The Barclays Wyndham Business card has a targeted offer for 5,000 bonus points:
– 1,000 bonus points per month for any purchase in June, July, and August – 2,000 additional points for $3,000 in spend or more over all three months
Yes, we’re past June, so really this is a 4,000 bonus point offer going forward. Look for an email from [email protected] to see if you’re targeted. (Thanks to Welcome Offer)
American Express sign-up bonuses do eventually post
The fuel points market isn’t as high as it was in the roaring 2021s, but it continues to adapt and recover nicely. Good fuel points brokers are assuming shutdown risk immediately or within 24 hours, so choose wisely my friends. (Thanks to GCG)
I don’t cover things that I think aren’t worth your time, which is why you won’t see anything about $2,500 sign-up bonus for a bank account that requires $200,000 in new funds to be locked up for 90 days and pays 0.15% in interest; it just doesn’t make sense to waste time reading about something like that when you can easily earn 4-6% on those funds with existing savings or money market accounts.
This philosophy means I almost never talk about Bilt, but I’m going to make an exception today because 2x everywhere for Hyatt points is definitely above the line: The first of every month is “rent day”, and you earn 2x on general spend on the Bilt Mastercard for up to $10,000 on rent day. Unfortunately today doesn’t coincide with the Kroger 4x promotion, but I guess you can’t win ’em all.
Hy-Vee Grocery has Meijer style promotion running through November 15 for $10 back on each $150 or more in Mastercard gift cards. It’s Meijer style because a single $500 gift card earns 3x$10 back for a total cost including activation fee of $475.95.
If you have an easy liquidation path, this is one of those deals that’s good enough that a trip to Hy-Vee territory may even make sense (and let’s face it, who hasn’t wanted to see Ashwaubenon, WI?). If you do it in the next three days, you can also stop at nearby Meijer stores for $10 in Meijer rewards for $150 or more in Visa gift cards. (Thanks to Justin via MEAB slack for pointing me to GC Galore and testing that the total cost was indeed $475.95)
Kroger online is running a promotion for a $10 Kroger gift card and 4x fuel points with the purchase of a $100 Delta Air Lines gift card. As long as you can use the fuel points and the gift card this is somewhere between a 15% and 24% discount depending on your gas tank size. Unfortunately it’s limit one per order so it’s tedious to scale, but you can do it in-between Hy-Vee purchases I guess.
Points earning at American Express is exceeding plaid speed. Here’s what we know so far:
The Offers
Sometimes things are available at only when you know to call in and ask about them as we learned with the 99 employee card offers. This time it’s business card sign-up bonuses though, and they’re big:
180,000 Membership Rewards for a Business Gold card with $20,000 spend in six months
250,000 Membership Rewards for a Business Platinum card with with $30,000 spend in six months
Both may also offer 10,000 additional points for adding an employee card and spending $1,000 in six months. To see if you’re eligible, call (855) 531-3491 and navigate your way through the phone tree to reach a customer service representative, then ask about the offer you’re interested in. You’ll have to specifically mention the 180,000 or 250,000 Membership Rewards bonus as appropriate. (Thanks to FM for background)
Notes
What we know about the offers:
They don’t seem to have lifetime language
You may not be eligible for a bonus even if the rep sees the offer
You’ll get a popup before submitting the final application if you’re not eligible
You probably have to specifically call out the bonus to get the representative to acknowledge the offer
Hacking the Offers
We can always level up our game a notch, right? Here are a few ways:
You can be approved for both of these on the same day, so don’t be afraid to try for both
You can quadruple dip the $200 Dell Business Platinum credit with a single annual fee, getting it for Jan-Jun 2022, Jul-Dec 2022, Jan-Jun 2023, and Jul-Dec 2023 (annual fees can be refunded up to 30 days after posting)
After a couple of weeks, you’ll probably be eligible for a call in offer for adding employee cards, each with a 5,000 Membership Rewards bonus for $2,000 in spend up to 99 employee cards or 495,000 additional Membership Rewards in total
Bonus categories and offers stack, so if you can manufacture spend in shipping or gas with employee cards you can earn 6.5x Membership Rewards per dollar
You can probably get a retention offer after 2-3 months, but then you’re locked in for another 12 months and another annual fee if you want to stay out of the penalty box
No word yet on whether these cards bypass the 11 or 12 charge card limit, but you can bet I’m going to try.
