Category: Wisdom

  1. The Citi Shop Your Way Rewards Mastercard, an original MEAB Unsung Hero, now allows for points redemption to Visa e-gift cards at the same redemption rate as other gift cards, making this the new best points cash-out option and making the card even more valuable.
  2. Lowe’s has an in-store promotion for a $15 Lowe’s gift card with the purchase of a $200 Mastercard gift card. The Mastercards are Pathward and have an activation fee of $5.95 to $7.95 depending on the variety, and the resale rates on the Lowe’s card are between 82% and 84% making this a profitable deal without considering credit card rewards.

    There’s a limit of two per $15 Lowe’s cards per email address, but someone told me it’s possible to get more than one email address. I know, sounds weird right?
  3. Fake Points Travel Blogger notes that the Bilt credit card company (Bilt Technologies, Inc) is suing another company also named Bilt (technically BILT, Inc) over trademark infringement for a mobile app that’s existed longer than credit card company, and that lawsuit spawned a counter-suit. Also revealed in court filings is that since its inception, the credit card Bilt has made a total of $41.4 million in revenue through January of this year.

    The action item on this one? Start thinking up new names for the Bilt rewards program and share them around your circles. I can’t wait to hear what you come up with.
  4. Reader Kevin was the first to let me know that there’s good (?) news to go along with yesterday’s bad news that Walmart has $3.74 load fees BlueBird cards: You can now load BlueBird cards at Family Dollar fee-free, just like with Serve cards.
  5. You’d better sit down for this, because I think you’re going to be blown away, err, wait. The opposite actually:

    Staples will be selling fee free $200 Visa gift cards in-store starting Sunday and running through the following Saturday, limit eight per transaction. As usual, try for multiple transactions back-to-back to minimize the time spent in a 12,000 square foot store manned by two employees, one of whom is in the back room watching TikTok.
  6. American Express’s Delta co-brand cards have increased sign up bonuses:

    – Personal Gold: 75,000 SkyMiles after $2,000 spend in six months
    – Personal Platinum: 75,000 SkyMiles and 10,000 MQM after $5,000 spend in six months
    – Personal Reserve: 100,000 SkyMiles and 10,000 MQM after $5,000 spend in six months

    AmEx used their random number generator with these offers so if you don’t see them, switch browsers, go incognito, connect to a VPN, try mobile, yell at Richard Kerr between lawsuits, or something similar until you do see them. (Thanks to rep-swe)

Have a nice weekend!

The real surprise isn’t Staples, it’s what’s at the bottom of the slide.

Remember all those times that your math teacher said “you’ll need to know this stuff when you’re an adult, so pay attention”? For me I guess that turned out to be true, but that was really a function of becoming a physicist and not because it was intrinsically necessary to survive as an adult.

It turns out that having some basic numerical sequence analysis skills can be useful though. For example, let’s look at American Express offer URLs for possibly defunct pay over time links:

  • https://americanexpress.com/activatenow38
  • https://americanexpress.com/activatenow39
  • https://americanexpress.com/activatenow40

See the sequence there? I’d squirrel that one away and try different variations of the last two digits every couple of months for the foreseeable future. Chase operates the same way:

  • https://www.chase.com/mybonus/ink2q422
  • https://www.chase.com/mybonus/inkq422

In Q1 of next year we’ll probably see inkq123 and ink2q123 for example. We can probably replace ink with hyatt, united, ihg, southwest, or marriott (shudder) too.

This trick works on offers, bonuses, applications, and in plenty of other places too, so always be probing.

The next bank anti-gamer strategy: The Fibonacci Series.

One of the famous American Express mass-shutdown events was caused when gamers paid AmEx with an AmEx through the now defunct PayPal Key and a becoming defunct bill pay service. Similar shutdowns happened at Citi when a credit card bill was paid with a Citi card, and those definitely aren’t isolated events, they’re just prominent.

I intuitively understand how people get themselves into this loop, because when a technique is simple and easy, your mental load is lower and it’s easier to push a big volume with just one or two moving pieces; The flip side is that it’s also much easier for a bank to figure out what’s going on and directly tie your activity to shenanigans.

So, avoid the death loop and always use an intermediary when playing games with a bank’s rewards earning card. To stay alive, never pay a [bank] with a [bank’s card].

“What about this one?” you say, trying to catch me in an edge case. Look, it’s simple. Never pay AmEx with AmEx, sorry.

In the manufactured spend and churning community there are plenty of us with dozens of bank accounts from churning and gaming activities. Conventional wisdom seems to tell us to close these unused accounts when they’re no longer useful. It’s decent advice because you can avoid maintaining yet another financial thing, worrying about your state’s abandoned property laws, and it helps you keep your balances more-or-less centralized.

But (there’s always a but, right?), there have been multiple times in which I’ve closed a bank account after it ceased having immediate utility, and then I later found out that a current deal works really well with that particular bank. Depending on how much I abused them in the past, they may not want to let me back in, like at all. In fact, last week I flew to Texas to try and reopen an account that I closed years ago with a bank that didn’t exactly want more of my business, because reasons both past and present.

The good news? The account was reopened after a nice conversation with a branch manager who was an advocate on my behalf, and later I got a nice TexMex meal on my day trip. The bad news? I could have prevented the need for the trip in the first place if I had kept an account open years ago instead of closing it, and I could have also avoided a few hours sitting on an unpadded United Express Regional Jet seat.

