Category: Wisdom

Introduction

The Coase theorem, winner of the just made up MEAB award for “best theorem with the most obtuse Wikipedia description possible” award, says essentially that the value of something can be measured by what you’d have to pay someone to give it up. (Editor’s note: Take a couple of minutes and read the first paragraph of the linked Wikipedia article, wowza that’s bad!)

Example

Let’s illustrate with America’s favorite fruit, bananas. How much are bananas worth in your life? Would you give them up forever if I paid you $1? What if I paid you $10,000, or maybe even $40,000? The smallest number that causes you to swear off bananas forever is, according to the Coase theorem, their total worth.

Making it Real

When assessing how risky a manufactured spend stunt is, the Coase theorem gives a concrete way to assess whether or not one should attempt the stunt, knowing that it might lead to a bank shutdown.

Let’s say, for funzies, that there’s an opportunity to earn 7-8x transferrable points for a cost of ~3%, with effectively unlimited capacity (yes, this has happened, and yes, more than once; no, sorry, I can’t share a play like that right now). If a manufactured spender went as hard as possible with 8x earn on 3% cost, most banks or credit unions would axe that account within weeks or months, and the relationship with that bank would likely also be fried for at least 7-10 years if not forever.

So, can that manufactured spender earn enough in weeks or months to make the play worth frying the relationship? If yes, LFG I guess.

A Case Study

What’s MEAB’s Coase theorem valuation for a few things?

Have a nice weekend friends!

Honorary MEAB award for Wikimedia, Inc.

It’s extremely common for people to arrive as early as possible to visit an airport lounge. Since we’re often gamers and manufactured spenders around here, and since we’ve talked about a minimum monetary value for our time, we should apply the same logic to airport lounges when we’re departing from our home airport.

Specifically:

  • If you’re an in-person spender, a few trips to Kroger, Staples, your local grocer, and Walmart can be done in a couple of hours and earn you (hopefully) a few hundred bucks or the equivalent in points
  • If you’re an online spender, the time value of money probably varies a lot more, but a couple of hours of investigation might open up a new channel that’s worth thousands

So, if you’re showing up to a home airport lounge three hours before you’re flight, I’d suggest you consider how much the cheese cubes, bottom shelf gin, and chewy slightly-overcooked chicken breast are actually worth to you. Look, I don’t want to yuck your yum – I get that a mental break might be worth the spoils from days of gaming. But, if you find yourself in the lounge saying “now what?” after you’ve been sitting for 10 minutes, perhaps consider using the early lounge time to earn something or learn something instead, and you can use some of that to buy yourself a nice meal that hasn’t been sitting under a heat lamp for six hours.

*None of this advice applies if you live in Tokyo and regularly have access to the JAL F lounge, you’re in Frankfurt and regularly flying Lufthansa F, or you live in LA and have regular access to the Qantas First lounge. All of you get a pass.

Concept for new AA Admiral’s club pre-flight meals at the future, Lubbock TX club.

Very few companies have a monolithic technology stack. That means you’ll often find different behavior with:

  • Mobile apps versus a website
  • Older terminal hardware versus newer hardware
  • Android apps versus iOS apps
  • Version 1.0 versus version 1.1

Ok cool. How about a few specific examples?

  • FlyingBlue will show different pricing and availability on AirFrance’s site than KLM’s
  • Turkish Airlines fails to ticket some itineraries on desktop, but they’re easily bookable in the app
  • Older Walmart terminals behave differently than newer terminals
  • Some Kroger registers auto-drain cards, others won’t
  • Old school bill payment platforms charge different fees based on what you use to start a payment

Ok, cool again. Now why should you care?

  • Different technologies get different results, which leads to conflicting data points. Not all conflicts are easily explained by different technology stacks, but a surprising number are
  • Fees, funding methods, and functionality often differ. Can’t get that payment to go through on the desktop? Maybe hit up the mobile app. Mobile app doesn’t work? How about the prior version?

Good luck, and have a nice weekend!

Even shoes have different technology stacks.

One of the common questions I got routinely when American Express had a referral bonus for 10x on up to $25,000 in dining spend was: How risky is maxing out 10x multiple times? My answer was typically something like “I don’t have any special insight into American Express’s RAT and fraud teams, but my guess is the risk is relatively very low”. What gave me the confidence to say that? Two things:

  • Unchecked bravado and unsubstantiated sense of self worth
  • Knowing who was paying

Without trying to go into boring accounting stuff at big companies (or exciting accounting stuff if you’re the approximately 20% of churners who made a career in accounting): not all expenses are created equal. Roughly speaking, you can classify most expenses in two-ways:

  • Variable costs (electricity bills, Membership Rewards payouts, STK Dining expenses)
  • Fixed cost (lease, advertising campaign, salaries, etc)

American Express’s RAT and fraud teams are trying to combat variable cost spikes caused by card-member usage patterns, and causing those spikes is usually what gets you in trouble. On the other hand, promotions like 10x on dining for up to $25,000 in spend is a marketing promotion with a (presumably) fixed / maximum budget attached to the marketing department. RAT and fraud teams, for better or worse, just aren’t looking at what happens to marketing’s fixed cost budget. Ergo, low risk.

We’re always playing a game with imperfect knowledge about the other side’s motivations and desires, but thinking about who’s paying for a particular play is a good proxy for risk in a game filled with imperfect knowledge.

The official MEAB coffee mug.