This guy closed his American Express Business Gold card three months after a retention offer. Don’t be like him.
On Monday of last week I was bright-eyed for a blow-out Black Friday weekend for manufactured spend, and unfortunately that was a bit of misplaced optimism on my part. Big box retailers faced with supply chain issues didn’t want to discount things that are going to take months to restock and thus didn’t have a major incentive to discount hot items.
Are you ready for Miles Earn and Burn “Economics 1010”? I’m not sure I’m ready to deliver it, but here we go anyway — let’s discuss this weekend’s macro economic picture to start us off, and then we’ll look at the effects on our game.
Macro
The major causes for this year’s lackluster MS opportunities seem to be:
The ongoing chip shortage, which means popular electronics weren’t immediately available to be purchased for resale (incidentally, the shortage was a major factor for the overall decline in the weekend’s revenue)
Kroger’s profits — Kroger will give guidance on their Q4 profitability during their earnings call tomorrow morning. They had record profits during the pandemic lockdown and are likely going to have a hard time meeting that performance with most of the US economy reopened, so they’re going to look at cutting costs to keep profit as close to the pandemic level as possible
Impact on Us
Ok, so what happened that’s directly related to us?
BestBuy gift cards
Bulk BestBuy gift card buyers stocked up on their gift card reserves in the week leading up to the sale in anticipation of the weekend’s deals
BestBuy effectively blocked buying bots for their few hot items from Thursday – Monday (but then seems to have ceased those measures yesterday); this meant it was much harder to spend existing gift card supply
The bulk gift card resale market became saturated, so much so that one aggregator reportedly had a backlog of $7M in gift cards over the weekend
Spot rates for $500 BestBuy gift cards dropped to 96% or lower, and most regular gift card buyers stopped buying
Other bulk gift cards
The BestBuy gift card debacle pushed serial MSers into Apple, Marshalls, Nike, and Home Depot gift cards
Buyer capacity for Apple, Marshalls, Nike, and Home Depot dried up with a new glut of supply normally spent on BestBuy
Non-bulk gift cards
Second tier gift cards (Target, Bed Bath and Beyond, Gap, etc) had great deal flow with many above-cost opportunities
Third tier gift cards (Subway, Red Robin, Dominos, etc) had great deal flow too with many at-cost deals
Buyer’s groups
The deal flow across second tier retailers was lower than a typical Black Friday weekend, though higher than a typical week
Big-ticket item deals (> $400 or so) were more scarce than years past
Resale groups
Many hot items were unavailable for purchase due to supply issues
Big-ticket item deals (> $400 or so) were more scarce over the weekend than even a typical week in 2021
Kroger rewards
Kroger’s 4x promotion hit a road-block on Sunday continuing into late Monday: 4x rewards weren’t posting (incidentally, I believe that this happened because Kroger is trying to fix a loophole in its rewards program to improve profitability, and it seemed to work only to a small extent)
Without grocery rewards at a boosted, bulk gift card purchases at Kroger ground to a screeching halt
Travel sales
There weren’t any major sales from the US carriers beyond what comes every month or two throughout the year. Frankly, it’s a sad state of affairs when the best deal was $50 off of a one-way flight with JetBlue
Marriott had 25% off of certain hotel points redemptions, but the list of asterisks associated with that deal was longer than the number of hotels participating (or at least close)
In summary, the weekend was the lamest Black Friday weekend in recent memory.
