Category: Wisdom

Your email inbox, WhatsApp, Slack, and Telegram are about to kersplode over the next three days. (If that’s not true yet and you want to take advantage of tens of thousands in manufactured spend, see Monday’s post.) There’s going to be so much going on that it’ll be impossible to follow everything, so let’s talk weekend ground rules today.

To start, what’s your time worth? I know it’s variable at any given point, but what about this weekend, the Super Bowl of manufactured spend? For me it’s at least $400 or 40,000 points per hour for manual things (versus what I’ve automated away). Given that, I have a cutoff for whether or not I focus on a deal as it rushes through my phone — is the deal going to pay out at $400 per hour? If not, something else will. Move on.

Examples:

Deal Time
(Value)		 Do it?
Buying an e-gift card for resale
(e.g., Kroger online offers 20% off of Groupon)		 1 minute
($6)		 Yes, if I get at least $200 in spend
Buying a Happy gift card to swap to something else for resale 5 minutes
($30)		 No, move on, swapping the gift card and the accounting takes too long
Buying a console for resale
(e.g., Gamestop has a PS5 in sock)		 30 minutes
($200)		 Yes, if I can make at least $200
Going to a store to buy gift cards for resale
(e.g., $115 in Target GC for $100)		 30 minutes or more
($200)		 Yes, but only if I can do twenty of them back-to-back at self check-out
Buying money orders with gift cards 20 minutes
($120)		 No, everything is super-busy right now and you can do this the rest of the year
Buying something for a buyer’s group 10 minutes
($60)		 Only if it’s a high ticket item for big credit card spend or pays a decent commission
Using FinTechs for bill payment and other shenanigans 5 minutes
($30)		 Only if I’m getting four figure spend or higher

I’m sure on December 28th I’ll revisit this table and laugh, and by February 4th I’ll revisit it and cry while I remember how good it used to be and with the knowledge that I’m valuing my February time at roughly the same as a Taco Bell cheerios-infused enchiritaco. (Ok, I made menu item that up, but 50/50 it actually exists knowing Taco Bell.)

For the second ground rule: Your time is precious, and it’s ok to walk away from everything and spend time with your friends/family. That time can absolutely be worth more than $400 per hour.

Happy long weekend!

The Taco Bell meal in question.

The existing articles about what resets the expiration of miles in AirFrance/KLM’s FlyingBlue mileage program are all over the board, and they conflict with one another at the surface level. There’s only one thing that’s been certain to this point: crediting an actual SkyTeam revenue flight to your FlyingBlue account will reset expiration and kick the can down the road for another two years.

What about points transferred from partners and from the FlyingBlue shopping portal? You’ll find different information in different articles and they’re all correct at some level. It’s taken several months of experimentation and now with the help of Gary and Connor, I now have a proper test and validation set to explain what’s going on:

  • Some partners reset expiration of transferred miles, and some don’t.
  • No partners reset the expiration of miles earned through flying
  • Miles earned through a FlyingBlue credit card reset the expiration of all miles

Ok, but most of us don’t have a FlyingBlue credit card and don’t want to credit a flight to the FlyingBlue program, so we rely on transferred miles to reset the clock (and transferred miles is probably how we got them in the first place). Here’s the scoop:

Partner Resets Transferred Mileage Expiration
Brex Yes
Capital One Yes
Chase Yes
Citi Yes
FlyingBlue shopping portal Yes
American Express No

See the stick in the mud there? Our best friend and aspirational colleague American Express is different than the rest. When you transfer miles from American Express to FlyingBlue, it doesn’t reset the expiration on other transferred miles, and that’s why we’ve had mixed data-points about this topic for years.

Now that we’ve tested and validated this, can we collectively move on to something else?

Happy Tuesday!

The “something else” that we’ve apparently moved to collectively. Why did we catalog this, exactly? Perhaps there’s some golden ratio of crust to nugget meat that I don’t understand.

I recently spent just over a week in Switzerland and although I’d love to talk about that, it’s not really the purpose of this blog. Instead, I wanted to talk about something that I encountered as part of the booking process for both the outbound and the return: I booked a business class award from my home city connecting in Chicago O’Hare to Zurich and the reverse routing for the return.

