Category: Quick Hits

Do this now:

  1. Register your Discover IT cards for Q2 bonuses
  2. Register your Chase Freedom cards for Q2 bonuses
  3. Register your US Bank Cash+ cards for Q2 bonuses

Spend strategies:

  • Discover
    • Gas
      • Buy Visas to convert to money orders; 7-11s and Speedways are usually the easiest, but definitely not the only options
      • Buy BestBuy gift cards and resell, but wait for the market to come back to 98-99% (should happen by the end of Q2)
      • Fill your car up? I won’t be doing this though, I have plenty of Kroger 6x fuel points to liquidate.
    • Wholesale
      • Buy MetaBank gift cards at Sam’s club if you can liquidate
      • Buy 3rd party gift cards during periodic sales and resell
    • Streaming Services
      • Load your Apple Wallet balance
      • Pay (and pre-pay) streaming (Netflix / Disney+ / etc)
  • Chase Freedom / Freedom Flex
    • Gas
      • Buy Visas and use to convert to a money order. 7-11s and Speedways are usually the easiest, but definitely not the only options.
      • Buy BestBuy gift cards and resell, but wait for the market to come back (should happen by the end of Q2)
      • Fill your car up? I still won’t be doing this though, see above.
    • Home Improvement Stores
      • Buy gift cards to resell
      • Buy Amazon cards to load to your account, giving you effectively 5x at Amazon
      • Buy and liquidate Visa Gift Cards
  • US Bank Cash+
    • Electronic Stores
      • Buy BestBuy gift cards and resell (but wait for the market to come back, which should happen near the end of the quarter)
    • TV, Internet, and Streaming
      • Load your Apple Wallet balance
      • Pay (and pre-pay) streaming (Netflix / Disney+ / etc)
    • Cell phone providers
      • Pre-pay your bill

All of these cards are no-annual fee cards. If you have a premium card from Chase, Bank of America, Discover, or US Bank, consider converting it to one of these cards. You don’t have to wait until the annual fee posts either, most banks will pro-rate the annual fee right when you downgrade.

General reminder on no-annual fee BoA cards: Lots of things count as 3x “Online Spend” or “Business Services” with the Cash Rewards family of cards. Also, even within the BoA Cash Rewards family, Visa is not the same as Mastercard. Go punch drunk on this one.

Picture of a person in a black leather jacket laying on the curb, clutching a bottle of alcohol. A wine bottle and other bottles litter the ground.
Punch drunk on 5x cards. Also booze.

I’ve had quite a few conversations about Cell Phone Burners and Travel Hacking, and I wanted to share a few points and some feedback:

  • Reader BlueCat ran into an error while registering Ting SIM cards with a strange error message about service availability in his area. If you hit this, try using an address in NYC, LA, or somewhere else. You’re not actually planning on using the service, right? So who cares where you register it.
  • BlueCat also notes that rather than an address issue, perhaps strange error messages about compatibility means “try a different burner cell phone”.
  • Another reader, Yun, has 10 separate Visible Mastercards maturing. Don’t be afraid to scale up this deal.
  • Ting SIM card packs come with a bundle of two SIM cards, one for GSM and one for CDMA networks. I bought a scratch & dent Google Pixel 3 that works on every US network, and that works with both SIM cards in the pack too. You can double your throughput with the right phone.
  • Worth mentioning again, because it’s silly and obscure. Reader Katie discovered that without a password set, you won’t get Port Out info on the Ting website.

Happy burning!

An aeroflot plane engulfed in flames.
No, no, no! I meant happy cell phone burning, don’t burn your aircraft.

1. Inside Flyer notes a sign-up bonus of 10,000 Hilton HHonors points for completing a single survey within three months. Many of these surveys take about 2 minutes, so it’s a great return on your time if you haven’t already signed up with the HHonors “survey partner of the month” yet.