How I Fared
I still had a great weekend despite everything — that’s because opportunities that I’ve developed over the year continue to work, and even though the weekend wasn’t as great as past iterations there were still plenty of deals to keep me busy. In the end, I hit approximately $60,000 in manufactured spend over the course of about seven hours of focus scattered over a few days, with the rest of the time being spent with my loved ones. I consider that to be a huge success.
I hope you hit your MS goals, or at least struck a nice-balance between MS and time with those you care about. Happy MSing going into the holiday season! There’s still plenty of opportunity.
A BestBuy sales associate helps the mob of Black Friday weekend customers customer.
I finally got a kick in the pants to write this post after Rocky emailed and asked why I keep talking about the Citi Shop Your Way Rewards card but haven’t ever posted any real information about it. Why haven’t I posted anything when I clearly love the card? Well, I guarantee you don’t want to know what’s going on inside my head at any given moment, so let’s skip the why and jump into the what. The what:
This no-annual fee card will pay you $700 or more a year, seemingly in perpetuity.
I think it’s obvious to about everyone in the known universe that if you could choose to earn ThankYou Points or Shop Your Way Rewards, you’d choose ThankYou Points. Unfortunately, the only way to get the ThankYou Point version of the card is to call in and ask to convert your Shop Your Way Rewards earning to a ThankYou Point earning version, but I haven’t heard of anyone having any success doing that since 2020. So, if you’re like me, you’re probably going to be stuck with the Shop Your Way Rewards version.
What do you do with Shop Your Way Rewards? You can redeem ten of them for a penny toward merchandise like toilet paper, iPads, or neoprene dumbbells at shopyourway.com, or you can cash them out for a gift card to resell. I definitely do the latter.
Value
Here’s why this card is really valuable: After you’ve had the card for two to three months and it’s been sock-drawered, you’ll start getting spending offers in your email inbox and those offers stack. And unlike everything else about Citi and Sears IT, they post automatically every-time. For example, I have the following spend offers all running concurrently and all from within the last 30 days:
$70 statement credit after spending $2,000 anywhere
10x points at Best Buy (lol) and home improvement stores up to $1,250 in spend
10% back in statement credits on utilities every month through January 2022 (min spend $400, max earn $50 per month)
All of these offers obviously pair really well together. For simplicity, I’ll buy 3x$500 BestBuy gift cards at BestBuy for resale and send a $500 “utility payment”. After those two transactions I’ll earn $120 in statement credits plus another $125 worth of Shop Your Way Rewards points, all from a no-annual fee card.
And while not all months have offers stack as nicely as this month, it happens a lot. A lot.
MS Hint: This card is like other Citi Mastercards in many ways, but it does a few things better than other Citi cards too so don’t forget to probe.
ZOMG Wha??
Circling back to the introduction: this no-annual fee card will pay you $700 or more a year through targeted spend offers. Why? The rumor I’ve heard is that the Sears Shop Your Way Rewards card is one of the most valuable cards in Citi’s portfolio because it’s typically held by older generations that grew up with Sears, and those cardholders typically carry a monthly balance which earns Citi plenty in interest and fees so they want to encourage more spending and bigger balances. The story sounds truthy, but I have no independent confirmation so let’s just call it a likely possibility.
How come you haven’t heard of this card before? Well I’m sure the main reason is Sears, though I don’t think it pays a commission to affiliates so there’s not a financial incentive to write about it. Finally, the Shop Your Way Rewards program isn’t exactly on-par with AAdvantage or Hyatt, so there’s that.
(Special thanks to Garth for introducing the card to me.)
What’s going on in my mind at any given moment: trying to get one of these stupid wheels to turn.
A couple of deals from last week are back with a tweak:
1. Meijer is back with another promotion worth scaling up: $10 off of $150 or more in Visa gift cards. Both variable and fixed value gift cards are included, so your lowest fee option is to buy a single variable $150 card.