In it’s eternal crapulance, United often “breaks” business class awards by only offering coach saver awards for most domestic legs, especially when there’s good availability on the route in business class internationally. I consider these mixed-cabin awards broken because it’s frankly punitive to withhold domestic first class seats on international business awards where the business segment is the vast majority of the cost to United, and where the domestic first class cabins are often empty despite the lack of award space. Let me tell you too, there’s nothing quite like flying in a Swiss Throne business class seat only to be followed by a three hour flight in the last row of an E175 with slimline unpadded seats.

How do we fix these awards? You’ve got two options:

  1. Periodically check the United site leading up to your trip to see if they open saver award space on your domestic first leg, then you can call reservations and have them reticket you in the domestic first class cabin for no additional charge (spoiler alert: United almost never opens first class award availability)
  2. Call United and ask to be added to the upgrade waitlist for first class on your domestic legs, which you’re entitled to be on as a business class award ticket holder whether or not you hold any status with United. Note that not all reps know how to do this and you may need to hang up and call again, but fortunately it seems that most reps know how in recent memory.

Note that if you use the second option, you’re considered to be on an instrument supported upgrade which puts you ahead of almost all elite complimentary upgrades on the upgrade list. That also means you’ve got a great shot of clearing the first class upgrade and un-breaking your business class award. You can see the wiki on this post at Flyertalk for more detail on upgrade list priorities.

How did this go for me? Well, because I was flying United I was hit by another form of crapulence: They waited until the last minute to clear upgrades, which mattered because the previous flight to my city was delayed by 8 hours because United is United, and essentially all of the confirmed first class passengers on the previous flight switched to my flight. I went from #1 with 8 seats available in first to #1 with 0 seats available in first within the final hours of my flight.

If Jurassic Park taught us anything, it’s that life will always find a way. My corollary is that United will also always find a way (to break your travel).

Happy weekend!

A picture looking out of an A330 aircraft window at altitude, with a brontosaurus peeking in.
The reason for the previous flight’s delay.

Background

On Monday I was scheduled to fly home on a short-hop Delta flight paid for with 5,000 SkyMiles. As I’m sure you can figure out from the post’s title, that didn’t really go as planned. The short story is that my aircraft had big dent in the airframe from the inbound flight to the airport. Delta posted an initial delay of an hour right when we were getting ready to board.

If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s dealing with IROPS when traveling. If there’s another thing I’m good at, it’s making the best steel cut oats based breakfast bowl that you’ve ever had, but why would you care about that? Let’s stay on topic people!

I have a cardinal rule when it comes to flight delays:

If the delay posted is an hour or longer, you need to have a backup option in place.

The moment the delay was announced, and I mean that very moment, I speed-walked to the SkyClub to avoid any lines at the gate, and simultaneously I made a call to Delta Reservations in case they’d come back more quickly than the SkyClub (spoiler alert: they didn’t). When I got to the SkyClub, I scanned my boarding pass and asked immediately to be “protected on the next flight” to my destination. The agent was able to do that in about 15 seconds.

Flight Protection

What is flight protection? It’s when an airline holds a seat for you on another flight without giving up your seat on your original flight. Then you’ve got the option to take either flight, whichever departs first. With most airlines, you can select a seat on both flights and you’ll be on the upgrade list for both flights too if you’re eligible.

All you have to do to get protected on the next flight is to know how to ask. And asking is as simple as “My current flight is delayed. Would you please protect me on the next flight to XXX?”

Caveat: Some airlines will cancel any remaining flights on your itinerary if you miss a flight (I’m looking at you United, the only airline that’s screwed me multiple times with this), so after I scan my boarding pass on whichever flight departs first, I double check to make sure that the other flight drops out of my itinerary in the airline’s mobile app. If it doesn’t, then I ask the gate agent or another employee to take it off of the itinerary so the rest of my flights don’t auto-cancel.

My Conclusion

As you’d probably guess, a dented airframe is more than an hour long fix. Delta ended up flying in another plane and crew to operate the flight, and it departed 6 hours and 5 minutes past the original schedule which is frankly pretty good for an event like this at a non-hub. I was already home and on my couch by the time that original flight departed though — I got there via the protected flight.

Bonus: Delta proactively gave me 7,500 SkyMiles for the delayed flight without me contacting them, making that ticket a 1.5x SkyMiles earner. If only I could replicate that at scale.

It’ll prolly buff out, right?

I’m sure you’ve heard all about the new American Express Platinum changes ad-nauseam, but in case you haven’t there’s a nice overview here (short version: higher annual fee, more stupid benefits). Once we know a little more about what works for hacking the value out of the benefits I’ll make sure you’re all up to speed.