So, when you’ve got a dormant bank account, maybe see if there’s a way to keep it open with no fees and let it sit for a few years (bonus points if you run an automated $0.01 charge on the debit card with debbit or similar so that it’s always active).

Happy Monday!

What my United Express seat padding probably looked like underneath the thin layer of fabric.

We’ve been beating around the bush about fraud alerts somewhat repeatedly over the years, but it’s time to explictly call out a principle you should always be following:

Clear fraud alerts as fast as you possibly can.

– MEAB, prolly

Why? There are multiple reasons, but they all boil down to unwanted poking around on your credit card and deposit accounts by someone who’s job is to manage risk and shutdown accounts that feel risky. For specific examples, see:

When you get a fraud alert, clearing it quickly (hopefully) means no one ever looks at your accounts. Side note: If you have to talk to a person and can’t clear an alert in an automated way, you may have better luck with foreign call center customer service representatives who don’t understand exactly what thegiftcardshop.com is and how a bunch of purchases there may raise eyebrows.

Have a nice weekend!

Happy [Rebecca] Black Friday!

If you were a programmer at a bank and you had to code a bonus category for a particular vendor, say like earning 32x Membership Rewards points on flights to Mars booked through Deep Discount Mars Trips, how would you do it? You’ve got a few decent options for how you might award a bonus based on:

  • A particular merchant account and payment processor
  • A particular merchant category code (MCC)
  • A specific merchant name, like “DEEP DISCOUNT MARS TRIPS LLC”

Of course you don’t have to pick just one of those, good banks and good programmers will do two or all three. Of course, there are some FinTechs out there that take the easy way out and do the bare minimum, for example, searching for “MARS” in a charge’s name and awarding 32x if the letters are found in the charge description. When that happens you’ll earn 32x at:

  • Marsha’s Grab and Go
  • Cactus and Marshes LLC
  • The Marshmallow and Vacuum Emporium

Often the FinTech programmer figures out that they’ve made a mistake and will fix the bonus award by implementing a blocklist instead of fixing it the right way, so the logic is: Award 32x if “mars” is in the charge description, but not if the description is “The Marshmallow and Vacuum Emporium”. Because of course they do.

Well, in the cat-and-mouse game with FinTechs, there are often ways to name-mangle your merchant description to side-skirt blocklists, for example by paying with a service like PayPal which will prepend PAYPAL MARK* to the front of your charge description, leading to 32x again.

It should probably go without saying, but let’s say it anyway: bonus street cred if you use one FinTech product to mask the charge for another FinTech. Happy hunting!

The Marshmallow and Vacuum Emporium, ripe for earning 32x.

American Express Annual Credits

Many of American Express’s Platinum and Business Platinum credits famously reset at the end of the calendar year, providing the scrooges among us an alternative reason to like the holidays. For our purposes, the most relevant are:

  • Business Platinum
    • $400 Dell credit ($200 January – June, and $200 July – December)
    • $200 airline fee credit
    • $189 Clear credit
  • Personal Platinum
    • $100 Saks Fifth Avenue credit ($50 January – June, and $50 July – December)
    • $200 annual airline
    • $189 Clear credit

The Triple Dip

When you combine the annual reset with the fact that American Express bills its annual fee at the close of the 12th statement for the card and its 30 day after annual fee posts refund policy, you’ve got a recipe for getting nearly three years worth of credits with a single annual fee. The procedure:

  1. Open a new card in late November or early December
  2. Call American Express as soon as you activate the card and push the statement date as late as possible
  3. Spend your 2022 credits before the new year
  4. Spend your 2023 credits next year
  5. Spend your 2024 credits on January 1, 2024
  6. Close the card within 30 days of the annual fee posting in late 2023 or early 2024

Earnings

There are other less valuable (garbage) credits on the American Express Platinum cards, but the big ones mean you’ll earn the following with a single annual fee:

  • Business Platinum
    • $600 in airline fee credits ($200 in 2022, 2023, and 2024)
    • $800 in Dell credits ($200 in 2022 and 2024, $400 in 2023)
    • $567 in Clear credits ($189 in 2022, 2023, and 2024)
  • Personal Platinum
    • $600 in airline fee credits ($200 in 2022, 2023, and 2024)
    • $200 in Saks credits ($50 in 2022 and 2024, $100 in 2023)
    • $567 in Clear credits ($189 in 2022, 2023, and 2024)

Of course the trick works for any other American Express card credits, or for triple dipping spend caps too; you can get the $25,000 4x grocery capacity on the Gold card or the $50,000 2x Blue Business plus capacity three times with a single annual fee, so be creative!

A favorite holiday treat completed with free mustard from Saks Fifth Avenue.

The Hyatt late checkout benefit is a favorite, but often problematic benefit for exactly one reason: According to my, erm, “completely scientific” measurements, housekeeping will knock on the door and sometimes even enter your room way before your late-checkout time 147.1% of the time. The Flyertalk threads about late checkout confirm this measurement, making it even more, erm, “completely scientific”.

Recently I found a nice solution to knock that percentage way down, possibly to zero:

Put a sticky note over the keycard reader that says “4:00 PM Checkout” (“16.00 Checkout” if you’re outside the US and therefore don’t operate on freedom time).

I’ve never been to a hotel front desk that didn’t have a stack of sticky notes at every station at the front desk, so you probably don’t even need to pack your own set.

Happy Tuesday!

Now you can make sure the housekeeping staff has had plenty of time to caffeinate before they discover this nonsense.