This isn’t as lucrative as Friday’s 10% back on gift cards and you probably won’t find anyone booking a last minute ticket to Meijer land for this deal, but if you’re already in the right area it can still be very lucrative.
2. Point has extended several offers, with these you can earn 5,000 points each every month:
Costco: 5x (mostly useful for personal shopping)
Amazon: 5x (buy BestBuy cards for resale)
BestBuy: 5x (buy BestBuy cards for resale)
Whole Foods: 5x (buy BestBuy cards for resale or Visa gift cards)
Just like Meijer, the Point deals this week aren’t quite as lucrative as last week’s, but at least the last three are probably worth your time. As usual, get a referral for the Point card because the sign-up bonus is $100 instead of $10.
3. Some Kroger affiliate stores are earning more fuel points on third party gift cards than they should, so make sure you’re always probing. (I had access to 3x fuel points on third party gift cards all weekend, and I’ve seen an unconfirmed report of both 4x and 8x being awarded at other affiliates.)
I’ll leave you with some Monday motivation instead of the usual snark (but don’t worry, it’ll be back tomorrow): I had multiple readers write in over the weekend about various successes from probing new fin-techs, traveling to new areas for MS, and finding loopholes in credit card sign-up bonuses. There’s always something out there to be discovered, don’t be afraid to branch out!
Not all tweaks are better, just ask this once great silicon wafer.
What a weekend eh? There was a lot that happened on the underground MS scene that honestly made me feel like I was watching a train-wreck happening in slow motion. I don’t have any direct information to share from that, but the action item for you is to remember that blogs are always going to be a good source of semi-public information and hints for bigger bonanzas, but the best information will be found in small, private groups. I’d suggest looking for a few of them to up your game if you’re craving more.
On that happy note, let’s follow up on a few items and talk about the Schwab devaluation, and maybe offer a bonanza hint along the way:
1. A lot of you had your Brex 100,000 points offer post on Friday or Saturday. Personally, I had the bonus post on one company’s account but not the other. In case yours didn’t post either, give it a few more days. If that doesn’t work, forward the emails that the PayPal sales rep you spoke with to [email protected] from your email address on file with Brex. It may be a (small) battle, but it’s one you’ll almost certainly win.
2. In case you haven’t read my affiliate link free post on cashing Membership Rewards yet (spoiler alert, none of you have because it’s still being written, slowly, over the course of the last several months), the Schwab Platinum card is the easiest reliable high-value Membership Rewards conversion to cash that currently exists. The redemption value is 1.25 cents per point which is great, but it’s even better because it’s a tax-free way to generate income, or in theory a way to increase your Roth IRA contributions beyond the normal limit without paying taxes or penalties. (I’m not a financial advisor, never take my advice, maybe about anything.)
We’re in a good news/bad news situation with the card now: As of September 1, the cash-out will drop from 1.25 cents per point to 1.1 cents per point; but the good news is: 1) if you have the card you’ve got time to cash out, and 2) if you don’t, it’s another sign-up bonus for you (60,000 Membership Rewards). When I first signed up for the card I cashed out 1 million Membership Rewards points the day it arrived in the mail, so there’s no real waiting period to speak of. To be eligible to open it, you have to be a Schwab customer but all that takes is a free brokerage account and $10 so the bar is quite low, almost as low as AA closing accounts and canceling tickets on the day of travel for churners.
FYI – there are other loopholes for cash-out that will pay at a higher rate with the Business Platinum card, but they’re either slightly sketch or not completely reliable.
3. Staples has fee free $200 Mastercards between now and Saturday evening, limit 5 per person (or, probably limit 5 per transaction.) There are absolutely still ways to liquidate these Metabank Mastercards for a low cost, but they are slowly being zapped like mosquitos in front of a bug zapper (sorry, it’s Monday, my metaphors are weak and you can see them coming from a mile away, like my alma mater calling me to “see how it’s going” which really means “give us a donation”.)