In the mean time though, I want to offer a piece of advice that will hopefully up your game: When it comes to the Terms & Conditions in credit card offers, shopping portals, spend bonuses, or anything else we deal with in travel hacking: Trust but verify. Here’s a concrete example for us to work with: The new, higher annual fee, stupified additional credit American Express Platinum card. If you read the Terms and Conditions for the card, you’ll see the following sentence at the beginning in big bold letters, slapping you in the face:

Welcome offer not available to applicants who have or have had this Card or previous versions of the Platinum Card.

That’s pretty easy to understand — if you’ve had a Platinum card, you’re not eligible for another bonus. Ultimately if you absolutely, positively must have this sign up bonus or you don’t want the card, you should probably trust what the terms say because that’s the legal framework that you’ll be working under if something goes wrong. However, (you knew there was a “however” coming, right?) that statement is verifiably not actually how sign up bonuses have been working in practice. Despite what the T&C says, you’ll get the bonus with American Express unless they give you a popup during the application that says: “… you are not eligible to receive the welcome offer. We have not yet performed a credit check. Would you still like to proceed?” The flip side is true, you may be eligible for a bonus according to the T&C, but you may still get the popup and you definitely won’t receive the bonus in that case.

So much of what we do in this hobby is reliant on the Terms and Conditions, and certainly if you ever go to mediation or court with a company, the Terms and Conditions will be hard to walk away from. That said, a lot of what we do in this hobby is to hide in the noise, and sometimes the noise is simply just overzealous T&C that doesn’t actually govern what happens in practice.

So, know what’s in the Terms and Conditions, but verify within in the community to see if they’re actually enforced. If you don’t, you’ll be missing out on a fair number of hiding “in the noise” opportunities.

Happy holiday weekend, don’t blow up your face with a firework.

Yes friends, even the firework’s Terms and Conditions “do not hold in hand” term isn’t enforced.

I alluded to some of the weekend train-wreckage that was happening in private groups on Monday, but now that the situation is public and many in the community are affected, I think we should go over a few points:

  • A semi-well known /r/churning Redditor, JonLuca, allegedly examined Chase’s source code last summer and manufactured or found links that bypassed Chase’s backend business intelligence rules (it’s unclear to me what is meant by “source code”, perhaps just looking at the HTML/JavaScript at chase.com, or perhaps something else).
  • This weekend in private groups there was a discussion about leaking the JonLuca hacked no-lifetime-language, pre-approved Chase business credit card links to the greater community as an attempt to shield a few heavy hitters from potential shutdown by overwhelming Chase’s fraud team with sheer numbers, allowing them to blend into the noise.
  • After a long discussion, the links were shared in several private groups, then at a semi-public event, and finally on Reddit. To be clear, I think the motivations were different for each case, and disclaimers ranged from none at all to very cautionary/”this might get you shutdown”. Certainly not all actors were malicious but some probably were and the cat jumped way out of the bag.
  • Yesterday, a wave of Chase shutdowns came and according to several other private groups, they keep coming. There are mixed data points, but it seems like if you used at least three of those links, or perhaps just two, you’ve been shutdown or you shouldn’t be surprised if you get shutdown over the next couple of days.

In the end, I think a fair number of shutdowns happened to people who probably weren’t going into the links with their eyes wide open or with full information, and that sucks. This game can be very caveat emptor and you should always be slightly weary.

Where do I stand in all of this? I didn’t use the links or share the links because I didn’t think they were safe, so I’m fine and I hope you’re right there with me. What’s the difference between these links and the American Express links I shared yesterday? The main difference is that the American Express links are low risk to me because they are semi-public, they don’t bypass any American Express backend eligibility checks, and they’re widely targeted.

My advice for you: Don’t use backdoor applications that bypass eligibility checks unless they’re public links you can find at the bank’s website, or if the links are widely targeted. Definitely never, ever use links that were hacked out of an examination of a bank’s source code, whether or not that source code was public. If you don’t know where a link came from, research it, ask around (feel free to ask me if you don’t know who else to ask), and do some diligence. Stay safe out there!

A stuffed cat emerging from a bag.
A freeze frame capture of the actual moment the cat jumped out of the bag.