2. United MileagePlus shopping now has a 1,000 bonus miles offer for installing their toolbar and spending $25 through their portal. All of these toolbar offer T&Cs say that you should keep them installed for 30 days, but if you just turn them off from the extensions menu before deleting them, they’ll never get an uninstall notification so they’d have no way of knowing whether or not you still have it.

3. If you have a Delta Business Gold or Reserve card, check here for an “upgrade” offer to a Delta Business Platinum with 50,000 SkyMiles and a $200 statement credit after spending $3,000 on the card in six months. Side note: I used quotes because American Express lets me “upgrade” my Delta Reserve to a Delta Platinum at that link.

A redheaded woman in poor lighting holding a golden iphone 5 in one hand and showing the peace sign in the other. She's dressed in black with a black hat and painted red fingernails.
What an “upgrade” from a Delta Reserve to a Delta Platinum looks like. Honestly, I’m not even sure what I’m talking about sometimes.

There are a few shopping portal bonuses with easy payouts for March:

For AA, buy a $100 gift card from GiftCards.com for 6x and credit card spend and skip the extra $200 at a lower multiplier unless you’re buying something anyway through the AA portal (buyer’s clubs, personal use, gifts, etc.). My personal preference at GiftCards.com is the Virtual Mastercard because you don’t pay shipping and they liquidate easy, but if you don’t currently have a way to liquidate those, you can either load it onto your Amazon balance or buy the physical variant.

For the other two, I’m going to be unloading my American Express Platinum’s Home Depot $50 credits twice and buy some cleaning supplies for in-store pickup, once with each toolbar. Make sure you uninstall the toolbars after you buy so it doesn’t mess with future portal earnings.

Is this a lot of work for a small reward? I’m having a hard time deciding. It really doesn’t take long: possibly 5 minutes for the AA purchase and liquidation, and there’s a Home Depot almost literally in my back-yard. I also still need to offload the $50*2 Home Depot AmEx Credits too, but I’m on the fence as to whether the rewards are worth it. I miss when GiftCards.com sold $500 Visas and Mastercards, it was a no-brainer then.

On a whim I searched for “home depot backyard”. I’m not sure what I was expecting exactly, but it wasn’t this.

There’s a fair amount of airline related news that’s happened in the last 24 hours:

1. United is offering 25% off of Economy Plus upgrade fees with the code LEGROOM25 for travel through April 11. You must book by March 7. If you asked me (which I know you didn’t), it’s not worth paying for the upgrade unless it’s less than $10 or your flight is longer than 4 hours.

2. Southwest has a decent fare sale that ends today. Fares start at $29. If you book for late April through early June, you’ll probably be able to change it in a week when the Southwest “switch to any other flight between the same two cities” trick comes back. Update: The trick is back again, at least for portions of April. You may be able to use the fare sale to book the cheapest fare and switch to Memorial Day Weekend.

3. Delta Air Lines is now showing certificate upgrade availability on its booking pages when you’re logged in and if you have a certificate in your account. They’ve also changed their T&Cs so that you can use upgrade certificates on award travel. That potentially makes Global Upgrade Certificates (GUCs) ridiculously valuable for Diamond members and their close friends.

They’re also extending GUCs and RUCs (Regional Upgrade Certificates) that have recently expired or will expire soon through December 31, 2021. I may actually be able to use those GUCs I selected for 2020 that expired earlier this year. Huzzah!

Pictured: Airplane news.

A few follow up items:

1. The SoFi matched round-ups deal is back in March. A quick recap: You turn on round-ups in the mobile app, create a “vault”, then when you spend with the SoFi debit card the charge is rounded up to the nearest dollar and the difference is placed in your vault. SoFi will match those round-ups up to a total of $25 matched. Can you guess what I’m going to say next? Set up debbit to make 28 payments to XFinity of $0.10 in March. Of course, you can make payments with debbit to other stores and providers too if you don’t have XFinity.

Side note: It took me longer to type the above paragraph than to update my debbit config for $25. I wish I could always make $25 for 30 seconds of work; that’d be $3,000 per hour.

