Category: Quick Hits

There are a few grocery store deals that are very conducive to manufactured spend going on this week, though they’re not quite as valuable as last week’s J4U craziness:

1. Meijer is offering $10 off of a purchase of $150 or more in Visa Gift cards through Saturday, which is really just free money as long as you have a way liquidate them — just add the coupon to your mPerks profiles. You do have multiple profiles, right? I don’t, but I don’t live in Meijer land so I guess the joke’s on me? Purchase with a Unicorn Platinum AmEx for 10x, or with an AmEx that you upgraded last week that also earns 10x at grocery.

2. Kroger is offering 4x Fuel Points on non Visa/Mastercard gift card purchases starting tomorrow and running through April 6, just don’t forget to add the coupon to your Kroger account. Trust me when I say that this deal is really, really lucrative. Might I suggest you research ways to maximize Kroger Fuel Points? Hello and good-bye to my 10x grocery spend $15k limit from last week’s AmEx Personal Platinum card upgrade.

Two word bubble earnings, one that says "hello" and one that says "goodbye"
Hello 10x grocery spend up to $15k. Also, goodbye 10x grocery spend up to $15k.

1. Office Depot OfficeMax is offering 25% back in rewards on Happy Gift Cards, limit $25 back per account. In case you’re a Happy GC newb like I used to be, these cards are basically Visa debit cards that work only at certain stores, and there are multiple varieties that work at a different set of places. An example: Buy a $100 “Happy Treats” gift card which can be at GameStop and at a few other places, then go to GameStop and buy two $50 Steam cards with the Happy card. The Steam cards resell at 90-93%, so you can really come out ahead if you can make good use of OD/OM rewards and have more than one account. Often you can liquidate the Happy cards online too, no need to make an in-person trip in many cases.

If you don’t yet have a liquidation channel for manufactured spend gift cards, several good options include SCO GC and TheCardBay. Shane at SCO GC announced this weekend that they’re onboarding more gift card resellers focused on MS, so email him at [email protected] with the subject “JOIN” to sign up if you need another outlet.

2. Danny points out that there’s a really, really great $1,500 sign-up bonus for the no-annual fee “AmaZing Business” Visa Card, provided you live in Colorado or in California. Too bad the scope is so limited on this one. Side note: what name is worse than Office Depot OfficeMax? The answer is clearly AmaZing Business. Why the capital Z in the middle friends? WHY?

3. I had a request from reader Jeff for email subscriptions to daily blog posts, because for some reason it seems that a few of you think it’s a good idea to give me a direct line into your inbox. In case that description resembles you, you can sign up on the Email Subscriptions page.

A weird ice cream sundae that looks like an animated character -- M&Ms for eyes and nose, licorice for a mouth, and bananas with raspberries for arms and an extra banana sprouting out of the top of its head.
This abomination is apparently the Sponge Bob embodiment of a triple. I can’t say I understand, but I can say definitively that it’s scary.

There’s a lot going on with grocery store rewards this week. A few examples:

  • At Kroger, you can buy $100 Visa and Mastercard gift cards for $100.95. Combine with Fuel Points for a nice win. Coincidentally, Kroger is usually a good target for liquidating cards like this.
  • At Meijer stores (pronounced “major” in case you’re a Meijer newb like me), you can get $50 in Meijer rewards for buying certain $500 gift cards. Check the exclusions, but as of this writing BestBuy isn’t excluded. Combine with a 4x or 10x grocery card for a huge win.
  • At Safeway / Albertsons / J4U stores, let’s just say it’s rewards bananas right now. Add online offers to your account and try buying a few things. You’ll probably be really surprised at what you see.
A trophy that looks like a banana on a plaque entitled "J4U Rewards"
“Rewards bananas” at J4U.

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.