In this hobby we’re really good at moving money around from bank a, to credit card b, to debit card c, then maybe back to bank a. We’re also good at parking money in accounts for a $750 bonus at Bank of the West or a $600 bonus at HSBC. If you’re like me, that means large sums of money are occasionally sitting in bank accounts, partially as a cushion for lax record keeping in order to avoid overdrafts in case you forget about a pending ACH or charge, and partially as a holding pen for sign-up bonuses or other perks. (And let’s not talk about the stack of gift cards waiting to be liquidated on my desk on any given day.)

When you’re letting money sit you’re subject to the opportunity cost of what that cash could earn if you didn’t leave it parked in some rando bank account. That money could instead be invested in high interest checking accounts (3-5% APR can be had with just a little bit of effort and some scheduled Plastiq $1.00 payments or with Debbit), maybe in US Treasury bills, perhaps you could be putting your money into buying Playstation 5s or graphics cards for resale, or you could be actively or passively investing in the stock market. All of those things will (hopefully) earn you money, and it’s quite likely that you’ll earn more money in those vehicles than the almost nil interest rate your bank probably pays. You’ll potentially earn more than you’re getting with sign-up bonuses too.

MilesEarnAndBurn Case Study: I’m a 90% passive index fund investor (VTI and VEU if you must know) with the other 10% being my own active stock picking based on fundamental market value and a very small smidge of speculation. I’m often right enough about my active stock picks that my 10% allocation grows to be 12% or 14%, so I rebalance back to the 90/10 split and keep going. What does that tell me? If I had a smaller cushion in my bank accounts and better record keeping about money flowing around, I’d have more money for investing, which will almost certainly outperform my stupid 0.005% APR checking account returns in the long run. I’m costing myself real money with my current strategies. I can and will do better.

Takeaway: Pease take a few minutes this weekend to think about your cash, how it sits and how it flows, and whether you’re using it in a way that you’re happy with. Don’t discount that there’s inherent value in simplicity too, if it’s just easier to let an extra $10,000 sit at a bank account to avoid the mental load of more strenuous record keeping, so be it. To be sure, I’m not suggesting any one particular investment vehicle or investment strategy — do what works for you, but please make sure what you’re doing is intentional.

A picture of quite a few US Dollar bills frozen in a large cube of ice.
A representation of how I’ve failed my bank account.

I have a travel hacking thought for you to mull over during the weekend: Inertia kills. Inertia kills deals, accounts, stores, good cashiers, loopholes, and redemptions. It’s easy to fall into a rut and ignore this but you really shouldn’t. What do I mean?

First a little refresher: Inertia is the tendency for something to continue as it has been, to avoid change*. In travel hacking, having big inertia means hitting the same technique over and over again. If your game is just buying a gift card every day and turning it into a money order, you’re in the rut I’m talking about. The same goes for singular focus on sign-up bonuses, or focusing on just gift card reselling, or sticking to cell phone burners. Or it could be using the same bank account for every single money order deposit.

When you’re singularly focused you’ve got massive inertia. The means you’re not:

  • Diversifying risk
  • Diversifying earning
  • Spreading spend
  • Exercising new techniques
  • Preventing burnout

If your bank decides they’ve had enough of your shenanigans, a shutdown there could cause a grinding halt to everything if you don’t have other bank accounts. If you visit the same grocery store every single day you’re going to stand out and you’ll be remembered. All it takes for the grocery axe to come down is a decision from an assistant-manager having a bad day that they don’t like what you’re up to. They may hold a store meeting to tell everyone to not sell to you, call the police, or you may even find your picture on the wall behind the customer service counter. Believe me, it happens.

When you’re constantly changing your game by switching your activities, stores, and techniques, you’re less likely to be noticed. As an added bonus your credit card company is less likely to be suspicious over buying “$506.95 worth of gas” every day when you call for a retention bonus after the annual fee posts. Frankly you’ll earn more and play more in the long run.

The same principle applies to the whole community; when everyone pounded uncle Tio, he passed away. When Plastiq‘s compliance team figured out why nearly every single account was sending $500 payments, they put a quick end to it. When Kroger awarded fuel points on variable load gift cards and watched their profit and loss statement explode, they stopped it. When the community collectively pounded the British Airways 4,500 mile partner redemption in the US for city pairs less than 650 miles apart, the chart changed.

Moral of the story: Keep your accounts, your methods, and your targets diverse and changing, and they’ll all live longer. You’ll probably end up earning and burning more too.

An unfortunate self-commentary.

* Yes, there’s a scientific definition too, you may have heard of it. It’s called “Newton’s First Law”. However my very real physicist hat is off right now and yours should be too.