2. Reader Katie discovered that when you’re activating Ting burner SIMs, you won’t see port-out information on the account unless you set a password. Ting’s IT must be based on Citi’s IT; fortunately for them they probably don’t have $500 million to lose accidentally like Citi.

3. Another round of Amazon discounts is available for targeted Ultimate Rewards cards. Check for the offer here after ensuring that your Amazon account has at least one Ultimate Rewards earning credit card saved in your profile. As per usual, buy a non-Amazon gift card for resale and use a single point.

4. The promo code FLASH2020 is still going strong for buying fee free Vanilla Visa Gift Cards. These gift cards aren’t as widely discussed online as BlackHawk, MetaBank, or US Bank gift cards, so don’t treat them as behaving the same. Try some things with those Vanillas even if they don’t work with other gift cards!

The Citi wire transfer system user interface, soon to be adopted by Ting Mobile.

With the end of the month approaching really quickly, it’s time for me (and I hope you) to do the following:

  1. Make sure you’ve spent any American Express credits in Uber Eats or Uber by Sunday evening. Watch out for combining accounts that have stored Uber Cash and American Express Uber credits though.
  2. Make sure you’ve spent any $10 American Express Personal Gold dining credits. The easiest way IMO is to buy something for pickup for $10ish at a local coffee shop on GrubHub.
  3. If you have an American Express co-branded personal card (Marriott, Delta, Hilton), make sure you’ve attached the dining offer to your card and spend it. The easiest way to do this from home seems to be to buy an exact value DoorDash or Uber Eats gift card on Fluz, which will code correctly as a restaurant on the co-brands. Find a Fluz referral from a friend to make their day if you don’t have an account already.
  4. Spend any American Express co-branded business card wireless credits. I prepay my cell phone bill with this one, and after last year’s Master Value Injection I’ve racked up a big credit. Just make sure you’ve added the offer to your American Express card first.
  5. Check for any credit cards that have had annual fees post in February and call them for a retention offer. I suggest saying something like: “I’m thinking of closing this card because of its high annual fee and I’m not using the benefits right now, but before I decide what to do I was wondering if there are any retention offers or spend bonuses.” I don’t think it works with other banks, but with AmEx you can do this over chat rather than the phone.

    Note: Don’t skip this one! Stu emailed me earlier this week to say that he got a total of $1,250 in retention offers after making just a few calls. Be cool, be like Stu!

  6. Cancel any cell phone burner accounts that you’re done with (and that you didn’t use a virtual account number that expires on).
A picture of 10 different liquor bottles laid on the ground, all empty.
Time to clean up after all of the “food” you bought with your dining credits.

1. Do this now: Register for Hyatt Bonus Journeys Q2, 2021. There’s lots of meaningless fluff content out there about this one, but just register for it and be done. Don’t let it sway your hotel stay patterns because it’s not that valuable, but it runs through June 15th so you’ve got time to hit it if you were already staying in Hyatts:

  • 2,000 points per two nights, or 2,500 for World of Hyatt card holders
  • Category 1-4 certificate after staying ten nights

2. Southwest’s book the cheapest fare and change to any other flights at no charge between the same city-pairs is back for, let’s say “smarch” through “Mapril”. The exact dates aren’t known, but it looks like the current iteration doesn’t have the usual ±30 day restrictions. So a cheap flight booked in late Smarch can be switched to an early fall flight this time around. For a bit more on the procedure, see Spring Break, Southwest Style. April 21 is a known working date, by the way.

3.Watch for fee-free Staples Visa gift cards Sunday February 28 – Saturday March 6. Use an ink for 5x, and have a backup liquidation other than Walmart in store money orders. Hint: There are still a few ways to liquidate these with Walmart.

An image of the continental US with a temperature gradient ranging in temperatures from -10 to 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Also, it sucks to spell fahrenheit.
Lousy Smarch weather.