One of my favorite sayings is “there’s always somebody hitting a deal harder than you”. Of course logically this can’t be true because there’s a heaviest hitter for everything, but it’s right for all but one of everyone so it’s close enough, the same way that in physics, π = 3 is close enough for most estimates and assuming the shape of a cow is roughly spherical is usually good enough.

I’d like to offer a corollary to the heavy hitter hypothesis:

There’s always a better version of deal than the one you’re hitting.

You can sometimes find these deals by stacking things in a line, like by earning 2% for buying something with a Citi Double Cash and earning additional spread by paying your bill using a spread on a payment service or by getting even trickier. Other times, you can find these deals at your local credit union; they may offer a grocery card that earns better than an American Express Personal Gold card, which would be enough at face value. Bot sometimes the credit union also lets you pay your bill with a HELOC, and lets you pay your HELOC with a profitable bill pay service, and maybe has a transfer bonus too.

Always be probing!

There’s always better pizza than the one you’re eating too. Not pictured: Literally any other pizza.

Introduction

It’s been a couple of weeks since we talked about thinking about the velocity of money as an APR. As a quick reminder, when you make a spread for moving money around, you can think of the profit in terms of simple APR as:

APR = spread * banking_days / settlement_time

In the example from last time, a spread of 0.65% gave an effective simple APR of 54.6%.

Making it More Complex and Accurate

But, when you’re earning a spread, you’ve got that spread to invest after it’s paid out too which makes simple APR tell an under-optimistic story: Basically, if you earn $650 for moving $100,000, next time you’ll have $100,650 to move, so you’ll earn a bigger payout if you reinvest your earnings. Assuming you’re paid on some frequency we’ll call payout_frequency, we’ve got effectively a compounding APR (APRc) formula that tells a more complete story (editor’s note: if the formula isn’t rendering properly, check the web site here):

{APR}_C = \left(1 + \frac{{spread} \times {banking\_days}}{payout\_frequency \times {settlement\_time}}\right)^{payout\_frequency} - 1

As my super annoying physics and math professors used to say in college, the derivation of that formula is left as an exercise to the reader. Of course it’s not super annoying when I do it, it’s cute right? Right?

Putting that all together with the numbers from last time, spread = 0.65%, banking days = 252, settlement time = 3 (avoid kiting), and payout_frequency = 12 (monthly), we get a compound APR of 70.6%. If you find a spread that pays out every time you move money, payout_frequency becomes 252 and, you’ll net even more with an effective APRc of 72.5%.

Conclusion

A small spread can look unappealing and make your brain flash a 🤏 emoji, but a small number compounded together a bunch of times can still turn into a big number. Obviously if you can do better than 0.65% on your spread of profit – fees (which you often can), then things look even better.

Happy Monday friends!

MEAB in a few decades; just like present MEAB, except older.

As a teen I worked at Albertsons for a year or two (and frankly sometimes I still feel like I work for them in a different, manufactured-spend like, capacity). One day on the job I loaded groceries into the trunk of a new car for a finance guy in a snazzy suit. He offered some life advice from the world of finance:

It takes just as long to do a big deal as it does to do a small deal.

– Snazzy suited finance guy

That’s absolutely true in most business deals, but often it’s not true in manufactured spend. For example:

  • You can sometimes send well into five figures using a bill pay service in 30 seconds
  • Waiting in line at Walmart to buy a $500 money order can take 10 minutes
  • Talking to a credit card company’s robot to try and push a payment through can take 6 minutes
  • Scrolling through a bunch of lame BankAmeriDeals double cash back offers for one that’s gameable (and will be hard to find) might take 5 minutes

So, I’d like to offer a suggestion: For any manufactured spend techniques you’re active in, start to build a mental model for two things:

  • How much time it’ll take
  • How much you’ll earn

With that mental model, you’re in a good position to know roughly what you’re wage per minute is for any given activity, and you’ve got a quick way to decide whether something is worth scaling or even worth your time.

Happy Tuesday!

Taking advice from a snazzy suited finance guy is never a bad idea right?

Introduction

At MEAB, we encourage churners to think about bank bonuses in terms of simple APR: for example, a $300 bonus on $30,000 deposited for 60 days is effectively an APR of roughly 6% (about $300/$30,000 * 365/60 * 100%). When savings accounts already earn 5.5% or above, this bonus almost certainly isn’t worth your time.

The Velocity of Money as an APR

The same rule applies for the velocity of money, even though no one really talks about it. What do I mean? Let’s assume you’ve got a simple rewards debit or credit card that earns a net profit of 0.65% for sending money through a FinTech (yes, this exists in myriad places in the real world). Assuming you can scale this, we’ve got a near perfect APR analogy for the velocity of money:

APR = spread * velocity

In this equation, velocity means bill pay cycles per year, or put more directly:

APR = spread * banking_days / settlement_time

Let’s take a concrete example: Assuming spread = 0.65%, banking days = 252, and settlement time = 3 (avoid kiting), we get:

APR = 0.65% * 252 / 3 = 54.6%

54.6% effective simple APR!

Conclusion

Moving money repeatedly with even a small spread has a huge effective APR, which you should keep in mind when deciding whether to park money in a high yield savings account, work on a bank bonus, or to scale your existing operations. Money in motion for a churner is often better than money at rest.

Happy Wednesday!

Next time on Wednesday Wisdom: Did you know that John Travolta = Nicolas Cage? This mug proves it.