlocks better rewards and it certainly did for me. I signed in here, clicked ‘Join’, then had a bunch of awards available to me including a $100 Visa Gift Card (physical). I picked that one and passed on the others which were honestly pretty lame. Hopefully you’ve got something worthwhile too.

And a final, bonus news item to keep track of: TravelBloggerBuzz notes that American Express is starting a new financial advising arm. Anytime new technology and big money come together, you’re likely to find bonuses and manufactured spend opportunities. So keep an eye on this one.

Pictured: The slippery slope of a travel blog posting about non travel hacking related topics.

Lots of targeted offers came in this weekend, I have no idea what makes the last weekend in July special but apparently it’s big. Check your accounts for all of the following:

1. Discover sent me an email offering $10 off of $50 at HomeDepot.com. Watch for an email with the subject: “Don’t miss out on $10 back”

2. Dean let me know that Discover is emailing another offer for $25 back for adding an Authorized User and making a single purchase (any size). The subject on this one is “This $25 cash back could be yours”

3. The Citi Shop Your Way Rewards Mastercard (a future MilesEarnAndBurn Unsung Hero card) has been sending out spend offers for 15x bonus ThankYou Points or 10% cash back on utilities purchases, up to $50 total cash back. I didn’t get this one, but my Shop Your Way Rewards boosts seem to come near middle of the month (thanks to Sam at Milenomics for pointing that there are different bonus schedules for this card.)

Apropos of nothing, Plastiq is a good way to pay utilities with a credit card, especially if you sign up for a new account with a fee-free promotional credit.

4. Co-branded Chase Business cards are seeing new targeted spend offers for 5x at Home Improvement stores or for Shipping charges, up to $10,000 in spend. This deal was seen on the Ink cards in early July, but the new round seems to be targeting all business co-branded cards, like the Southwest Business card or the United Business card. Check for eligibility at: https://chase.com/mybonus.

5. Bitmo had quite the run of targeted offers for gift cards this weekend and hopefully carrying into today. Check your activity feed for the offers, or check this tag at GC Galore to preview what we’ve been seeing. Bitmo is a great platform for gift card resellers because it uses PayPal for credit card processing, and there’s almost always a card that’s giving 5x or statement credits at PayPal (like the Discover IT card in Q3).

If you’re new to Bitmo and want to sign up for an account, use a referral because the referral bonus is usually bigger than the regular bonus (4,500 points). As always, try and find a friend to refer you, but if you can’t find one you can use my link, which I’m adding only because it’s almost certainly a bigger offer for you if you use it but please double check during signup that you’re getting at least 4,500 points: *

6. My PenFed PathFinder Rewards Visa has a targeted offer for 5x at Bed, Bath, and Beyond for the month of August. This one is actually exciting because there’s “no limit” to the number of points I can earn (hah, we’ll see) and last I checked BB&B sold Visa Gift Cards, though maybe that changed in the last year. Look for an email with the subject: “Earn 5x Points at Bed Bath & Beyond!”

Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised to see one of these show up from American Express today.

Let’s talk about making an easy $794 today, spread across a couple of deals:

Chase

A new link has surfaced for generating yourself a Chase Business $750 bonus code, this one is good through October 21 and requires $10,000 held in the account for 90 days. I really like this iteration of the bonus because there’s nothing in the Terms & Conditions about existing business accounts with Chase, so you can use an existing business and just open a new account for the bonus (provided that the business hasn’t had a checking bonus with Chase in the last two years).

If you’re not going to do this deal immediately I’d suggest generating yourself a bonus code now in case the offer disappears, then you can take advantage of it any time between now and October 21. Honestly this is probably going to be one of the easiest big bonuses you can earn this year, easy like lemon grass.

For those of you that don’t have a business, you can just open a Sole Proprietor account with an anticipated annual revenue of $0.00. That said, I’m not a CPA, lawyer, or otherwise qualified to offer anyone any type of advice so take that suggestion as a thought experiment.

Walgreens

Have you installed Google Pay yet? If not, I’d suggest it — my app on iOS is showing an offer for 20% back at Walgreens up to $50 (a total of $250 in spend for the non-math inclined). I’d buy a Visa or Mastercard, or a Home Depot gift card for resale in a pinch.

How do we make this better? For some of you, Walgreens is showing up in the American Express Shop Small tool. The Walgreens stores in my area aren’t showing up so I can’t directly test it, but almost certainly the 5x/10x/15x Shop Small will combine with the Google Pay $50 since the Google offer is linked to the card number and doesn’t require using your phone at checkout. After a Visa or Mastercard fee, you’ll have about $44 in your pocket and another 3,800 Membership Rewards at 15x.

My purchase of a Vanilla Visa tracked in the Google Pay app instantly after using my card in store, so no waiting on this one. That leaves you plenty of time to see what else you might be able to do in the way of MS at Walgreens while you’re there. Hint: the answer definitely isn’t “nothing”.

A lemon grass plant.
What makes lemon grass easy? I literally have no idea.

Two roundups in a row? What can I say, it’s that kind of weak I guess. Don’t shoot me, I’m just the messenger, or something.

1. AirFrance/KLM Flying Blue has a widely targeted 30% transfer bonus from American Express Membership Rewards. This, combined with the Flying Blue promo rewards can really turn into some great business class redemptions to Europe. Look for an email with the subject “Convert your American Express Membership Rewards® points now to earn 30% more Miles!” The one in my inbox had a link, but the link just takes you to the American Express page to transfer Membership Rewards to Flying Blue so I won’t post it here.

I’ve gotten great value out of the program in the past, and I will be taking advantage of this offer to a small extent, especially because transferred miles will now extend mileage expiration for other transferred miles.

2. This week’s fee free $200 Visa Gift Card sale expires at Staples tomorrow night, but don’t worry, another one starts on Sunday, but this time with fee free $200 Mastercard Gift Cards, limit 5 per customer or per transaction, depending on how your store rolls. I’m going to pass on this one because the stack of gift cards on my desk is growing uncomfortably large right now, especially considering that the closest Staples translates into 25 minutes in the car each way for me.

Side note that you didn’t ask about and don’t really care about either: I miss the OfficeDepot/Office Max sales quite a bit because there’s one of those about 5 minutes away on foot from my house.

3. American Express has another round of 20,000 Membership Rewards Authorized User bonuses going out for the Personal Platinum card. Use this link to see if you’re targeted. (thanks to Fryes)

4. Kroger has another 4x Fuel Points promotion running today through Sunday, and the BestBuy market is hot with the release of pre-orders for the Nintendo Switch OLED version. It’s going to be a productive weekend, especially if Kroger’s IT starts awarding 6x again.

Have a great weekend, and if you have ideas on cashing out some stupid Equinox credits, hit me up!

Frankly, I just don’t see the appeal of the Nintendo Switch, but when BestBuy gift card demand soars, roll with it.